When you run a business, industry experts say, “You need a website.” Once you’re in development, you decide what content goes on the site: company description, product, and service information, contact us, and so on. Have you stopped to ask yourself the purpose of your website? Have you envisioned the experience you want site visitors to have? Your website can be so much more than just a repository of facts. If you create your website as more than just a “brochure”, it can be one of your most powerful marketing tools.
Make Your Website a Marketing Machine
Powering your website with marketing features means driving visitors to your pages, keeping them engaged, and moving them through to the site to make a purchase, a request, or an appointment. Online marketing provides a unique opportunity to give site visitors a self-guided tour of your brand. You don’t do that simply by launching static pages and providing navigation tabs. You create a strategic roadmap that they can enter at any point, move in any direction, and find their way to your designated endpoint while enjoying their trip.
Maintain and Refresh Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Start to power up your site by reviewing what you have and determining where you want to go with it. You’re evaluating both form and function. Does your website reflect your brand? Does it represent your product well? Can a visitor find all of the information they need to answer their questions online? If not, reimagine the site in a way that will appeal to your audience by providing the desired information and experience.
Whether you’re in need of a touch-up or a full makeover, consider the following activities as mission-critical:
- Your brand image shows consistently throughout the site with consistent themes, colors, graphics, and fonts.
- Site navigation is clear, simple, and easy to follow. Visitors can follow it forward, sideways, or backward to pages they’ve already viewed. A customer can quickly and easily find the important content on the site.
- Everything works. There are no broken links, invalid code, or misdirection. All images look good and aligned, and the content is properly placed in its designated place. Forms can process quickly.
- The site is mobile-friendly through responsive design. Test it out on many types of devices including large screens, tablets, and phones, and make adjustments as needed.
- Your website is SEO-friendly to boost your organic search rankings. Employ an SEO-friendly structure and theme. Content provides relevant, correct information, is high quality, varied, posted consistently, and refreshed frequently. Written content contains keywords and optimized headings found through research, and images contain ALT-text, titles, and descriptions. Use backlinks to achieve search engine recognition.
- Create a landing page so that your content should specifically meet the goal and promise of any ads or the post and should contain a call to action.
- Implement analytics to measure website performance and tracking.
Go the Extra Marketing Mile
While the roadmap features are essential, why stop there when you can do so much more to engage your visitors and lead them down the marketing funnel? First, you can add more visual impact through graphics and video that can encourage visitors to spend time on the page and make them curious to see more. Next, add interaction, which can mean anything from filling out forms to playing games. Potential interactive content includes:
- Adding sign-ups for memberships and newsletters
- Offering free gifts, such as informational eBooks, in exchange for an email address
- Providing videos to play
- Creating quizzes, puzzles, activities, and games as part of a learning experience or a contest for prizes such as eBooks or gift cards
- Provide an ecommerce store with online payments
- Offer a searchable database of content
- Ask for comments, questions, and testimonials by form
- Book appointments or make reservations through the site
- Create connections to social media accounts through buttons, links and feeds
- Add a virtual tour of a property, a factory, etc.
Can you think of more possibilities? You may have some unique ideas for your business. What do your customers ask you for? What questions are you constantly answering offline? Always make sure that the interactivity is providing rich content consistent with your brand.
Use Your Internet Yardstick
If you’ve set your website up right, you’ll not only have a marketing machine that works, you’ll be able to use analytics to measure its effectiveness and to know where to make adjustments for the future. If you create the road map, go the marketing mile and use your analytical yardstick, you’ll build a strong customer base and foster loyalty to your brand and business.
No need to go the marketing mile on your own! We’re here to help and ready to answer your questions. Reach out and let us know what we can do to better serve you!
