Why Should You Invest in Your Website?
The digital space has become a cornerstone of how companies, people and organizations communicate. Consumers evaluate companies more through their digital presence than ever before, making your online presence a critical asset. Your website is your digital shop window; and, depending on your business goals, there are multiple factors and functionalities to consider introducing to your website for success.
1. Brand Building
It’s crucial to ensure you are conveying the right message to prospective customers and clients, and your website can be an invaluable hub for positioning your company as the solution to their needs. By creating the right first impression, you will build trust and create brand recognition. Ideally your online strategy involves actively communicating your brand, but at the very least a good website will passively reinforce your brand after they have met you
2. Tracking Success
Measuring how audiences use your website can be an important tool for honing your brand message to communicate with and relate to better prospects. Optimizing your website by tracking traffic and analyzing audience behaviours can greatly increase your conversions and refine your understanding of who you should be talking to.
3. Drive Leads
Your website also has the potential to be an important driver for lead generation - identifying, qualifying, and integrating with CRM systems (like Salesforce) to improve the lead generation process. Using lead generation forms on your website, you can capture customer information as well details about the product and services they are interested in. When this information flows directly into your CRM you reduce data entry errors and accelerate the workflow of following-up with your clients. You can even consider a client portal to add further value in managing these contacts.
4. Re-engagement with Email
Email blast capabilities can be connected to the CRM integrated on your website to issue newsletters or email blasts relevant to your audience. This is an effective way to keep your contacts engaged and connected to your content and your website, and ensure your company is always top of mind.
5. Customer Specific Experience
Sharing data between systems such as the website, Order Management system and your CRM will give you a powerful way to tailor your content to your visitor. Depending on your setup, data from your Order Management system can be used to populate information about products, services and projects on your website. Done effectively this helps optimize the process of managing your website content.
6. Social Media Integration
Social media should always be closely integrated with your website. A good social strategy must be actively managed, with fresh frequent and engaging content across multiple channels. Integration across all your online efforts – from your blog to your social platforms – demonstrates that your company has character and understands its audiences. This efforts creates a human connection and increases affinity for your business.
7. Organic Content Promotion
People trust people more than brands – so you want organic website traffic and the visitors coming from social to be encouraged to share your content back out to their own networks. Through a good interface design, these cues and social sharing callouts help drive the dissemination of your website content.
8. Search Engine Optimization
The integration between your website and social media can have a tremendously positive impact on your search engine optimization. Your subject matter authority is boosted when social conversations reference your website, which will drive up your search engine ranking.
9. Recruit Top Talent
Attracting talent is critical in staying competitive, and there’s an expectation for companies to communicate well and look good online. It’s a standard. Your website can contribute to delivering the impression of a top firm. It can also act to reduce steps in the recruiting process and make it more efficient for staff to manage, as well as encourage talent retention. We’ve often heard from clients that they saw a surprising boost in quality of recruiting candidates after their website was redesigned.
10. Community Focus
Lastly, your website can be a powerful tool for cultivating good relationships with communities – be that the neighbourhood you’re in, an online community, your clients or employees. Your website can act as a platform to educate, inform and engage with vast audiences to create good relationships, increase word of mouth, develop distribution channels and cultivate partnerships.
Author: Sandra Moffatt
Digital Marketing.