*This may have been autogenerated and may not be 100% accurate or grammatically correct.

00:00 Focus on clear goals for an effective website.

03:13 Designing for the user journey and leads.

06:46 Tips for valuable content sharing and following.

*This may have been autogenerated and may not be 100% accurate or grammatically correct.

Having a website is one thing, but having an effective website is way more important. In this episode, I’m gonna focus on 3 things that you need to do to make sure that your website is more effective at converting leads and sales for your business. Hey. My name is Marlon, and welcome back to another episode of Future Steps Creative. I do content like this to help you build and grow your online business, especially with strategy for your website and your online content, so you can attract and convert more of your ideal customers or clients. Now, before I jump into things, I have a free gift for you, it’s called profitable website checklist. Now you can get this downloaded and go through all the things that I recommend that you should be having in place for your website. So if you’re building a website now or if you have one in place, you can use it to audit what you’ve done to see what changes you can make to make your website perform better for your business.

Marlon McPherson00:00:54 – 00:02:01

You can grab it at marlonmcpherson.com/profitablewebsite. Now, like I said, I’m gonna be covering 3 things that’s gonna help you become more effective with your website strategy. And the first thing that I’ve got is going to be to figure out what the goal is for your website. What’s the main goal? Is it to convert leads? Is it to sell your product or service? Is it to provide a resource or resources? You need to figure out what that primary goal is because this is going to help you as a guiding North Star when it comes to certain decisions that you’re going to make in terms of the layout of the website, what is going to be on the website and so forth. And you wanna make this as straightforward as possible. If you have too many things that you’re thinking about as a goal for your website, you’re not going to have an effective enough website because it’s trying to spread people’s attention in too many different directions. So you need to actually have a clear focus so that you can actually get better results with what it is that you actually want people to do. The second thing you need to understand with your website is that the website is not for you, it’s for your users.

Marlon McPherson00:02:02 – 00:03:13

Too often people are thinking about themselves when it comes to putting together their website because they’re thinking, oh, I like this thing, I like this color, I like this wording, or I like this design, and they’re putting things together based on their own biases and their own limited understanding of how things should be. So instead of thinking about things from your perspective, actually put together a ideal customer profile. If you haven’t done that before, you just need to figure out who your target client or customer is and write down the things that are important to them. So think about their pain points, their desires, their needs, their expectations, and what it is they’re looking to accomplish. And this is what you’re going to use as the primary decision maker as to what you put on your website. It’s gonna decide for you help you decide how to word the things, it’s going to help you decide what actually should be in place and so on on the website. So think about your ideal customer or client and use that information as a guiding, principle when it comes to decision making. The 3rd tip I’ve got for you in terms of making your website more effective is to design for the journey.

Marlon McPherson00:03:13 – 00:04:51

What do I mean by designing for the journey? You want to understand what it is that you want your users who are going to be either your potential customers or whoever it is that’s coming to the website, you wanna decide what the journey is that they’re going to take or the steps that they need to take on the website to get them to the result or the goal that you have in mind for them, and this is something that needs to be congruent with what they want. If you go back to my previous point, I spoke about having us, a customer profile and understanding what it is that they need, the desires, the pain points, etcetera. You need to tie that in with the journey on the website in terms of the user flow. So think about things like having a clear call to action, which is going to be basically go to an intentional capture point. An intentional capture point to me means, instead of having a basic contact form that anyone can fill in and put whatever message and just send you something, have something a little bit more effective where you could put some questions into it or put some check boxes into it to say, look, ask people what it is that they’re interested in and narrow down what it is that they can inquire about. This is going to help you deliver higher quality leads at the end of the day. So having a more effective, entry point or capture point could be having like a quiz, you could consider having a survey or some kind of a quote calculator, if this is something that you do, if it makes sense for your business or brand. All these things are going to actually filter out some of those, lower quality submissions and give you some higher quality leads at the end of the day.

Marlon McPherson00:04:51 – 00:05:49

So make sure you have, you know, a button at the top of the page as well that is going to lead people through to that call to action and is clearly outlined with a headline, with what action they need to take to go to that next step. People need to be guided. And I wanna say that I have 3 things for you, but I do have a bonus point which is to keep things familiar in terms of design. Instead of trying to be a unique unicorn and all of people trying to be different and try to say, you know what, I don’t want to have my website looking like everyone else is and so on. But you already have something that is unique. You have your brand, you have who you are, you have what your goal and your mission is, and you have how you see things and how you communicate, etcetera. So it’s the words that you use that’s going to differentiate you, not so much the design. In fact, having something that’s unorthodox in terms of design, that typical users in your space are not used to is going to actually hurt you more likely than it is going to do good.

Marlon McPherson00:05:49 – 00:06:45

Because what happens is that people get confused when they land on your website and they don’t see like logo in the top left hand corner, they don’t see the menu over onto the right hand side, and the things they expect to see they don’t see like a nice banner with a call to action button. They’re seeing all of these crazy outlines or these crazy designs going on because you just want to be unique. If you’re designing for a design competition, then fine. You can do that. But if you’re designing for leads, to capture leads, and to convert sales, and so on, you need to keep things familiar. So look at what the best companies or the most most successful companies or businesses are doing with their websites in your space and try to keep things familiar or similar to what they’re doing. So when people land on your website, they don’t have to think too much. They don’t have to wonder, oh, is this the right thing that I’m on? It needs to be appropriate for the industry or for the type of clients or customers that you’re going after.

Marlon McPherson00:06:46 – 00:07:09

Exclude

0:00 – 07:10

Now, those are the tips I have for you today. Hopefully, you have gotten some value from it. If you did, feel free to share this, subscribe to my YouTube channel, and follow me on social media as well as I will be sharing other content on these platforms as well, and, giving you more tips. Thank you for hanging out with me, and go ahead and check out another piece of my content. Take care.

​