This post is part of a series on getting more leads and enquiries from your website.

Part 1 – Get Inside the Mind of Your Ideal Customer!

Do you know what visitors are looking for when they land on your website?  Are you clear about what it will take to convince them that yours is the business they should deal with and what will persuade them to make an enquiry?

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, if your website is going to maximise the leads and enquiries it generates for you, it has to instantly reassure visitors they’re dealing with a business that:

• They can relate to
• Empathises with the challenge they’re facing
• Can provide them with the ideal solution
• They can trust

Making sure it does all these things means getting inside the mind of your ideal customer and thinking about things from their perspective. It means defining exactly who your ideal customer is, answering key questions about what will take them from visitor to hot lead, and using this knowledge to inform the content and messaging of your site.

There are 2 steps to this process:

Step 1: Create a profile of your ideal customer

The first rule of selling is knowing everything you possibly can about who you’re selling to. So do you have a clear vision of what your ideal customer looks like? Perhaps you do, but documenting it so that it can be used as a reference point whenever you – or someone working on your behalf is planning sales activity is a savvy move.

A customer profile – also sometimes referred to as a customer persona is a document that sets out everything you know about the person you are targeting. It can be as comprehensive as you like, but at its most basic level should include things such as gender, age, education, socio-economic group and whether a buying decision is likely to be based on emotion or on factual detail.

When it comes to designing your website and creating content, your customer profile will provide your web designer with valuable insights into the way it should look and speak.

Step 2: Get inside the mind of your ideal customer

Now you’ve listed the key characteristics of your customer and created a profile, it’s time to take on their persona, think as they do, and answer 3 key questions:

1. What are they really looking for?

Finding the answer (or answers) to this question can help you focus your website even more closely on your ideal customer. It’s important to remember that your customers are not looking for products or services, they’re looking for solutions, and understanding this can have a significant impact on the messages you use.

At MMD for example, our own website messaging has evolved as we’ve come to focus more closely on what our web visitors are looking for. Of course, the reason they are on our site is they’re in the market for a new website – but why is that? In virtually all instances, it’s because they want a website that will deliver more leads and enquiries.

It’s not rocket-science, but looking at things from our customers’ perspective changes the key messages we use. Instead of being generic and simply talking about how we design great websites, we can be far more specific using headlines such as ‘We Build Websites that Generate High-Quality leads to Help Your Business Grow!’

By using a much more targeted message like this, we set ourselves apart from our competitors and instantly engage with the kind of customers we want to work with. What’s more, by making our specialism clear, we increase the quality of the leads we generate.

2. What are they worried about?

Next, still with your customer head on, think about any ‘blockers’ that might potentially get in the way of a decision. If you’re a wedding photographer for example, you might come up with a list of concerns that include things like cost, quality, experience, reliability and punctuality.

Having identified all the things that might be concerns, you can set about addressing them in your web content, proactively reassuring visitors on these critical points.

3. What will convince them to trust you?

By addressing their concerns head on, you’ve removed virtually all the reasons your ideal customer might have for not converting into a lead. There’s just one more thing you must do: convince them to entrust you with their business.

Once again, you have to channel your customer. This time, ask yourself what is it you need to do to prove yours is the best solution?  Depending on the nature of your business, demonstrating your credibility and expertise is likely to involve considering things like customer case studies, testimonials, media articles, white papers, photo galleries and awards.

What next?

By now you have a much better idea of who your ideal customer is and what they’re looking for. As a result, you’re far better equipped to start work on designing your website than if you’d simply dived in head-first. Although you might well have ended up with a beautiful looking site, if it failed to produce the quality leads you need, you’d have been wasting your money.

But this is only the first stage in the process of creating a website that will get you more leads and enquiries.  Our next blog in this series will be considering the customer search experience. Make a list of the key words and phrases your ideal customers are likely to put into Google at the start of their journey, and we’ll look at how you can use this information to attract more quality leads to your site.

This is the first in a series of blogs about How to Get More Leads and Enquiries from your website. If you’re concerned about the number or quality of enquiries your website is generating then please contact us today by sending us a message or calling us on 0118 380 0131.