Why Your Website Needs A Supply Of Visitors
The question “why does your website need visitors” is one few photographers ever consider in any detail.
Instead, they assume they need a website because who would run a business without one these days?
Of course, this is true, but they can end up putting one out there without really thinking about why the website exists in the first place or the deeper reasons of why they’re trying to attract traffic to it.
It might even seem like a crazy question to ask, but the answer deeply influences your entire marketing strategy, so it’s an important question to consider.
So, first of all, think back to the answer to our earlier question of why your website exists, and then we can look at this in more detail. As I said, I think this is a question every photographer should ask themselves before doing any marketing.
The goal of your website is to take anonymous visitors and turn them qualified leads you can follow-up with. Essentially, it’s a lead-generation system, and we’ve already talked about that at a fairly high level.
We also know the goal of lead-generation means your website lives at the center of your marketing.
But, not every visitor is going to become a lead on their first visit, so you need lots of them (again, search traffic isn’t enough on its own to accomplish this).
The process your website goes through looks a bit like this:
- Attraction strategies capture people’s attention…
- Which results in website and blog visitors…
- Each visitor starts out as an anonymous IP address…
- It’s up to the content you create to turn their attention into genuine interest…
- The stories you tell, and the photographs you share, turn interest into real engagement, which builds a human connection with your prospects…
- At the appropriate time, you present a call to action to convert your visitors from anonymous IP addresses into real people with needs and desires…
- At this point you have a genuine sales lead – someone who has raised their hand to say they’re interested in learning more about what you can do for them…
In this training course, we’re concerned with the attraction part of the cycle – in other words, getting people into the loop so they can make their way through your marketing funnel to the point of becoming a lead you can follow-up with.
Homework Assignment
Now you know more about the different functions of the pieces in your marketing funnel, it’s time to put your “chief marketing officer” hat on and take a bird’s-eye view of your own marketing system.
- Write down the four phases of attraction, interest, connection, and conversion on a sheet of paper, and then go through your entire online presence and website to identify as many elements as you can for each of those four phases.
- For example, your blog post headlines (or titles) would fall into the “interest” category. Any call to action (and there are most likely more than one) on your posts would be categorized as “conversion”.
- When you’re finished take a look at what you have – can you see a clearly-defined path you want your visitors to take, or are there too many opportunities for their attention and interest to leak away?