In the traditional brick and mortar world, your store front is typically only open for specific hours throughout any given day. A website, however, operates 24 hours a day – seven days a week! A website allows you to showcase your products or services after hours, allowing your customers the flexibility to visit you when it’s convenient for them. Though showcasing your services or products on your website and making money “overnight” sounds terrific, a website’s home page or landing page coupled with its design, is crucial for success online.
Think of your website as a piece of virtual real estate, similar to residential real estate. When you first walk into a house for sale, the first impression is everything. If the odor is horrific and the house lacks in the cleanliness department, you’re likely not going to be submitting on offer on that home. The same concept applies when you are designing your website. When creating and implementing the design for your website, it is important that you keep your customers in mind. You want your customers to return to your site and to tell others about it as well! Referrals or “word of mouth” advertising is a very powerful form of marketing! If the website is poorly constructed and not user friendly, the negative experience will travel a lot faster than a positive one!
A website with a creative and unique design with an inviting homepage will make people want to stay on your website and explore the other pages your site has to offer. Often times, when someone visits a website, if the pages aren’t interesting enough, or the website isn’t easy to navigate across all platforms (cell phone, tablet, computer) they are likely to not follow through with the purchase. Select Marketing Solutions recently interviewed a local business in Florida who has an ecommerce platform, whom have recently been suffering with their online sales. After reviewing their website, it was discovered that their website wasn’t easy to navigate on mobile devices (cell phones primarily). After further investigating their lack of online sales, it was discovered that they had 327 open carts! We reached out to a few customers who had registered their information with the store’s ecommerce platform and when we asked why they never followed through with their purchase, they stated it was because the website was too hard to navigate on their cell phone. Had the website been easier to navigate on the cell phone, this local business could have had more than 300 sales in the last twelve months! The moral of this story is, make sure your website is compatible! Even if half of those sales converted, 150 sales would have boosted the company’s revenue by an absurd amount! Ensuring mobile compatibility is imperative! A recent study has shown that “79% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile device in the last 6 months!”
Aside from showcasing your products and services on your website, you must be able to deliver valuable content on a regular basis. Sometimes coming up with original content can be difficult, but with some research, thought and effort, you will be able to come up with information that appeals to your customer base. Like this blog post for example, likely, you are here because you are doing research on how or why you need to have a website for your business! By providing regular content that provides value will keep customers coming back, searching for more valuable information. With this all said, we understand that running a business full time is very time consuming and the last thing you may have time for is writing a blog post. Fortunately for you, there are agencies out there, like Select Marketing Solutions, that offer custom content delivery options to help boost your brand online! Stay tuned for next week’s blog post “Blogging For Business” for more information on what blogging can do for your website, business and brand.
After you have decided on a theme and the website is completed, you can advertise your website through other platforms for the cost of a Grande Pink Drink from Starbucks! Some popular platforms to advertise on include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and more! To learn more about social media marketing, stay tuned as well will be releasing a course teaching you step by step how to market yourself on all social media platforms!
All in all, a website is a very powerful tool that your business needs in todays world. Regardless of the size of your business and whether you are solely online or have a physical location to match, a website will allow a place for your customers to visit and learn more about you and what you have to offer.
Whether you are a new or established business and are looking to redesign or build a brand new website, Select Marketing Solutions has web designers that are available to assist you!
Contact us today for a free consultation!