6 ways to get repeat visitors to your website

Once you have generated traffic to your website using search engine optimisation or online advertising techniques you need to ensure the visitor's experience of your brand is consistent with all your marketing messages.

If your business is innovative, forward thinking, creative, extremely competitive or in some way unique - does your web content demonstrate this?

Here are some communications techniques that could give your site a real boost, and encourage customers to visit your website regularly.

1. Online video

Video assists greatly with your product marketing. It is especially useful if you have a complex product or proposition that needs a more graphical explanation than can be achieved using still photographs and words. It also enables you to demonstrate your company culture and show another side to your business, especially if you are unlikely to meet customers on a regular basis.

Tips for online video:

• Keep the production in line with the intended audience. Shaky camera work might be perceived as being cool by one audience but others might see it as shoddy and unprofessional, so be mindful of your intended style.
• Tag your content with appropriate keywords so that the video can be found by your customers in web searches.
• Designing your video for online use means bearing in mind the bandwidth and audio quality issues. You must find a happy medium between production quality and a potentially large file size.
• In addition to posting your video on sites such as YouTube, embed the video on your website to maximise the number of viewers who have access to it.
• Solicit feedback. This will allow you to engage with your customers and collect their opinions on the content, which will inform future marketing ideas.
• Developing an online video community among customers and stakeholders is an option to consider.
• Consider using a video as a means by which you can quickly respond to events of relevance to your sector. For example, if a competitor brings out a new product you could create a video about your product and why it's different or better.

2. Podcasting

A podcast is an audio recording hosted on a website; it may be thought of as a radio show that is hosted on the internet. It is yet another way in which you can keep in touch with your customers and clients and adds some more personality beyond that found in a website.

Typically, a podcast will cover a topic that is interesting and current. Podcasts have the added benefit that they can be downloaded to portable MP3 players and listened to when on the move. Podcasts can be interviews, magazine programmes or educational/instructive content.

Preparing a podcast gives a business the opportunity to source interesting material, refer to its expertise in a controlled manner, and edit the results to maximise impact. Releasing regularly-updated podcast episodes aligns a company with leadership in a particular field, and will attract new customers over time.

Podcasts are a great way to interact with your business community. Consider interviewing your customers and others who have an interest in your products or services.

Tips for podcasting:

• Remember to plan, produce, publish and promote each podcast and if you plan a scheduled podcast, make sure it is available on time.
• Keep the audio quality as high as possible, but remember that high-quality files will take up more disk space (a 20 minute 32kbps podcast will take up about 4.5Mb).
• Practise your microphone technique to ensure that the voices recorded on a podcast are clearly audible and free from distortion.

3. Blogging

Successful blogs can attract many thousands of readers and generate a community of their own. From a business perspective it is a useful means of establishing your name as a reputable source of insight and commentary. Blogs take a lot of commitment and hard work to establish and you will need to create interesting copy several times a month to maintain your readers' interest.

Tips for blogging:

• Never leave an abandoned blog on your website.
• Do not use a blog for the 'hard sell' – your commentary should be enough to convince customers that you are worth dealing with.
• Keep the blog fresh and relevant.
• Encourage comments from customers. Lively conversation will make your blog interesting.
• Link to other relevant blogs; if you post good content on other blogs you will start to create a deeper link back to your site which in turn will rank your site higher in search engine rankings.
• Be realistic. Without interesting comment your blog will not attract visitors. Building compelling material takes time and effort.
• Microblogging through sites such as Twitter can be a useful way of communicating news of new products and services, or alerting followers to news of interest in the industry - especially useful if your products appeal to the connected "Web 2.0" type of consumer. Find out more by reading web 2.0: a guide for business from Business Link.

4. Customer testimonials

Whether you sell direct to customers or your model is business-to-business, third-party validation is extremely reassuring to potential customers. Your customers' brands may have higher profiles than your own company, so their stories can be very powerful selling tools for potential new customers.

Tips for testimonials:

• Find a relatively small number of positive comments that represent the range of customers you serve, or wish to serve, and rotate them in a prominent part of your website, eg on the home page.
• For B2B businesses, a positive endorsement from a senior executive with whom you worked is suitable.
• Aim to provide clear evidence of the effect of your work, illustrating this with statistics and figures where available.
• Case study documents should be made available as PDFs, including photography and images, and should be of the highest production value.

5. News

A vigorous online presence is indicative of a business that is thriving, active and energetic. Simply by posting a piece of news relating to your products or announcements about your business' success, or updating a blog at least once a month, you can demonstrate that your business is active.

6. Testing

A few simple updates to your online presence can provide excellent returns if well-executed. None of these need cost much and indeed some can be completed quite quickly. Don't be afraid to try out new ways of building your business using online marketing tools to find out what works best for you. And don't forget the importance of involving your customer and end user community.

Team Discovery fully supports the philosophy of these ideas and provide help to clients wishign to implement these ideas.

Article is copywrite Businesslink and article sources is here.