There is no question that a website is a must-have for any business or professional service.
The real question is whether your website is working for you right now. Business go through cycles and strategic objectives change. But very often websites do not. They get created at one point and then forgotten for months if not years. Guaranteed that this website is definitely not working hard for you.
Websites aren´t static assets – they are perpetual works in progress, which need to be tweaked and re-tweaked every step of the way to increase their efficiency and reflect the change of your business. The first step to ensuring your website works for you RIGHT NOW is figuring out what is your objective RIGHT NOW as a business. And how are you going to use your website to reach that objective.
- For example, if you are a news website, chances are your objective is to maximize views, because that increases your advertising revenue. In that case what you want to achieve is maximize the amount of news that each reader opens.
- However, if you are a hotel, your objective is to maximize sales of your roomnights. Hence, the objective of your website is to get people to book.
Once you figure out your objective, you need a strategy on how your website is going to help you reach it. If you sell something simple to understand, such as socks, you can probably optimize your website for a quick online sell.
But if you sell services, you will need your website to peak enough interest from people to either call you directly to chat about their needs, or at least give you their details so that you can keep in regular touch with them with a view to engage them as clients to fulfil future needs.
A tailored website can satisfy different needs depending on the stage of your project:
Getting started – focus on tweaking
It is a given that you are working very hard to find and target your clients. Unfortunately, you won’t be 100% sure of which clients ‘love you back’ until you have website statistics for a stretch of time. Statistics don´t lie, your job is to find strategies to improve them following your goals. There is no point stubbornly sticking to a message that is not paying off.
Here are a few tips to ensure your website is optimized when you start a new project:
- A website increases substantially the credibility of your project. Make sure that all the details in your web are consistent. For example, when possible use the URL as a domain for your email address rather than using freemail accounts
- Go paperless on the brochures and company information. Push people to download online brochures and when possible gather your audience details
- Your website works for you 24/7. Make sure it is doing it as hard as possible even while you sleep. Optimize every aspect of your website each step of the way
Automatic Processes
When customers are flowing and your sales start to increase, you typically focus on other areas of the business and leave the website ticking along. This is where you need to set time aside to work on marketing automation.
Automating marketing and sales processes is the best use of your time at this stage. It delivers the info each potential customer needs, it gathers every question or suggestion from them, it manages seamlessly every step of the way, including post-sale services.
The take away is clear. Setting up a website is not enough. You have to tweak it constantly to optimize it for your own objectives. In the next post I will give you some clues on what tools you can use to figure out whether your website is working for you and how it can be improved. If you have any suggestions or feedback inbox me on Araceli.giner@ata.email or comment below.