Don’t blame your website if you’re not getting the sales leads you want... Design your swim lanes better!
It’s easy for others to point to the performance of a website, web page or web designer for that matter and pile on all of the problems companies can experience generating the sales leads they need.
It’s easy, but unfair, to blame your website designer for your lead gen woes. Normally, any failure to build an effective inbound marketing approach runs deeper.
A few years ago, every business or organizational you could think of was sold on the idea of having a website as a digital alternative to the traditional company brochure and business card. It was the place to tell your story and present a gallery of products, neatly underpinned by lots of proof points about the company, its projects, and its ability to deliver them.
This concept of a website, where visitors are left to roam free without any guide, in the hope they would encounter something interesting that would appeal to them, fails when you’re dealing with ‘I-Want-What-I-Want-When-I-Want-It’ visitors. They don’t have the patience to browse around aimlessly. If you’ve ever taken kids of a young age to an exhibition, you know they might bear the trudging around the halls if you bribe them with food, sweets and a toy at the end. But if you really were honest and asked the kids what they wanted to do, most would say ‘toy, food, and let’s get outa here, this is boring!’
Now scale that up by a factor of ten. Welcome to the era of swim lanes.
A swim lane is a conceptual dream user journey your website visitors will take on their path to becoming your customer. It’s a ‘single-thread’ conversational path’ that begins with a profiled buying persona with a problem (i.e. an event that has led to the formation of a ‘job that needs to be done’) an ends when the individual buys one of your products or services. You can visualize a swim lane as illustrated below.
Getting your swim lanes right is a non-trivial planning task. Critical to success will be the ability of your team to fundamentally understand THE BUSINESS and, more important, YOUR CUSTOMERS. And how do you get in the heads of your customers? Well, that’s where customer insights research and data analytics comes in.
Businesses that get their swim lanes right are inevitably best placed to capture the lion’s share of the market they serve. What sort of competitive edge is that?
Ian.
Ian Tomlin is a seasoned marketer, entrepreneur, and business leader with a 30+ year career at the intersection of strategy, technology, and marketing. As the founder of successful businesses, including Newton Day Ltd, Ian brings a wealth of expertise in guiding companies toward compelling brand stories. Reach out to Ian via LinkedIn to transform your marketing approach and tell your brand story effectively.
