Consumers who arrive at your homepage directly by typing your specific URL present a challenge to marketers: they arrive without leaving a trail, no affiliate or keyword search to clue you in, leaving it difficult to know who you’re marketing to.
It makes sense, then, that the home page -- the page visited most often by those completely unknown to you -- often figures most prominently in the redesign of a site, as marketers tweak the branding elements that convince those unknown visitors to buy.
Yet there's an irony there, too: if you don't know to whom you’re marketing, how can you redesign a page in order to make it better?
In today’s online world, relevance and brand trust are two major considerations for any marketer thinking about a site redesign. Relevance is key because customers who have purchased from you in the past already know and trust you. The difficult first step has been taken, and relevance -- that is, getting the right product in front of them just when they’re looking for it -- is of utmost importance.
But for customers with whom you've never had any contact, a marketer’s best bet may be to hit them over the head with a branding iron -- in other words, make sure they learn as quickly as possible who you are and what your brand’s unique value proposition is.
How can you do that when you don’t know who they are, and what they expect of you? First, look at the stats. Separate out how many visitors truly arrive completely unknown. Isolate the people who are brand new and who have given you no idea about their intentions.
Then, try one of these three ideas to better brand your company to these phantom visitors:
Action #1. Determine intention
Most companies have two or three major areas of intention a visitor could fall into. Rather than offering your new visitor everything under the sun, attempt to isolate their intention by radically simplifying the options. This might mean offering two large buttons:
- Job Seeker VS. Employer
- Sedan VS. Mini-van
- Home Loan VS. Car Loan
Let the visitor self-select. In doing so, they’re learning more about what your brand offers, and you’re learning what bucket to group them in.
Action #2. Make search bigger
For visitors who arrive without helping you out by using a keyword search, consider encouraging them to use internal search by making the search option more obvious. This may be a smart tactic if you have a wide product selection that can’t be narrowed into two or three areas of intent.
Action #3. Promote cross-channel marketing content
One thing that we can state with certainty is that when a first-time visitor gets to your site through your URL, they know more about you than you do about them. That means they have some expectation of you.
How about using the opportunity to connect with cross-channel marketing:
º Recent press mentions--call them out!
º A great mention on Good Morning America--reinforce it!
º Great new products getting word of mouth play--shed some light on them!
Set up some content slots on your home page in order to test the above branding suggestions to learn just what those expectations are. Not clear? This is a great opportunity to use outside surveys to inform online test ideas.
When visitors arrive at your site by typing a URL, they obviously know a little about your brand. Perhaps they heard about you on Oprah, read about your company in a newspaper or magazine, saw your latest billboard, or came across some of your other branding activities.
These consumers -- those completely unknown to you -- make up a key group of visitors, yet marketers often don’t take them into account, believing that because you don’t know them, it is impossible to target them.
Showing relevance is perfect for the consumers you know. Generating brand trust is vital for the consumers you don’t.