Operating a business is not an easy task. With so many moving parts and pieces, it can be difficult keeping everything moving forward. This makes a website a powerful asset. It’s like a sales team that is going 24/7, year-round. There are a few things, in particular, a website is especially good at doing:
A Good Website Grows Brand Awareness Online
If the internet is like a giant city and a domain name is a plot of land, your website is the house you build. If you don’t have an attractive house, nobody is going to visit.
As more and more people are turning to their phones and computers to find what they’re looking for, it’s never been more important for business owners and operators to make sure the right information about their business can easily be found online.
Everything a business does online produces awareness among the public. The more present your business is online, the more people know about it, and the more people that know about it, the more customers you can have.
The bare minimum your website should produce is to be found for people searching from your brand name. If your business is called Joe’s Plumbing and people are looking for you on Google, you want them to find you. If they find another plumber instead, you are literally giving your business away to your competition. Don’t do that!
Modern Tools Connect Your Business With Your Customers
People aren’t looking for just products and services, they’re looking for connections. In a lot of instances, consumers want to learn about the people behind the business they’re scoping out. They want to get to know and trust the people before they risk giving them money. That’s why your website must present not just your product or service, but you and your employees, the people that make the magic happen.
In 2020, people are even connecting through tools like chatboxes and social media integration. These new ways of communicating have created a whole new way to interact with customers through your website. The American Marketing Association found that having a chatbox on your website increases sales by an average of 3x. By being available the moment visitors have questions, salespeople are able to close sales much more often and with a closer connection to the customer.
Think of your website as a digital storefront where you can hang out and represent your business in the online world.
The Right Copywriting Shows Visitors What They Are Looking For
When a visitor hits a website, they are looking for some type of information. Web pages displaying services and portfolios show the visitor that you have the product or service they’re looking for. Testimonials and reviews prove that you can deliver and provide a good experience. When visitors see this, they are comfortable taking the next step towards becoming a customer.
Here are some common bits to include on your website to get better results:
- Professional design with complete attention to the details
- Headlines that speak to the pain points of your customer
- High-quality images of people enjoying your product or service
- High-quality images of the people behind the business
- Technical details about your product or service (If your business is technical)
- Trust badges from associations and accolades
- Testimonials from real customers
- Clear information about how to make a purchase
- An easy way to contact your business and a form that works (has been tested!)
If you cover all these bases, then you’re in a good spot. Further improvement ideas can be found from researching your website’s Analytics. What is that? I’ll cover that next.
Google Analytics is a Free Way to Spy on Your Customers
Before you get creeped out and leave, hear me out. There’s a free tool called Google Analytics that you can plug into your website and see what people are doing. You can see what pages they visit, how long they stay there, and what they click on.
You can’t track individual people, but you can track them as a group and this gives you extremely valuable insights about what your website is doing well and where it can improve.
Perhaps the most valuable thing tracking Analytics provides is the feedback about your messaging and delivery. With an inside view of how people as a whole are interacting with your website, you can make the kind of changes that produce serious results. If you aren’t already tracking website visitors, you are missing out on information your competition has, and that gives them an edge. Don’t let that happen.
The Right Content and Messaging Generates Leads
At the end of the day, your website is designed to increase your profits. The fastest way to do that is to make sales, and making sales requires a steady flow of new leads. There are many ways to get people to your website, but I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole in this article. Once people are on your site, we have an arsenal of methods and techniques for getting those visitors to submit a contact form and become a lead.
The more sophisticated websites provide blogs and articles that help guide visitors through the shopping process. The effects of this are two-fold. First, you provide all the information the visitor needs to make their buying decision. When they are ready to move forward, you are already there and ready to help them.
The second thing this does is increases the size and value of your website. Search engines like Google will see your website as relevant and helpful for consumers so it will show it hires in the search results. This, in turn, drives even more visitors to your website. The cycle continues.
A common tactic with blogs is to offer free information through email. When a visitor gives you their email address in exchange for free, valuable information, they become a lead. You are now free to market directly to their email inbox. This is one of many ways a website can produce leads.
Some visitors will call your business, others will email. Any time you get information from a visitor that can lead to a sale, it’s called a lead.
There are thousands of ways to convert visitors into leads. Which ones will work for your business depend on your customers and how they approach buying your product or service. Other factors that come into play include your competition and location.
If you aren’t really sure how to approach this, don’t hesitate to contact a professional marketer. Producing leads is critical to the survival of your business so nailing it on this is of the utmost importance.
The Right Signals Enhance Your Sales System
By interacting with customers online, you get access to a lot of data. Your sales system gets tested time and time again. This process allows you the opportunity to make improvements and grow your sales system. There are also tools such as CRM that allow salespeople to take advantage of technology to organize their pipeline and increase the number of sales they can make.
Besides the technical aspect of sales, there’s also the psychological. If a customer’s decision comes down to you and one other company, who will they choose? They’ll surely go to the internet to look for reasons to move either direction. When they look at your website, will they feel like your better than the rest?
If you can say yes to this, you will be closing more business because many sales will come down to the wire and after your salespeople have done all they can, it will come down to your online presence to determine if you win or not.
Now that you know, you better win!
A Real Website Allows For Automation (Not a website builder)
Automation is a buzzword in the news right now. People are worried about losing jobs. It makes sense. Businesses are automating all they can because a machine can run 24/7, doesn’t take vacations, and doesn’t slack off. It does what it’s programmed to do indefinitely. For businesses, this equals more money, so automation is here to stay.
Almost all online processes can be automated which saves time, the most limited resource.
Imagine if half of the administrative tasks you do could be automated. Well, they can.
Some website automation we use a lot these days is email automation. A lot of our customers have too many leads and they don’t have time to contact them all, so we automate some of this process. New leads get an automated email message when they fill out a contact form that asks them to fill out a short questionnaire. We ask questions such as:
- type of project being requested
- budget
- timeline
- location
- personal details
This gives our clients a chance to assess whether they think it’s worth it or not to pursue certain sales. This allows them to filter the leads a bit so they can optimize their time.
Another popular automation will automatically post a new blog all over social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. That way one piece of content can be spread all over the internet with the click of one button.
The options are unlimited, and things really start to get exciting when you’re using automation that is customized to your business. The cost savings are almost always enough to pay for creating these automatons. The boost in profits is the icing on the cake.
A great example of this would be Lake Anna Landscaping website.
How is Your Website Doing?
If you don’t have a website yet, then you’re already behind the ball. The first step is to build a solid foundation on which to build and catch up with your competition.
If you do have a website, then how is it performing? Do you know? If you need help figuring that out, we can help. We love auditing websites to see how they were built and how they are performing now. We always find tons of ways to improve and sometimes we even learn new tricks we can use on our websites.
Hopefully, this article helped you gain a little knowledge about how websites affect businesses. If you have any questions or comments, you can leave them below.
