Ever since the UK Government announced the 2020 COVID-19 Lockdown, businesses have had to adapt to working from home and not using a physical store. Businesses that didn’t have an online presence and only operated from a physical store struggled to keep their businesses from going under. However, it’s never too late to start developing your brand online and building the perfect website for your business.
Here at Jumbuk Digital, we have put together an extensive guide to create a website for online marketing to your current and potential customers. No matter what your business is, or where it is located, people need to know who and what you do. In order to do this, there are certain points that your website needs to showcase. So “What do I need to do”, you ask?
In order to design and develop your website as an effective brand tool, it needs to provide information that meets the customers’ needs, instantly. A website needs to have good usability that generates leads or even sales. In order to do this the following 10 points should be considered:
- Beautifully Designed
- Content, Content & More Content
- Communication
- Something for Free
- Easily Sharable
- Optimised Landing Pages
- Visual Content Marketing
- Reviews / Testimonials
- Page Speed
- Build your Brand Image
1. Beautifully Designed
Replicating your businesses identity onto a website is no easy task, but it is fun! No matter who you are, the first thing you notice about a website is how it looks. Think about Home Decor, when you walk into someone’s house you notice their gorgeous Persian rug or the ugly looking teapot canvas on the wall. It’s the same with a website.
If a website is not aesthetically pleasing chances are the visitor will leave your site in an instant. There are a number of ways to change your website to make it more pleasing to the eye, such as:
- Colours
- Layout
- Images
- Titles & Headers
- Written Content
2. Content, Content & More Content
There is a reason major names in the digital industry say Content is King. It has been ever since the internet first came around. In 1996, Bill Gates published an article on the Microsoft website titled “Content is King.” This article created a blueprint for all existing and upcoming online businesses.
Creating content that is relevant to your business is key to gaining traction on your website. A written piece of content has many valuable properties, such as Social Sharing, Backlinks and Search Engine Rankings. It allows visitors to understand your business and gain knowledgeable insight on the chosen topic. Now content doesn’t just have to be written word, it can be Videos, Infographics (we will discuss this later) or emails.
Creating content on your website moves you into the realm of content marketing. In Layman’s Terms, you have to generate relevant and interesting content to increase engagement, thus gaining more traffic, and ultimately increasing profitability in the long run. Creating content is so important when creating a website for online marketing.
3. Communication
When designing & developing a website, one of the most important aspects to focus on is whether or not your website communicates effectively to your audience. Both of the previous points, Beautifully designed & content, content and more content are forms of one-way communication.
There are however many ways to create two-way communication between you and your website visitors. There are a few ways to do this effectively. We have listed them below.
- Reviews & Testimonials (more to come)
- Blog Comments
- Social Media Platforms
- Social Media Sharing
Communication is key in order to improve your branding, reduce website bounce rate & generate more sales, leads and email subscribers. It also allows you to understand your customers, which in turn helps you to develop ideas.
4. Something for Free
You might be asking “WHAT, I HAVE TO GIVE SOMETHING OUT FOR FREE”? The answer is yes, but why? Everyone loves free stuff, who turns down a free sample? I surely don’t. Costco used to give out free food in their stores in the hopes that people would love the product and go on to buy it.
The same works in the Digital Space. The only difference is that you have to give your customers something of value. This doesn’t necessarily mean monetary value. It is something that helps them out. If you are an accountant it could be Invoice Templates, a free 30-minute consultation or even an e-book all about managing your finances.
The idea behind this is that if you give visitors/customers an invoice template they have to supply you with their email address. This allows you to capture their email and then send them newsletters in the hope of converting them to a paid customer.
5. Easily Sharable
Making sure that content on your website is easily sharable to social media platforms is critical to gaining website traffic. You may have written the best piece of content in your niche. However, if there is no way to share it, how will people see it?
Social Media is growing every day. It is where the 21st century lives. Platforms will come and go. But the content moves with it and so do the people who use it. Tik Tok for example launched in 2016 under the name Douyin. In 2017 ByteDance launched it outside of China. It Exploded. As of March 2021, TikTok is the most downloaded app on the apple store and has over 689 million active users. That is a lot of people to share your content with. Tik Tok is the only platform on the planet where you can post one video and get 1 million views. It is not something to sleep on.
Friends trust friends. So you read this article and found it helpful. You then share it on your Facebook page. One of your friends sees it and they are also looking to improve their website. This article delivers value to them and they gain more business and more traffic to their website because of it. If this article didn’t have a share button then your friend would never have seen it!
6. Optimised Landing Pages
What is a landing page? A landing page provides a unique experience for your visitors. It is the first point of contact between your business and potential customers. A great deal of your time should be spent on making sure that your landing page meets the expectations of your customers.
Make sure to include a call to action on your landing page. You also need to make sure there is one call to action on the page, such as an email form and no navigation. This forces the visitor to take action on your landing page and not get distracted.
Landing Pages are perfect for sharing on Social Media as they are for a specific product or service. They are also amazing at converting. Landing Pages can also be used to gain website traffic through search engines with the use of Search Engine Optimisation.
7. Visual Content Marketing
Visual content is the most noticeable features of your website. It tends to draw more attention from your visitors and provides you with a unique opportunity to build your brand.
Visual content comes in many forms. Your company logo is a form of visual content. A logo gives visitors the initial perception of your business. If your logo is poor, visitors will think your business is poor. Another form of visual content is the visual representation of data. This can be charts, infographics or graphs. It allows visitors to get an overall view within one piece of content.
No matter how long a visitor spends looking at your piece of content, 10 seconds or 10 minutes. They take away valuable information and share it with their colleagues or friends on social media or through email.
8. Reviews / Testimonials
Reviews, sometimes known as testimonials are unique. You can shout from the rooftop about how amazing your business is, but if you don’t have any customers to back it up, no one will believe you.
Psychologically it allows showing potential customers that they can trust this business. subconsciously it decreases the risk because someone else has either bought the product/service. This is why we trust other people.
There are many ways to showcase your reviews on a website. You could set up a review/testimonials page where visitors can leave a review of your business. Alternatively, you could use a third-party programme such as TrustPilot.
9. Page Speed
Page Speed is sometimes confused with Site Speed. Page speed is how quickly a page loads from the point you press enter. You can check how quickly a page loads with Google PageSpeed Insights.
Google uses page speed as part of the algorithm to rank pages, this is used for SEO. It is super important as it also affects the visitors experience on your website. There are many ways to improve your page speed such as:
- Enabling Compression
- Minifying HTML, CSS & Javascript
- Reducing Redirects
- Improving Server Response Time
- Using a CDN (such as Cloudflare)
- Optimising Images
Moz has put together a fantastic guide on how to improve your page speed efficiently and effectively.
10. Build your brand image
If you delve deeper into your website and start to implement the points we have discussed your brand image will grow. However, beware it is not a quick process, it takes time and effort. A great way to start off is to complete a SWOT Analysis. SWOT represents Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just a few bullet points under each section.
I hope you enjoyed reading about how to create a website perfect for online marketing.
