Is your site dialed in to appeal to your ideal audience?
Much like a good email or marketing campaign, you need to consider your audience when creating your site to ensure that it really connects. Understanding your audience persona is the first step to help you focus your message and design.
Ideally, your website needs to tell your story in a way that entices people to move naturally along the audience engagement cycle. Your digital marketing should create opportunities to attract the right people; connect with them; create and nurture a bond; and then inspire them to remain in your network, take further action, and expand your reach within their own sphere of influence. By understanding the needs of your stakeholders and the challenges they face you can craft a marketing platform that will truly help expand your mission to reach an even wider audience.
Typically, we start with your site and seek to help you refine it so that it works.
This includes creating opportunities to hone these three, key components:
Story: With a good story woven throughout your site, you can attract people, help them better understand their own motivations, and build a relationship with them to connect them with your cause.
Usability: Solid calls-to-action are the first elements needed to increase your number of donors, volunteers, and constituents who are ready to engage with your organization. Making it as easy as possible to get in contact with you can greatly increase your organization’s opportunities to do great work. It’s good practice to provide a variety of ways to engage – from simply enabling the ability to get more information or a “value-share” piece of content to joining your organization as a volunteer or donor. You would be surprised how often sites miss opportunities simply because they fail to provide a way to engage.
Shareability: By creating great materials – then making those easy to share – you can engage those with whom you have created a relationship to expand your reach. This starts with compelling content and valuable resources and is supported with materials that are easy to share. Want to get a post promoted by your network? Give them a few, pre-crafted snippets they can publish (with accompanying graphics). Create compelling materials then make it SUPER easy for your stakeholders to become advocates and share your amazing stories with their networks.
Remember, your website is a platform that should work for you. With some thoughtful attention to the audience engagement cycle, your site becomes an asset that attracts people to your organization, connects with them to enable you to stay in close contact, which creates bonds that get people engaged with your programs. Once these relationships have been cemented, you can continue to use your site and other assets to inspire your stakeholders to stay connected and help expand your mission to a wider audience. By ensuring that you are designing with your stakeholders in mind, it becomes easy to make your story visible and inspirational and make your website more than just an online business card.
Ever wondered how good your site is at telling your story or getting people to take action? Reach out to us and we’ll take a peek. Send us an email or you can sign up for your free audit here.
