So, you just dropped a bad amount of money on a flashy new website done by the biggest agency in town. The site looks good and you wait for the corresponding bump in customers. And you wait. And then you wait some more.
What the hell happened? Wasn’t your fancy new website supposed to transform your business and excite new customers? You start to regret the money you put into your company’s new website and wonder about your next step to turn it all around.
We’ve all been flimflammed by some phony “miracle” product at some point, and the web design game is no different. The truth is that a lot of thought and effort will have to go into your company website before it can start converting at its full potential. Luckily, there are some tried and true hacks that you can start implementing today to make your website work for you.
5. Be Honest
You now have a good looking website that introduces your business to the digital world. Congratulations! Now what?
You might be surprised that many business owners fail to plan out their website past this point. Perhaps the firm that made the website never bothered to ask the right questions, or perhaps they dismissed the questions outright by advertising their “miracle” approach to web design. “Long-term strategy? After the site launch, the only strategy you’ll need is a way to keep customers from tearing down your door, aha!“
Suffice it to say, such firms do more harm than good. Only by honestly assessing your business goals and how your new website fits into them can you form a cohesive strategy that will enable your website to elevate your business.
Keep in mind, concessions will be made, and planning your web strategy will not be easy. Eventually, you will likely have to focus on certain business goals above others, and that’s okay. By thinking outside of the phony “miracle” paradigm, you have already taken the first step in adding functionality to your beautiful, albeit useless site.
4. What’s the Incentive?
After honestly accessing your web strategy, you will likely have an idea of what incentives you will be offering potential customers who click onto your website. Will you have exclusive deals or online-only sales? Exciting contests that will generate buzz around your brand (and a ton of emails for you to market to later)? Whatever you decide, it is absolutely imperative for your website to give value to customers before you can gain value from your website.
Savvy businesses leverage the accessibility of their website to create conversions out of small incentives that cost them next to nothing. A customer may regularly visit a local ice cream shop’s website, knowing that the shop prominently advertises their “flavor of the week” every Monday. While visiting the site to get this information, the customer can be enticed even further with online coupons or an advertisement for the shop’s new “premium” product.
Whatever the incentive may be, predictability and simplicity will go a long way in effortlessly generating high-value traffic to your site and your business. If the ice cream shop fails to update the flavor of the week for two weeks straight, their site will lose weekly visitors, as many will conclude that the all-important update is no longer predictable. When customers stop proactively checking a site for information they value, they are much less likely to show up at the business’s doorstep.
Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to gently cry about my once-favorite ice cream joint that did me dirty…
3. Rep Your Brand
Everyone and their great grandmother is on social media. This may seem fairly obvious. But many businesses fail to advertise their various social media platforms on their website in a fresh, engaging way.
Many small businesses are very active on their company Facebook or Instagram accounts while the company website remains mostly static. Thus, unless their social media accounts are prominently advertised on their website, most site visitors will remain in the dark about the important information a company shares on their preferred social media platforms.
Think a few clickable social media icons on your website footer will be enough to generate clicks? Think again.
To really drive social media engagement through your website, you will need to get a little creative. If you are a brand that prides itself on its witty Twitter banter, why not showcase your company’s best on-brand witticism as a “tweet of the week” pop-up to people engaging with your blog? If your firm is always updating its Instagram account with photos of exciting projects, why not create a beautiful gallery on the company homepage that links directly to your Instagram account?
There are a ton of simple methods for repping your social media on your website in a fun and creative way, and yet so many businesses will only do the bare minimum. While surfing the web, take note of how top and up-and-coming brands are implementing social media into their websites. You will not regret it!
2. Don’t Lose Focus
If the firm you hired did its job well, then your company website should be effortless for customers to navigate. However, you will still want to keep a close eye on how potential customers behave on your site. Luckily, there are a ton of tools to help you do this yourself.
Observing user behavior and gaining precious feedback are important aspects of planning improvements to your website. Seemingly minor changes to site elements, copy, and structure can hugely impact user engagement and conversions. Remember, your website is a long-term business strategy. Like your business, the website should also improve over time.
When hiring a person or firm to manage your company website, it is important not to get complacent. Many firms will charge top dollar to do the bare minimum. Finding someone with initiative and creativity is not always easy, but will pay dividends in the long run.
1. Use it or Lose it
If you’ve taken the steps to ensuring your website is ready to flourish, there is no reason to let it collect dust. If you have the means and know-how, you should keep your website up-to-date by advertising your latest products and services. Is your business hosting an upcoming event? Create a new post all about the event on your website, and share that link on social media.
Many businesses allow platforms such as Facebook to do the heavy lifting when it comes to advertising events and promotions due to Facebook’s enormous user base. They erroneously figure, since the company website cannot compete with Facebook, why bother posting about an event on their site at all?
Obviously, there are plenty of reasons. If the Facebook event page goes viral, your website is going to get a lot of traffic from potential customers. Additionally, your company may stand to gain a ton of link karma from blogs or websites writing about the event. Perhaps even more importantly, though, you are helping to set the expectations of your site’s visitors by beginning the process of regularly (and predictably) adding important information, updates, and more to the site.
If your customers value your business, they will value your website, too. However, if the business itself does not value its website, it will not take long for even your most loyal customers to tune out entirely.
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