Using Your Website to Attract Your Ideal Clients
Your ideal clients are looking for an expert that they can trust to guide them down the path to the land of benefits.
Who are your ideal clients?
This is an imperative question to ask yourself at any point in the game. Hopefully sooner rather than later. Being able to hone in on who you actually want to do business with is a valuable step that will get you the projects you want, the revenue you need, and fulfill your career goals and portfolio more than anything else. Not to mention the work you’ll be producing will be that much better because working on what you want will always produce higher quality products – so your clients win just as much as you do.
It’s all about the right tools
After you figure out who you want to be doing business with, you need to acquire the right tools to attract those clients. To do anything most efficiently, you need the right tools. Attracting clients you want to work with is no different. The tools needed in this case are your brand and your website. Today we’re going to focus on the latter. Entrepreneur Magazine published a couple listicles recently that I enjoyed and agreed with about this very topic – things to do to spruce up your website, and things your website needs to attract wealthier clients.
They did a great job on these articles so I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here. The converging points and highlights of these two articles are what I’m excited to share with you.
Personality and Credibility
You need to position yourself as an influencer in your industry. Especially with the subject matter on your blog. You need to stand out and you do that the same way you do so as an individual – with your personality – and your customers should be able to pick up on this immediately upon visiting your website. People want to connect with a company, with a story. Don’t be afraid to show your personality and if you’re not marketing your story – you’re marketing wrong.
Most of your ideal clients aren’t looking for industry jargon and super-technical knowledge that people are used to spouting off to show how much they know about their craft. They’re already going to assume you know this stuff and usually don’t care to learn it all themselves. That’s what they want to pay you for. They’re looking for an expert that they can trust to guide them down the right paths to the land of benefits. You can do this by showing off your personality and credibility. What makes you credible? How are you exuding trustworthiness? Do you have high-profile clients who can vouch for you? Do you have published work? Where’s your portfolio? Testimonials?
Mobile-Friendliness
It’s always been a good idea for your website to be mobile-friendly since the dawn of serious mobile browsing circa 2007. But now that such a huge amount of browsing is done via all types and sizes of mobile devices, mobile-friendliness is a necessity. And not just a mobile version of your website, but most preferably you need a responsive website that adapts your full site to any sized screen. All kinds of different smartphones, iPads, Kindle Fires and other tablets all the way to vehicle infotainment centers, televisions and even more home appliances will soon have screens you can browse on. And as of April 2015, Google is tightening the requirements on results for searches performed on mobile devices to only show pages and websites that are mobile-friendly.
About the author
Ian
Founder/CEO
I’ve been in the design and web industry since 2005, and more times than not, you’ll find me shoeless, my music loud, espresso in my cup, and following a pretty irregular schedule. I’m passionate about business, technology, design, and the environment, so I genuinely enjoy what I do – especially when those passions all merge in a thunderous cloud of work/project/unicorn majesty. I'm also super passionate about people and travel, and the endless learning opportunities to be had when openness and spontaneity is embraced.....(more)
Lead Capturing
Email marketing can be very hit or miss with our overflowing inboxes and all of the companies vying for your email address these days. But that’s no reason to exclude the opportunity for acquiring this information from your visitors. Your ideal clients may like what they see, but need to wait a month or two before starting discussions. If they’re interested in what you’re offering, they’ll sign up. Then it’s up to you to keep the content coming (just not TOO heavy) and keep it relevant. It’s better to have a small email list that’s at peak efficiency than a huge list that’s bloated with 80% of receivers never opening your messages.
Content Management Systems
Content management systems (CMS) are key to allowing you, the business owner, to edit just enough of your website as necessary, keeping the content current and relevant, without having to know code or complex customized systems. WordPress is our CMS of choice for many reasons, one of which is that it’s coded cleanly and efficiently with lots of SEO built-in from the foundation, and is consistently updated with new features, and patched for security exploits. But don’t just take it from us. Here’s a couple excerpts from Entrepreneur.com that express similar thoughts from both articles:
“If your website isn’t on WordPress, get it there! There are a number of great reasons to use WordPress, but first and foremost, it’s great for search engine optimization (SEO) because it’s built with clean code that makes it easy for search engines to spider and index your website. WordPress also offers endless plugins that can enhance just about every aspect of your website.”
“Have at least a portion of your site set up to give you free reign to update as necessary, adding information like news and blog posts as needed. This is usually done through converting all or part of your site to a CMS-type site like WordPress.”
The Need. The Need For Speed.
Not nearly enough focus is given to page load speed and overall website speed. Your website should start on a solid foundation with secure, high performance web hosting. Lots of folks think it’s unnecessary as network and device speeds are only increasing, but so are the size of the images and videos we display on our websites. There’s also plenty of room for bottlenecks depending on the servers all that content is hosted on, the size of the website and database, the more it’s being accessed, and the amount of fancy features the site has, like CSS transitions, gradients, full screen embedded maps, background videos, gifs, and so much more. Nobody wants to wait around for a webpage to load anymore, and if they have to wait too long, they’re likely to go somewhere else.
In Summary
Give your website a quick once-over and see where you can improve and start to attract those ideal clients. This process should be ongoing, realistically, so that you’re consistently staying relevant, providing valuable content and services, and utilizing your investment to its fullest potential. Key takeaways to get you there are:
- build on a solid foundation – fast, reliable web hosting
- WordPress CMS – enabling you to edit your content and stay relevant
- build in lead capturing strategies – website forms
- sprinkle in just enough of your personality and link to credible sources
And of course, if your website is falling short, contact the majestic folks at the works IT and we’ll help you set it straight.
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