Creating a successful website starts before you talk to developers, and doesn’t end when the new site launches. There are many moving parts involved in making a website effective for your specific business need.
5 tips for building an effective business website
- Know yourself, your customers and your competitors before you start
- Have an updated responsive website / progressive web app that is fit for purpose
- Use digital marketing to attract people online
- Engage with customers once they’ve found you to increase leads
- Measure your efforts and learn what you can do better, or what you should stop doing
If your company wants a new site, or are wondering why your current one isn’t working for you, then discuss the points below with your team or with whichever one of us you most like the look of.
1. Know your customer, and yourself
You’re human and you create online messaging for other humans. You need to think a lot about the real life person you’re trying to reach when planning an effective website.
Think beyond how customers may interact with your website, think beyond what they may do during their buying journey for your specific product and think about their deeper motives, interests and desires.
- If you know a lot about those you are wanting to reach, then you’ll have good groundwork in place for successful website design. Read the great advice from Geri here about being customer centric.
- If you don’t know who you are yet, then answer that question first. To think about what business you’re really in, read Matt’s blog on business planning for the digital era.
Image: HX – Human experience (Google it, some good stuff out there to think about)
2. What makes a website fit for purpose
Each website has a unique need but all sites should be easy to find, easy to use, have the right information available and offer the exact stepping stones that lead your customer down the path they want to be led.
Once you know;
- What you’re truly offering
- Who you want on your website
- What you’d like visitors to do on your site
You then need to take a look at who else your customers will be finding during their time online.
Whilst you don’t want to get absorbed with worry about what your competitors are doing (which could make your actions reactive rather than innovative), you do want to have a look at how you compare to their current online state as a starting point.
- Do they have a helpful online tool that’s answering customer questions and drawing them to their site?
- E.G. A home loan calculator for a bank
- Are they way more visible on Google than you for what people are actually looking for?
- Have you optimised for the wrong keywords?
- Is their website navigation a breeze?
- Comparatively, is your information buried away taking too many clicks to find the right answer?
- Or is the main information missing completely from your site?
- Is there a clear way for your website visitors to contact you, if that’s what you want them to do?
Image: It’s important to our potential customers to know who the experts are in our team, and how we work together to help them. That’s why our site has ‘Why Mogul’ and ‘Team’ options in the main navigation and why these pages are visited a lot by visitors exploring our services.
What characteristics contribute to an effective website
So much goes into building an effective website structure;
- The thinking and planning up front is critical, you can’t blame a developer for a dud site if you are the one that asked for it to work in that way.
- Partner with experts, they know what works and if they don’t they’ll explore the unknown carefully together with your industry knowledge.
- Ensure your website is mobile friendly and responsive, talk to our developers about PWAs if you’re thinking ‘apps’.
Developers are artists, creative problem solving is their adrenaline rush and they know how to improve customer experiences along every step of the digital buying journey. If you’d like to know how to make an effective website, take advantage of the expertise available to you and ask the people who make them every day.
3. How digital marketing helps a business
Once you have a new website with all the functionality needed to help your customers, you can’t leave your efforts there.
Now you’ll be asking, “How can I make my website powerful”?
If you create printed brochures, would you leave them on your desk and blame the brochures for being ineffective? You have to ‘hand your website out’ and expose people to it. This doesn’t happen automatically. Digital marketing is a broad topic and involves many different tools that draw people to your online website investment, there’s ;
- SEO
- Paid ads of all kinds
- Creating ongoing great content
- Social media tactics
- Affiliate marketing
- Influencer campaigns
and so much more…
If you’re wanting to achieve your business targets this year, to make your website powerful, know that digital marketing is important to you.
Don’t take a stab in the dark when it comes to web marketing, you’ll waste your time and money and your wider team will be disappointed with your results. Work with interested experts to put together a plan with measurable goals and a timeline that makes sense for your business.
4. Increase engagement with your website visitors
Simply getting traffic to your website isn’t enough.
Once you’ve brought people to your site, you must help them to find what they’re looking for. Make it easy for visitors to do what you’d like them to.
Egor’s written a good blog post on how landing pages can increase your conversion rate here. This is an art form in itself. The gist is that if you’re paying good money (or using your valuable time) to get people to your site then it’s worth looking at where you’re pointing them to.
A bad website landing page experience is like getting your friends pumped for a night out and then taking them to a closed pub. Marketing needs to lead people to a place where they can not only find what they want, but where they will also do what you want with ease.
5. How to measure website success
How do you know you’re reaching the right people online and actually getting enquiries, leads and sales?
Get some enquiry tracking set up on your website and start looking into the website data you’re collecting in Google Analytics;
- You’ll learn from your marketing efforts
- You’ll learn about different customer types
- You’ll learn more about your business
For example, how do you know if your website is attracting phone calls to your switchboard? We can help you find that out and give you the reporting capability you need to show what a great job you’re doing.
Using analytics software and tracking code, we have been able to report to some of our clients including; Bloom, FarmChief and Specialist Vein Health, that their phones are kept ringing by their clients clicking on their phone number in a Google Ad without even needing to click through to the website proper.
Image: In Google Analytics you can see how your different online marketing activities are working together to bring you new customers. In this example, you can see that there times when 2 – 3 different marketing touch points are needed before a person enquiries with this company.
Boost online presence for your business
Have you got a clear plan in place for achieving your business goals this year?
We’re already in Q2 so if you’re not meeting your forecast figures or discussed targets then don’t ignore this finding until it’s too late.
If you need help with any of this stuff then give Mogul a call on 068777478, or email at office@mogul.co.nz to explore how we can help your business do better, we can help as little or as much as you need us to;
- Audience segmentation
- Building the best websites for your unique customer needs
- Creating custom online experiences that set you apart
- Getting people to your site with digital marketing, and measuring success to inform next steps.
If you’re all good then sign up to our newsletter for tips that’ll support you with business success.
Image: Screenshot of a recent newsletter snippet.
