Based solely on your web site, would you buy from your company?

31-Jan-2010 Look at your logo, grab a bunch of your brochures now compare them to your website. Are you consistent with your message and your look and feel or does your website look like your cousin created it from his bedroom.

Consistent message to your customers

Marketing 101 says that you need to be consistent with all your marketing efforts. This is the way you build up your brand. If you think of the major brands in the world they all present consistency.

No matter how small your business, you want to try and emulate that consistency in your products, services and your image.

What you are doing offline you should be doing online

If you advertise in print media, you might want to consider also have the same advertisement or promotion on your website. Preferably using a promotion code on your printed advert.

This way, not only can you measure the effectiveness of your advertisement, you can create incentives for your potential customers to engage your services or buy your products.

One of the biggest website mistakes

I see so many businesses, big and small, make one of the biggest mistakes you can make on the web. They PDF their brochure or advertisement and just have a link on their site to the PDF.

Users hate this, you have about 2 seconds to grab your users attention. Not only do they have to wait for the download which is usually huge, when they download it they cannot do anything with it. They will not pick up the phone because you have already wasted too much of their time.

A better way to do this would be to create a landing page with all the information on the page, provide lots of details so there are no grey areas about what they will get, try and include a contact phone number on every page, include a link or button take them to a form so users can enquire about the product or services immediately. Make it easy for them to purchase.

I see this so many times where websites make it really difficult for users to make a decision about their products or services because of the lack of information about their offering.

So next time you review your site think about how easy it is for users to purchase from you. If they cannot get to the information quickly you will loose them, maybe forever.