Marketing
Marketing Tips: What’s the Purpose Of Your Website?
If you are in business, you need to have a website for your business. If you’ve been in business for a while, you likely already have you’re company website already up and running.
Is there a type of business that doesn’t need a website today? We googled it, and many small businesses are getting on just fine without an online presence – well almost.
Professionals like general practice doctors, dentists, and sole operators like your lawn mowing service or gardener exist without a website. However, would their business benefit from a website? Yes, if you are in business, you need to have a website and a blog too.
Otherwise, where do you send prospective customers to find out more about your services, get reviews and book appointments?
Don’t build your online presence on Facebook alone. Yes, it’s free, but you also lose a lot of information that would be backed up and useful to visitors and future prospective buyers. Put your time and resources into creating an online asset that you own. Your online business assets, including your website, email marketing list, social media profiles are valuable, and when it’s time to sell up, they could add thousands to the sale price.
So here are three ways you can make your website a useful marketing tool for your business.
Search Engine Juice
Search Engines love content. Your website should have a lot of content to keep the search engines happy. Just by adding a blog to your website, you now have an easy way to update your site regularly and keep the search engines coming back for more.
Adding a weekly blog post or article will give the search engines a reason to come back and index. Blogging has never before been so relevant and unique content vital for SEO (search engine optimisation) and increasing your inbound website visitors.
Searching for information using keywords is the most popular way to get access to reputable sites. Google is the search engine most internet users prefer making up more than 70% of all searches. However, it may be surprising to know that there are many search engines available, including AOL Search, Bing, Qwant which are multilingual.
Commit to improving the quality and relevancy of the content on your website, and this action will reward you with a higher rank, so your site appears in more search results. More targeted website visitors will increase your sales enquiries, or if you have an online booking system or eCommerce store, you’ll get orders and sales, all done without you need to front up and do the selling or handle the appointment.
Lead Generation
Many people think that the primary purpose of a website is to make sales. This should actually be the second goal of your website. The first should be to get customers on your marketing list, i.e. customer database. The majority of your website visitors will not buy the first time. Expect most visitors to need four or five contacts with your business directly or indirectly before they commit and part with their money.
Consumers are always researching online – ‘window shopping’ by visiting websites. When they come to your site, you want to get them onto your email mailing list so you can contact them directly with your special offers, and news. You will need to incentivise them to part with their email address, and you can do this with a free report, a sample of your product, free video or some other gift.
Just by offering something for free, you give them a reason to like you more than your competition, and they are more likely to remember you when they are ready to make a buying decision.
Buy Now
Make it as easy as possible for someone to buy when they are ready. If you offer a product, make sure the process is intuitive, i.e. it’s evident what to click to to buy right then and there. Offer as many payment options as you can too.
Add online chat aka a chatbot, so if your customers have a query, they can get answers immediately.
Too many websites that I see out there are nothing more than online brochures that aren’t updated, don’t build a relationship with the visitors and never even ask for the sale.
Just by adding these 3 things to your website, you will turn your website from an extra expense for your company to an automated sales machine.
