Website has become an essential part of running a successful business; it’s more than ever a key decision when setting up a business. Any business that wants to capture its target customers must not only have a website but must do so with an impressive design to reach the market, gain acceptance and enjoy a good competitive edge. A well planned and professional website is a great business tool that can deliver excellent ROI and marketing outcome to save your business time and money on unproductive marketing efforts and compliment your business strategy. Let us look at the top 15 fundamentals that work magic and produce desired outcomes for a successful business website.
1. START WITH A STRATEGY
The first reason why businesses fail to reap the benefits of building a website is the lack of strategy that serve as the blueprint for the project execution. It’s like building a house without a building plan. No matter how beautiful the architecture or expensive the interior decor you want to have inside will be, the result will be unimaginably poor – a big fail.
A successful website start with clearly defined goals and business objectives, every other decision is guided by the blueprint – a holy scripture of sort. Create a list of your expected outcomes; let your end goal determine your starting and kick-off point. Answer all the important questions – the what, why, how, whom, where and when – this will be your guiding compass. Describe and profile your target audience and how you intend to engage your visitor – include a clear map for buyer’s journey to create valuable information that encourages visitor’s action.
It’s ultimately important to build and focus your website strategy on the audience – make sure your copy, messaging, aesthetics and features are well planned to appeal and connect with your target audience. It’s the first step to a successful marketing of your website and business. Agree with your design team on outcomes and highlight the deliverable and key millstones.
2. CREATE A PERFECT LANDING PAGE
On the average, website visitors spent about 7 seconds to go through 90% of website they visit. Simply put, you have to make your first impression and impact within these few seconds – telling the visitor: what you do, who you serve, how you do it and why they should choose doing business with you.
Therefore, it’ important for any business willing to succeed online to capture the mind (deliver it’s pitch) and connect with the visitor right from arrival point that is your landing page – also called the home page. Business should invest time and resources into developing a clear marketing message with all corresponding, accompanying and relevant elements such as logo, tagline or slogan. This also includes punch lines to reflect and communicate in specifics: the brand’s credibility, expertise and target audience or market you serve.
Have a clear strategy for your website copy to deliver compelling and brief introduction of your business in a way the customers and visitors will appreciate and desire to meet you – as I said earlier in a very short time, preferably less than 7 seconds.
3. USE CALL TO ACTIONS
A lot of website experience drought especially when there is no careful planning going into the design process – the graveyard silence can be very disruptive to achieving your marketing objectives and business goals. Many business owners thus keep wondering and asking why their website isn’t sending business their way. It simply lack of conversion planning and optimization strategy.
Conversion optimization and strategy will cleverly encourage your site visitors to take action – cautiously planned to invite and guide your visitors on next steps through the buying process – suggesting and ensuring that they make decision favorable or initiate a contact with you. Conversion is achievable through smart design elements called call-to-action buttons e.g. “Shop Now”, “Click Here” or value-led action calls/CTA’s by offering specific information or details the customers will find valuable to build trust and initiate commitment.
It is also important to ease and anticipate the customer experience journey through your website. Key outcome of a well planned conversion strategy includes increase lead generation to fill up your sales pipeline, business appointment, product order or service booking. So it’s important to have such simple details like your business phone number, address, and contact email in visible and easy-to-spot locations on your website.
4. TRACK YOUR CONVERSIONS
This part is very crucial if you desire to see and experience the real value of a website to your business. It’s easy to measure your website ROI, simply by tracking the numbers of inquiries and leads; sales and conversion coming from the website. It will help you determine the source of your website traffic and visitors to know where to concentrate your marketing efforts and ad budget plus what it’s costing your business to get a customer online. This information will help you plan your marketing budget, measure effectiveness of your method and evaluate the success of your overall strategy in terms of your website goals, online marketing improvements and changes. Good website solutions usually include tools to help you track your conversions and analyze the data for business intelligence.
5. MAKE YOUR “ABOUT US” PAGE CAPTIVATING
Have you ever talked to a lady before and then go on and on talking about yourself? I’m sure that’s not something cool and if you are a lady – you don’t enjoy such experience if you had one before. Same thumb rule applies to website about us pages; it’s not all about you. Create a balance between sharing information about the personality of your brand or business and how you help your make customer’s life better.
The about us page like your landing home page is one of your impulse pages, it should captivate your audience and help them see how your company mission and values delivers benefits for your customers – it’s good to be direct and specific so that you can get your visitors attention. Spend some time and money to create professional copy for a good show online.
6. CREATE HIGH QUALITY CONTENT
On the web, content is king! Content is what visitor look for online before a beautiful website or great product. To grow your business online, you need to tell a great story first – you can’t get a good result without a great content. Great contents are magnet for leads and traffic and very key to a successful marketing effort, customer interactions and engagement, and solution presentation. You should focus on providing qualitative, valuable and educating masterpiece content for your website and email marketing – ensure your contents are readable, precise and appropriate to the interest of your target audience. A combination of well planned appealing content and email marketing is a perfect tool for leading and helping your visitors towards reaching an informed buying decision. It demonstrates your authority, expertise and experience which are three jewels to earn customer trust and loyalty.
7. BUILD VISUALLY IMPRESSIVE DESIGN
A visually appealing site with great aesthetics gives visitors déjà vu and keeps them glued. It’s creates seamless, unique, scintillating and compelling experience that gives your visitors excitement. A successful blend of creative visuals and functional design will help:
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- Keep visitor engaged with your website and stays longer
- Makes your website memorable which in turn makes visitors return,
- Connect with your visitor’s emotional response, making them likely to refer others to your site.
- Establish your product and service, brand and business as a top quality.
- Working with a professional web design agency can help you achieve a unique creative design and a great ROI as highlighted above.
8. INTUITIVE USER EXPERIENCE
User experience comes second to none in making your website successful online, never trade it for anything! User experience is the creative blend of visual design and functionality to deliver intuitive and usability on the website to your audience. So you have no choice really than to build your website around user experience. It will help you effectively drive user interaction, engagement and conversion as well as anticipate the choices they will make even before they realize it – this will give your visitors a sense of personal connection.
This can be achieved by anticipating what brings visitor to your site, how your audience will like to interact with your site and why they are coming to your website – once you identify these needs, you can structure the design of your website to fulfill those needs. Meeting the audience’s point of needs will ultimately position you as the go to business and brand of choice. To achieve high user experience, give easy access to content, contact information, product details and pricing information – make it available and on-demand.
You can read the part two of the post here.
If you will like to learn more about how to make your new or current website meets the recommendations above, send us a mail at info@itrdntechnologies.com or click here to send us your web project inquiry.
At ITRDN Technologies, we help businesses leverage digital transformation to accelerate business growth, achieve strategic outcomes and a rewarding experience. Contact Us Today! Complete the form at our website to request your Free 30 Minutes Web Strategy Session on 0802 660 0125 or email info@itrdntechnologies.com. No-String Attached!
