What Does My Website Need to Attract Clients?

Using a CRM for creating buyer personas and detailing the features your site will need to attract clients

According to a 2021 report by HubSpot, Litmus, and Wistia about best marketing strategies, websites were the top channel used in marketing in 2020. This year, social media tops the list, but barely. This means that websites are still considered an essential tool to attract and engage with existing and potential customers. 

If you have a website, great. If you don’t, you may want to consider getting one. Either way, a well-executed website builds trust, provides a better customer experience, and creates a stronger brand. Below are some of the best practices that you can use to attract clients to your website. 

First Things First: Create Buyer Personas

It’s not enough to just slap together a website and hope that it will gain an audience — first, you need to understand what drives your audience. What are the things they find interesting? What do they want to learn? What are the things that motivate them? 

A customer relationship management (CRM) tool can help you answer these questions. This technology helps collect, store, and desilo data about collectors that give you insights into their behavior. This tool keeps information about your customers in one location, and it helps you create buyer personas for existing and potential customers. 

For art businesses, it’s vital to also understand your target demographics. If you’re selling art, then who are the people most likely to buy it? For example, if you have a midsize gallery that primarily sells work below a $10,000 price point, then why would you try to attract buyers who either want to buy work for $500 or bid on blue-chip art? These are the people you want to educate.  

Basic Features of Your Website

Once you know who you’re targeting, it’s time to get to work building your site. According to the HubSpot, Litmus, and Wistia report, companies with 51 to 100 pages on their website generate 48 percent more traffic than companies with 1 to 50 pages. 

That’s a big increase in traffic! This does not mean, however, that you need all of these pages to launch your site. Nor do you need to add all of these sites if you have a small business that doesn’t have a lot of content. You don’t want to add fluff just for the sake of bulking things up — your content should be meaningful and ever-focused on educating your audience (which will ultimately help drive traffic and generate sales leads!).

Your website doesn’t need to be fancy, but it should, at the very least, have the following features:

• Main Pages: Although you don’t necessarily need 51 to 100 pages, you should have a solid foundation of pages and sections to build upon. These sections should succinctly explain to your audience who you are, what you do, why it matters, and what you can do for them (this is your value proposition). It should also have a way to easily contact you. 

You won’t want to clutter up a single page with too much information, as it’s hard to navigate. Having pages designated for certain types of information and topics and artworks and the ilk increases your search traffic, as Google ranks a for specific products or services.

• Blog: Think you don’t need a blog? Think again. Remember, your customers want to be educated. Have you heard the expression, “content is king?” Well, it’s the truth. Your blog is the place on your site where content can offer insights and provide call-to-actions such as encouraging people to subscribe, schedule a sales call, etc. 

• SEO: So you’ve created your website. Now you need to get people to interact with it! For your site to appear on search engines like Google, you need to spend a little time with SEO. It’s probably best to talk with a professional who understands how to use SEO to drive traffic, but at the very least, you’ll want to: 1) choose a URL, or domain name, that includes the name of your business; 2) create titles for your pages (“About,” for example); 3) use anchor text that helps people navigate your site.

• Testimonies: What better way to build trust than see how your art business has helped other clients? Many websites will simply write a testimonial followed by a first name, but that doesn’t lend much legitimacy. Who’s to say you simply didn’t make up the great words about your company and then slap on a name? Instead, ask your clients if they’d be willing to write a testimonial and use their first and last name along with the name of their company. 

• Company logos: Even if you decide against doing testimonials, you’ll want to add the names of companies you’ve worked with to your site (unless there’s an agreement between both parties that you can’t share their name). Ask your client if you can add their logo to a page or section of your website titled “Clients,” “Who We’ve Worked With,” or something similar. 

Prospective clients want to know you’re the real deal — one of the first places they’ll look to see if you’re legit is your website. If you’ve used a CRM to figure out your customer personas and then added the above features to your site, you’re well on your way to attracting prospective clients — and drumming up new business.