A website is a must-have for all businesses
If anyone wants to find you, the first place they look is online. If you don’t have a presence, you won’t be found. Google is the new yellow pages, so don’t underestimate the value of a website to your business.1 Plus, if Cisco’s estimate was correct about their forecast for 2021, annual global IP traffic will reach 3.3 ZB per year, smartphone traffic will exceed PC traffic, and the number of devices connected to IP networks will be three times as high as the global population.2 So where do you want your business to be? Online.
Think about your website strategically
Your website can meet multiple needs depending upon your interests or business model. How? A website:
- Establishes your brand
- Educates your target audience about your products, services, company management, career openings, value proposition, etc.
- Facilitates advertising, customer communications, and social media to increase awareness for your offerings
- Generates leads, helping prospects find information and turn their interest into a sale
- Enables partners to showcase a joint solution or show their support for your offering(s)
- Provides a mechanism for purchasing and product delivery
- Nurtures on-going customer relationships through customer service, professional services, and technical support.
Set objectives and develop a plan
As with any marketing program or deliverable, setting objectives is important. Also, make sure you do your homework before building a website. If you want to ‘wow’ website users, you’ll want to have the features and capabilities they expect so they want to come back or share it via social media. To manage the project, create a marketing plan for your website that includes goals and objectives, features, expected time frame for execution, marketing campaigns, tactics for building website traffic, partners and vendors needed, and a maintenance plan. When you’re just starting out, a high-level plan is fine. The more you can anticipate and plan for, the more prepared you’ll be to take advantage of market opportunities and minimize risks moving ahead.
Launch your site
Once your website is optimized, the fun begins. Use multiple communication vehicles to get the word out about your new website. Use outbound marketing techniques like direct mail and email or advertising and PR to promote your offering. With your website up and going, you now have an instant ability to extend your reach, providing information at all hours of the day, 7 days a week, via your prospect’s desktop or mobile device.
Tips!
- Do your homework before building a website.
- Develop a web design plan to ensure your navigation makes sense, the features you desire are included, and it can be maintained easily moving ahead.
- Follow basic principles so that your website is easy-to-use, entices people to stay, and encourages them to tell others about it.
- Don’t forget SEO, also known as search engine optimization; this helps potential customers find you.
Promotion is key
Once you share the news with prospects, continue to promote your website with search engine marketing (SEM) tactics – such as online paid ad placements, contextual advertising, or online sponsor/partner marketing efforts – to gain and improve website traffic to your site. From there, you can work on keeping website visitors interested and converting their interest into sales opportunities or customer engagements depending upon your objectives.
Maintenance is vital
Expect to add articles, update features, maintain security, and implement marketing activities to promote your business such as creating and running promotion campaigns or online events to educate users on your latest offerings. Search engines like fresh content and users need reasons to come back. If your website isn’t safe or the content never changes, visitors won’t return. Don’t disappoint them.
