Three questions to ask yourself to increase the effectiveness of your website

For this month’s book in the Business Book Collective, we’ve been reading “Building a StoryBrand” by Donald Miller.

The book provides a way to clearly communicate about your business in a way that engages your clients on an emotional level. The framework encourages you to position yourself as the “guide” to help your client solve a problem they have.

Once you have the framework laid out, it becomes the basis for your marketing messaging across all of your marketing materials, including your website.

Many of the members of the Collective are taking away their learnings and applying to them to their websites right away.

By making some small changes, you can dramatically impact the effectiveness of your website. To help you get started, here’s three questions to ask yourself about the home page of your website, and more specifically, about the part of your home page that is visible when you first land on your website “above the fold.”

Are you clearly communicating what it is that you do in a way that could be understood in three seconds or less?

This may sound obvious, but it's really easy to miss this. We can get so focused on trying to use “marketing language” to convey information that we don’t clearly spell out what we do.

For example, it should be clear that my business offers “Marketing Strategy for Small Business Owners of Service-based Businesses” or “Landscape Architecture for Small Lot Homes.”

Do you have a clear call to action to directs people to take the action you want to them to take?

One of the most important objectives of your website it to encourage people to engage with you in some way. That may be to book a strategy session or to request a quote.

Think about what the most important action is that you want to drive and have ONE clear call to action prominently displayed in a button on the top right-hand corner of your header, in your main image and placed strategically throughout the site.

It’s also helpful to use words on the button that correspond with the action you are trying to encourage. Use words like “Book a call” or “Schedule a Meeting” instead of “Contact Us.”

Are you using imagery that your ideal client will connect with?

It is important that the client can see themselves in the imagery on your website. As an example, if you are a financial services company and you have a visual of a Toronto skyline as your main image, there is a disconnect.

Your client is not buying real estate. They will connect more with an image of the owners of the company interacting with a client. Or image of client experiencing the outcome of the transformation that you’ve helped them make.

Interested in learning more about the Business Book Collective?

www.businessbookcollective.com