With any website, the end goal is to keep them on there for as long as possible, get them to have a look at all the various services you may offer, and encourage them to get in contact you to buy from you. It’s all to do with the conversion from visitor to customer.
So what are some good options to consider?
Well, for a start, good, well written content. No one ever has confidence instilled in them when they read copy with ‘bad speelling, punkchooashun, and grammah’. It doesn’t look professional, and looks as though you couldn’t be bothered to get it checked over before publishing it. Not good at writing? Bring someone in to do your copywriting for you, it’s not that expensive, and will definitely be worth the spend. (If you need a copywriter, I know people).
However, ultimately, good text in this day and age just isn’t enough for the average website visitor. You need something else to engage them, capture their attention, and encourage them, to give them a call to action. Multimedia is a great way to help get people’s attention; by using well placed audio and video clips, people generally will be intrigued to see/hear what they are about, and will most likely click play. Things like online radio ads, podcasts, welcome messages, short video bursts about various products or services, showing immediately the benefits that buying from you will bring, will all help them take more notice.
Generally speaking, utilising multimedia isn’t a majorly costly thing, so there are few reasons for not getting involved, to get your website really ahead of the game. To put it another way, can you afford to be left behind?
Finally, let’s look at what ‘multimedia’ literally is; it is defined as: “multimedia |ˈməltiˈmēdēə; ˈməlˌtī-|adjective(of art, education, etc.) using more than one medium of expression or communication”
Essentially, what this means, in a business context, is that no matter what you are selling, you should have your content available in many forms, so your message can be accessed by as many different people as possible. Remember, not everyone is going to want to read text, not everyone is going to want to listen to audio, not everyone likes video etc etc.
Ask yourself a question; how accessible is your website?
Something to think about…
Richard Heathcote.
Great read Rich!
Plus I totally agree. Multimedia is the way forward, as humans I think we’re getting lazier every day when it comes to text. We need to think of more cool ways to engage with web visitors and potential customers!
+1 for Richard Heathcote
Luke
Cheers Luke 🙂
Yeah laziness can often be an issue. Especially when I load up a site and it’s either a mass of text, or hardly anything that tells me about their company. Engaging from the front page has to be key!
Very interesting Rich. I know video in particular is something that I am looking into a lot more. I think websites need the right mix of text, imagery and other stuff. It can be tricky to get the balance though!
Great to hear Phil. The balance certainly can be hard to judge, but definitely think that having at least some content in there in different forms is going to be a much bigger plus than not having it at all….
🙂
Really good points & definitely should be more people looking into different ways of entertaining their potential customers who are becoming less bowled over by text no matter how well written it is.
Cheers Mat….
Absolutely agree. It’s getting harder and harder for people to retain visitors to their site as clicking the back button is so easy. Multimedia becoming more important than ever!