How To Convince Clients to Come To Your WebSite and Stay!
In another article we learnt how to define who are our clients, what they need and what we offer. Now we want to focus on how to bring them to our webpage, how to make them know that we are there, that we can solve their problems. On top of that, we will learn how to analyze how good we are in acquiring users. We will use Google Analytics for that
Product / Market fit
First of all, a couple of short theoretical concepts. There is this principle in Product Development which is called AARRRRRRR!!! Actually just three R’s, I like to exagerate.
- Acquisition
- Activation
- Revenue
- Retention
- Referral
They are self-explanatory, so let’s define some of them very briefly.
Acquisition
How do people know I exist?
Nowadays it’s very easy to use the build-in platforms for that: facebook, twitter etc. Using them is easy, we just post something in Facebook for example. But is it easy to get some traffic? Hell no!. In order to get traffic, it is very important to offer something to the user, before you convince them to purchase your product, to register to your webpage etc. You can create good blogs in Medium, you can create a very interesting Twitter account to give important information, you can create good content in Youtube. There are a lot of strategies, the better content you give, the higher acquisition volume you are gonna get. For sure you can pay for Facebook Ads, Google Ads, but be careful, because the users are not stupid. If you are trying to sell something, which gives them no value, they are going to pass on you and your spent money would be for nothing.
So do whatever it works for you, to acquire users. Be creative. You can pay for influencers, you can organize big events. In my company, Le Wagon, we organize Meet Up events, where we teach people coding skills and product design. We show what we can teach in our current courses, how we do it. If people like it, they are going to consider our courses. Maybe they end up registering. If not, they would look for other options. So for us, it’s a win win situation. We do some marketing while we help people to learn a new skill. Very fulfilling job!
Activation
Once I acquire my users, they know that I am there, I have to answer this question: what do I want people to do?
We can have again a look to some example pages to see if we find some hints. Let’s begin with Twitter. See their webpage.
On the left-side we have some explanation of the Twitter service.: Follow your interests. Hear what people are talking about. Join the conversation.
So they use 3 sentences as a product pitch. Precise and straight to the point. And on the right? There is a registration form. They want you to register. They don’t want you to pay, they don’t want you to subscribe to a newsletter. They want you to register, because that’s their business module. The more people, the more volume, the more traffic, the more ads, the more money they get. So they put a huge registration form to activate you. That’s their activation.
Very briefly, if you visit Airbnb, they want you to look for a flat, that’s why they put some nice pictures and a nice map. They want you to see how great your experience could be. Why? Of course they want you to end up booking a flat.
As you have seen, these companies are using a web page to create an interaction with the users. At the end, we need this place, a landing place where we send the users that we acquire, so that they do what we want them to do. In web development terms, this page is called the landing page and it’s the first page that the user visits. A web page is the most common strategy, but there are other places where we can bring and activate a user, such as facebook groups, meet up events, etc.
We need to stop at the landing page, since it’s a key concept, and go a little bit deeper. There are two ways of creating a web page / landing page:
1) Use an online-software. There are lots of them for free.
Wordpress, Wix etc.
2) Learn frontend. That means, code the webpage by yourself!
In order to do that, you need to learn two main areas:
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
- Bootstrap from Twitter, Material Design from Google.
If you are new to coding, with HTML you give the structure of the web page. With CSS you give the design. And with JavaScript you can animate your webpage among other stuff.
With Bootstrap and Material Design, you can use some components, some predefine things, that were made by Google and Twitter, that you can just use in your web page, without coding them. You just use these two libraries to have a nice design in your web page. Totally worth it to learn it.
No matter how, whether you code your web page or you use some online-software, you have to have your own landing page!
To this moment, we master the art of product pitches. We can acquire users. We can activate users, i.e. we make them do what we want. We bring them to our business, for example, to our landing page. Let’s see now how successful we are, how good we are doing it. Let’s do some metrics!
Google analytics
Once you put your website online, hopefully you get some traffic. Which users are visiting your company? When are they visiting your company? Are the marketing campaigns working? Are users coming from links from Facebook, from Twitter? You can find answers for all these questions in Google Analytics. That is a tool from Google, where you analyze all the data that generates your webpage.
Bounce rate
There is a lot of concepts to be analyzed in Google Analytics. I will not cover them, since there are thousands of tutorials out there. I just want to comment briefly the Bounce Rate. Google can compute, if your users visit your web page and they spend some time or if they immediately leave, if they bounce. Of course you want people to stay! More information about the metrics of google analytics are to be found in this link:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1009409?hl=en
Which campaign is working?
In Google Analytics we can see from which countries the users are coming from, their bounce rate, how long they stay in hour webpage etc. But we still have a problem with campaigns. Say that I pay two community managers to launch two campaigns, one in Facebook, one in Twitter. Say that your webpage is www.lewagon.com/berlin. If the two community managers do the campaigns and they share the same link, every user will click the same click, hence Google Analytics will receive the same information. We can not allocate success to non of the community managers. How we differentiate which community managers is having more traffic? Who had the more success? Who do we need to pay more?
UTM-ize your URL
The key is to add some keywords in the link of your website. For example keywords with the name of the campaign, with the medium which is being done etc. This way, the link contains this meta information, which can be later on be analyzed by Google Analytics. To do that, we just use a service from Google, where we put the link that we want to explain and we add the keywords. Here is an example:
We have a normal url: www.leawgon.com
And we add some keywords to know which campaign are we sharing in our social media.
Your web link with UTM: www.leawgon.com/?utm_source=facebook-am&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=my%20first%20campaing
Look at the utm keywords! The user visits the same page, but he clicks a url with special keywords, that tells google analytics where it was clicked.
You can find the UTM builder under following direction:
https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/
That’s great, because you can analyze now your campaigns, you can track them. You can find nice charts nows in your Google Analytics panel. Slowly we are doing business, we are generating traffic in a data-driven way!
Prototyping
At some point, you have to design your whole web. Not just the landing page where the users arrive, where they can give you their email. At some point you have to design all the pages from your web application. You want to insert videos, buttons to interact with the user etc. You have to create a user journey, i.e., what is the user going to do through your web Application. Visiting home? visiting a blog section? visiting the payment page? All of that you have to define.
Before you create these sub pages, you have to design them. That will save you a lot of time afterwards, because all the decisions will have already been made and you just need to execute. If you miss this step, while you are creating your platform, you will find yourself discussing with your team for every tiny detail later on. Colors, Fonts, Design, etc.
There are two big players in the market nowadays in order to do that: Sketch and Figma. Sketch was the first platform where you could prototype your ideas. It was cool and still it is, but Figma is overtaking the market. Figma is completely for free, you can download the software and they have a very intuitive way of working. Have a look at it!
So now it’s time for celebration. We finally have created our web page with all the content!
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https://twitter.com/Le_Wagon_Munich
Keep reading in the next article!
