When designing a new website you’ll want to make sure to analyze your messaging and content first. View our article on ‘Content Messaging for Your Website’ to find out more about this. Below is a guide to help you develop, upgrade or create a new website for your business.
Content and Messaging:
Be sure to develop high quality content for your website and answer questions that your ideal target audience is looking for:
- About You
- About Your Business
- Your Credibility (Testimonials)
- Your Warranty or Guarantee
Video
You have 3-5 seconds to make an impact. Video is a great way to get people a lot of information in a short time. (make sure it’s a high quality video)
Design
Ensure your website design is clean, easy to read (not too fancy of font), not overly designed (keep colors simple). Make sure your homepage has key content directly in the line of view for the user without having to scroll. The viewer needs to be interested right away or they will leave.
Conversion Points
Include a call to action. What do you want people to do when they get to your website? ‘Call now’, ‘Insert your email address’, ‘Fill out this form’, ‘Download this’. Why should they do what you say? Make it enticing!
Mobile Friendly
Make sure that people can view your website properly on their mobile device. *No Adobe Flash* or programming languages that don’t play on mobile devices.
Do you need a specific mobile theme for your website that’s different from the desktop version? Depending on your industry you may need a ‘Call Now’ button to be the first button they see on the mobile device.
Social Integration
Is your business going to be heavily marketing on social media. Maybe your conversion is to get people to like your page from your website if your sales cycle is a long period of time. Or if your purchase price is large. Allow the ability for people to subscribe to your updates to bring them back to your website. Maybe a app contest is in order? Like us on Facebook to enter our draw to win.
Internet Marketing
It takes 5-7 touch points for an average purchase or sale to take place. How will you retain your website traffic in order to increase conversions? I mentioned social media, what about email marketing?
Email marketing is often over looked by how active people are on social media. Depending on your clientele, email marketing may be a more effective route. When given the permission to send people marketing emails it converts higher than social media marketing.
Landing Pages
Creating new pages on your website for a specific advertising niche and or catered to one conversion goal are called Landing pages. You want a website visitor to ‘land on this page’ from advertising or direct search and take action. (Usually fill out a form, download, or call.)
Remarketing
You can target people via Google or Facebook advertising to come back to your website and make a purchase. Consider these options as a way to increase the touch points in your sales process.
You can see the importance of your web marketing planning during the stages of creating your website. If you plan on hiring two separate companies, this can add to the costs (one to build the website, one to do the marketing). Be sure to think this through before deciding on building your new website. ROI Web Hosting offers both web design and web marketing, this helps save companies money and headaches of dealing with two separate companies for your Internet marketing efforts.
