A website is the storefront of your business online! It is where your potential clients come to see what you can offer. However, not everyone thinks of a website that way.
So that is why we are here to provide you with the information on how to think about your website in 2019, so you can ensure you are providing the best content for your audience.
Most of the time, we look at a website as an “I have to do it because everyone else has one”. Having this mentality can mean your website lacks the clarity and wow factor that clients want when they look at choosing someone to cater to their needs.
Design – your digital showroom
One of the first things a client will see when they come on to your website is the design. You need to remember, this is your digital showroom. Instead of a physical store, you have a website, so you need to create it like you would if it was a shop. As your digital showroom, you want to make sure it is visually appealing.
Now, remember, you haven’t got the overheads like you would a shop front, so you also need to invest in ensuring your website is appealing to scroll through and has all the relevant information. Customers need to know if they are buying from you, what are they going to get?
When you walk into a restaurant, you always judge if you want to eat there based on the appearance. If it was messy and didn’t look appealing to eat at, no matter how amazing the food is, you probably won’t eat there. So when you are developing or auditing your website, have a think about whether it is appealing, neat and looks like the type of brand you would buy from.
Look at your “wow” factors to offer customers a reason to use your services or buy your products. Everything from your logo to your branding needs to be on point to tell your story and visually “look the part” that represents your business. You want the design of your page to relate to customers, to speak to them so they can understand exactly what they will get from you!
Content – producing relevant content
Most websites will provide a service site, with not much thought put into providing information on what problems they actually solve. As part of the website, some brands will add a basic blog that is updated every few months.
Companies that create content for the sake of it may simply feel it is the “thing to do”, they don’t produce high-quality content to engage the target audience. Most brands have no idea what their target audience even searches for on Google, Bing or even YouTube (second largest search engine on the planet).
To have a relevant website in 2019, it is all about content and how you build content to inform and educate the audience. Creating high-quality content will add a lot of benefits to your brand. It will show you are an industry leader, it will build trust with your audience and will give customers a reason to come back to your website. Also, it helps with SEO and draws traffic to your site.
If you are increasing traffic to your site through high-quality blogs, then you need to ensure it is an easy to navigate website with all of the right information provided.
You can’t do one or the other – have a good blog and an ordinary website or an ordinary blog and a good website. Both need to be done right for all brands in the digital marketplace.
When it comes to producing content, you could supply a range of topics from “how to” tips and tricks, industry news and personal, relatable stories!
If you want to up your content game, provide a content resource section. A content resource section is not just the latest news. It is about giving the audience what they want. It would be guides, workbooks, courses or resources for your clients to find more information – it is all about giving them a reason to come back!
Think of Netflix for a moment, they are a content hub and an easy to use APP with a smooth design. They are always adding more and more content based on what their customers demand which is why people keep coming back.
What advanced, innovative content platforms can you add to your website to keep your customers coming back? Maybe you are an interior design business, and you have a platform where people can interact with your products by changing the colours and adding them to a 3D interactive home. Or maybe you’re an Antenna installer with a fancy YouTube Channel showing off every job and how you solve the most complex installations. What ever you do, think outside the box.
Communication and logistics – be available
Your website needs to be the place people can contact you about your services directly and multiple ways of reaching and engaging with your brand. When creating the communication aspect of your website, consider multiple options like the obvious two, meaningful numbers for sales, support etc, emails and perhaps a Facebook Live Chat, forum and a blog comment box. Whichever your customers would prefer to reach you, provide it to them.
The live chat function is an excellent opportunity to get more people contacting you as it allows them to communicate without their full attention. This could be setup in a variety of different ways.
Once you have your communication methods down, you need to make sure your website is convenient and fast. It needs to be mobile responsive and quick to load. Ensuring a clean, functional design with a strong focus on UX, could be a decisive factor in either increasing or potentially missing out on customers. This is particularly true in the B2C space.
Final thoughts
With the rise in social media, some brands believe websites are a thing of the past. And depending on how your website is created, this may, in fact, be true. Keeping your website evolving, ever-changing to meet your new customers demands and expectations will go along way to building a brand. Imagine if facebook.com went down as a website but still worked as an APP. People would still panic. Even the king of social media Facebook requires a website to meet the demands of many of their customer base.
Brands need to understand, a website is your 24/7 business development manager. It is a place to inform, educate and lead the way in service or product innovation. Different platforms connected to your website (i.e YouTube channel or Instagram feed) can be incorporated into your website so you can easily increase subscribers or likes directly from your website.
Your social media channels are elements of your business where you have the opportunity to create unique content for each platform and incoporate them into your blog and other pages depending on the content. For e.g. we have embedded a relevant video from YouTube below into this article.
Your website is the hub for all your content, links to channels where other content your brand creates can be found and displays your business for everyone online to see.
No matter what you do online and through your website, always ask yourself, is this actually improving my User Experience (UX), online reputation or brand awareness?
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