Is your website ready for social media marketing?

One of the most cost-effective methods of marketing for any business is social media. It’s a tried and tested way of getting your business brand out there and noticed by your audience, and when done correctly, they’ll interact and engage with your content.

Fundamentally, social media marketing has the overall aim of generating leads and sales. And it’s typically your website where that magic happens. Your calls to action, lead magnets, further information and special offers should ideally be hosted on your website with your audience directed to them via social media.

Doing it this way (rather than doing everything through social media) gives you greater control over the marketing to sales process, allows you to use analytics to identify where you’re losing leads (so you can take remedial action) but the more traffic your website receives, the higher Google will rank it search results, so it’ll directly impact your search engine optimisation too.

But your website needs to be ready to handle what you send to it through social media marketing. And that’s what I want to talk about in today’s blog.

Is your website built to handle lots of traffic?

Unfortunately, not all websites are built the same, and there are many factors that may mean your website is unable to cope with a steady stream of visitors directed there by your social media posts.

Hosting is the biggest issue here. If you’re using one of the cheap as chips hosting companies such as GoDaddy, Hostgator, etc, then you will be sharing a server with lots of other websites and may have bandwidth restrictions on your website. Worst yet, the server may even be in a different country to your audience, which adds extra time to the page loading speeds.

What this means is that when you have several visitors on your website at the same time (for instance, you’ve just launched a new course or time-limited offer), it will slow down drastically, and maybe even show as unavailable to some visitors. We don’t tend to like waiting for pages to load on the internet, so you’ll probably find your interested leads will give up and maybe even think badly of your business as a result.

Bad hosting like this can also affect your website’s SEO. Google wants to see fast loading websites, so if your website is too slow, it will rank you further down the search results pages than your competitors with better hosting.

Is the landing page reflecting your social media post?

(By landing page, I mean any page your visitor will land on by clicking on the link in the social media post.)

Does the page echo what you’re saying in your content? If you’re talking about a special offer for new customers, are you sending them to a specific page with this special offer information on it, or are you just sending them to the homepage?

Is the branding consistent? Are you using the same colours, imagery and fonts in your social media marketing as your website? While these don’t have to be exactly the same, they should be similar enough that they feel familiar to your audience and aren’t completely different. Even subtle differences can throw up red flags for visitors, especially if a monetary transaction is involved.

Are you using the same language? Is the style and tone similar to your social media content? Often, webpages are written more formally, in third person, using lots of industry jargon than the direct conversational style we tend to use with social media. FYI – webpages should use that same conversational style too!

Hopefully, you’ve understood the point here that consistency, similarity and familiarity is key between your website and your social media. Make sure that what you’re promoting on social media is actually what your website is selling.

Is there a clear call to action for your visitors to follow?

The CTA on your social media posts are usually ‘click here to find out more’ which goes to the website, but what do you want your visitors to do once they are on your website?

In most cases, it will be a ‘buy now’ or a ‘contact me to get started’ but these need to be obvious on the page. A lot of websites use subtle design touches that remove functionality and action for aesthetics. Forms might not look like forms, buttons might be replaced with text, links might be the same colour as the text, so your visitors have no idea they’re links, etc.

Subtlety doesn’t work with websites. Ever wondered why you see “click here” in large text or big buttons? It’s because it’s proven to work! We don’t read webpages we scan them, our eyes look out for important bits of information that we need to know or follow. This is why we use headings, white space and images to help the eye focus on those all-important messages you want your visitor to take notice of.

So, do make your call to action prominent on your page, and for special offers, course launches, new products, etc repeat them at least once. Do use large text, different fonts, different colours and those extra large “click here” buttons – they really do encourage visitors to take the actions you want them to take.

I hope this blog has been useful in helping you ensure your website and social media marketing are working well together to get you the leads and sales you’re looking for. If you’re looking for personal advice on the changes you can make to get your website ready for social media marketing, get in touch with me now for a friendly chat to get started.