10 Good Reasons for your Target Audience to Visit your Website

Far too many articles regurgitate the same advice to use multiple channels (such as email, social media etc) when trying to promote your website. Far too few focus on providing compelling reasons why anyone should care about yet another site, and make the time to spare you a click.

To get results, you need to skillfully (or sneakily) lure visitors to your homepage and then spoon feed them around. Being able to reach people isn’t enough. You need to dangle a sufficiently enticing carrot that gets them to bite.

Website marketers make the mistake of fretting over the need to build a huge list of prospects to blast, without putting enough attention on the message itself. In this era of likes, retweets, emoticons and the like, meaningful messages are an essential way to stand out from the endless stream of information bombarding inboxes and timelines.

Create Messages that Get Noticed & Clicked

To make every email, DM, tweet or post really pop, your messages must first have substance and then be crafted to suit each medium. Oh yes, you’ll need to prepare longer form posts, put words into images, squeeze your appeals into 280 characters, and more.

To grab the attention of an increasingly fickle-minded audience, you’ll need to do whatever it takes to make it count when your message flashes across their screen. You need to invest in producing quality messages that are worth reading and worthy of a click.

Instead of slapping together a quick “Come check out our new website”, “You’re invited to the official relaunch of our site” or something sounding equally bland, you need to have a deep think about what’s in it for your guests. Why should they click over, and what can they expect that will make it worth their time.

How to Attract Visitors to your Site

The best way to attract your target audience is to use one that is appropriate for your type of relationship, the stage of your relationship, what your brand means to them, and the characteristics of their profile.

In short, you need to offer them something enticing that piques their interest about your brand, product or website.

This can be approached in various ways, and the most effective campaigns often use complementing strategies to appeal to different customers.

Here are 10 ideas to get the brainstorming session going with your team:

1. Highlight a Feature – by drawing attention to a specific element of the site, it gives people a reason to come take a look and then explore further. It doesn’t matter if it’s brand new or not. It could be a piece of content, a design detail, an intriguing tool or anything that’s interesting and inviting.
2. Ask a Question – engaging your audience directly with a question automatically sets them up to take some sort of action. Remember to frame it so that they need to visit your site to find the answer, or be able to respond adequately. People are highly opinionated so tap on their eagerness to share their 2 cents worth. Even if you don’t value what they’ve got to say, at least you’ll have succeeded in getting them to your site.
3. Give a Small Inducement – giving something to get what you need is easier and often more effective than asking for a favor or purely relying on the potential merits of your ask. A freebie or the chance to win a giveaway may be motivating enough. Or you may want to organize a more elaborate scheme. Just plan it cleverly so that it’s sufficiently appealing to everyone, including those who only come across your message days after it’s posted.
4. Offer a Coupon Code – for e-commerce sites, the easiest way may be to offer an attractive coupon code. Or a few. It’s flexible, trackable, leads to a sale and always in demand. On top of getting them to the site, it allows you to attract first time users, promote new products, reward existing customers and much more.
5. Provide a Free Download/Access – a downloadable info product is a simple and effective virtual door gift to encourage visitors to your site. Compared to unique gifts or prizes, these are cost efficient to give away lots of copies. Alternatively, depending on the nature of your site, you could give access to an online tool or some sort of service which is a one off investment with low marginal costs.
6. Give a Special Bonus for Email Subscribers – a slight twist on a straight giveaway may be to tie it in with one of the call to actions on your site. The easiest is probably to give a perk to visitors who subscribe to your email newsletter during the promotion or site launch period.
7. Share a Captivating Story about the Site Design/Redesign – everyone loves stories, especially if they’re real life experiences that people can related to. By offering a peek into an amusing event or a challenging incident encountered during the making of the site, your target audience will automatically feel more connected to the site and may be more curious to see the eventual outcome.
8. Tell Them How Much the Website Design or Web Development Cost – money has this magnetism to it, even when you can’t have it and it’s got nothing to do with you. By giving people a bit of background into how much was sunk into your web design project, it’ll give them another reason to come take a closer look.
9. Set a Challenge/Competition – if possible, you should go all out to organize an attractive event that’s easy for visitors to take part in, gets them engaged, and designed to be highly shareable in order to create a viral effect. For example, a contest draws attention, allows you to have an extended time frame (with a fixed end point), highlights your products or services as prizes, and contributes towards customer list building efforts.
10. Promote an Outstanding Piece of Content – instead of coming through the front door, you can use a high quality blog post, infographic, case study or white paper as the reason to invite visitors to your website. Make sure it’s well researched, professionally created and simply exceptional. Remarkable content that’s evergreen has tremendous value to help promote a site for months and years to come.

Put Effort to Promote your Website Properly

As you can see, there are plenty of creative ways to get your audience’s attention and persuade them to come visit your new or revamped site. But how many website owners actually do any of this?

Unfortunately, most invites don’t pack enough of a punch to get the target audience to take notice or take action. And that’s because there isn’t any underlying appeal to address the essential question – what’s in it for them?

All too often, the process of designing a website and creating the content ends up bursting budgets and overrunning timelines, which results in a rushed and inadequate effort to promote the site properly.

Now that you know this, there’s no excuse for you to lazily shoot out a sloppy request to come take a look at your site. You have to put in the effort to make it a positive experience. One where visitors are impressed enough to want to recommend it.