Your company’s website is the digital equivalent to a sign in front of the store.
If it is small, if it isn’t highly visible, if it is poor quality, you’re going to lose potential customers.
Here are a few tips on how to grow your business through effective web design and development.
Create a Mobile-Friendly Website
Odds are that your website needs to be made more mobile-friendly. More than half of all internet searches are done via mobile device like a smart phone, not a computer. This means your home page and product pages need to be optimized for fast loading and easy reading on a small screen. This issue is so important to user experience that search engines will penalize your site in the search results page rankings if it is slow to load or has a high bounce rate. A web design Essex expert can create a clean, lean website that looks just as good on a PC as a smart phone screen.
There are other things you need to do to optimize for mobile visitors. Choose a single, high quality and relevant image for each page. Rely on brand color schemes and small logos rather than a massive banner on the top of each page. If you put your name, address and phone number on a page, put it in text rather than a graphic that may not load. This has the side benefit of increasing the trust search engines have in the NAP information for your business. Put map capsules in the website rather than a picture, and try to give them the option to view your business on the map of their choice. However, you can improve your local SEO and the value of the page overall by mentioning public transit stops nearby or identifying free parking near the store. Give them driving directions such as taking exit X if traveling on the nearest major highway.
Have a Purpose for Every Page
Every webpage and social media account should have a purpose. Is it to sell the product, build brand awareness, connect people to customer service or allow them to book an appointment? Each page on the website should be optimized for that purpose. That means you shouldn’t be selling your flagship product to people scheduling repairs for what they currently own, though you might sell do-it-yourself repair kits based on the issue they’re reporting. If they’re on a page to buy your product, there’s no value in promoting “brand awareness” and “telling your brand’s story”. On your “about us” page, talk about the brand and the company’s history, but don’t try to sell. Don’t interfere with the main purpose of a webpage with other marketing methods. For example, you risk losing the sale if someone visiting an ecommerce page gets a pop up pushing them to sign up for your mailing list. If you have such a thing, only do so if they try to leave the page without buying.
Coordinate Your Digital Marketing
How do you coordinate digital marketing? You may share the content from your emailed newsletter on social media several days or weeks after it appears in your emailed newsletter. This allows you to reuse the content while still giving people an incentive to sign up for the newsletter. Put links to your company’s social media pages on your home page and put links to your corporate home page on your social media profiles. Better yet, put links to your other social media profiles on each corporate social media page. This is a natural source of backlinks, and it allows people to visit the social media site they’re most comfortable using.
When you post marketing videos on a site like YouTube or Bitchute, share it via your social media profiles. When you find customer videos gushing about your business or your brand, share it via social media. Add branded keywords and hash tags to the post. Adding hash tags to your corporate blog is a mixed bag, but it can help in some cases.
Have a Tight Focus for Your Social Media Marketing
Have a clear focus for your social media marketing. What content will you share? Where will it come from? In general, you should only share press releases, positive news stories about the company, positive customer reviews, and carefully curated content. It is necessary to keep a steady stream of content going to keep your followers following you. On the other hand, letting an intern post about the hot topic of the day with your corporate account can make it seem like your company is endorsing said viewpoint. Odds are that this will alienate half your audience. Keep your social media content carefully neutral, and you’ll be able to appeal to all of your customers. If a cause matters to the company, then create polished press releases about your donations to a group or employees volunteering for related charities rather than performative hash tags and colored squares. Then it has more weight with people who do care about the cause.
