When it comes to marketing your business website, you have a few things working in your favor.
Your website is the first thing potential customers see when they visit your business online.
This means that it’s important that your website looks appealing and professional.
Your website is a one-stop shop for customers. They can find all the information they need about your business on your website, including contact details, product information, and pricing.
This makes your website a valuable tool that you shouldn’t count out so quickly.
These are a few things to follow when doing so:
The first step is figuring out just who the heck you’re trying to build this new website for.
Once you have that little juicy tidbit figured out honestly the rest is pretty easy.
You don’t have to make it difficult, just a few hundred hours of research and you’re good to go…
I’m only half-joking here, there are a TON of different templates, layouts, and interactions you can do on your website to make it really speak to your audience.
So it can be super easy to get lost in the options and end up not doing anything.
As a web agency owner and developer/designer, I am not usually a fan of templates but that’s just me.
As a business owner, you don’t have time to be constantly updating your web pages and the layouts to work across all devices properly, and the minutia that goes into “micro-interactions”.
So there are a ton of different places to check out complete themes for whatever platform you’re looking to build on.
I’ve done another post on a super easy builder for your website you can check out here.
I have used a large number of builders, and have just coded them in HTML, CSS, and some ole Javascript for the razzle-dazzle.
And thennnn…once you get your audience figured out then just google them, and that fun little search engine will actually list a few things that your target audience has issues with.
Then just fix those issues for them!
As I am usually a “Mobile-first” always kind of fellow, choosing the right style and device is especially often overlooked when starting to build a website.
I get it, it’s wayyy more fun building on the vast landscape of a desktop-sized screen but that just isn’t how the internet is predominantly being used anymore.
What is it, something like 92% of people uses their mobile phone for browsing websites.
With that being said, start with if there are any for sure things that your target audience believes or would benefit from, and design around those.
Not only is doing something like the target audience research that I mentioned above a way better business practice.
It has a number of benefits to your business as well besides attracting new people.
Your brand will save time, money, and a much greater extent of resources, which in turn will yield a much greater ROI.
You won’t have to focus so much on testing different ad creatives since you will already know the “pain points” of your target audience, and you can just keep bringing those up on how you can help with them.
It’s time!
A great way to get started is to “Employ design thinking”.
This is understanding things from a customer’s perspective and will in turn let you easily create and organize a layout for you to build off of.
What design thinking is and what it can mean to you as a business owner is how a social media post is designed, or how a menu is laid out, and choosing something based on ease of use instead of your personal preference.
A few key tips from me are: keep text to a minimum on especially your homepage (small sentences and show them instead of making them read if you can), and only have it on your front page if it’s super important to what you want the new customer to do, white space is okay!
I can’t even begin to tell you how important it is to focus on color, and a small tip to help with this when designing your website is the 60/30/10 rule.
This means 60% of a neutral color like your background and creating white space, then 30% a secondary color for things like text, and finally the 10% this is where your colors come into play really.
That 10% is where you focus on the important, high-contrast things you want your customer to focus on like Call-to-Action buttons or Sign-up areas.
Even if you choose a trash text, the colors will make it easy to navigate a new customer as well, but please don’t just choose a trash text.
That script font doesn’t look as good as you think it will when it’s repeated 15 times in an H2 header.
Getting back to the style layout choice, sorry got off on a tangent there.
There’s a wide range of different design styles to choose from as you’d imagine.
These styles can range from minimalist, artistic, contemporary, serious, vintage, and so much more.
Here’s where the beauty of wireframing and low-fidelity mockups is magical because it allows you to experiment with different styles and variations.
This will help you really narrow down on an option that suits your brand best and will resonate with your audience in the maximum way possible.
Some things to take into account are your brand’s personality, the industry you are in, your message, and of course the user.
Now I’m not going to lie to you and say once you complete this part you’re done for life.
That’s just not reasonable, with trends changing and even industry changes you will occasionally have to A/B test your style and see if it works for your audience still.
But that is a whole other monster to make sure you’re A/B testing properly and how to read the data.
I know that was a lot of information to get thrown at you, and I would love to help you with this process if it feels too overwhelming.
I would check out places like Fiverr, Envato, and Creative Market.
These places either can complete the whole thing for you besides me! :), or will have some amazing complete templates for you to browse through.
The templates will be ready to plug into the platform of your choice and start adding your own personal content too asap.
Just when you’re looking through everything make sure it’s “Responsive” not even so much adaptive but responsive is the more efficient way to go.
I would love to help you if needed in getting those templates ready to go live and start generating new business for yourself.
These little features that I am speaking of can be simple things like a helpful tool that the audience can use to help with a project in relation to your industry, or some content that your target audience deems really helpful loaded with tips and tricks for the industry.
It can also be the little interactions with things that the customers click on or hover over on your website.
Basically, you want it to be so enjoyable for your target audience to use that it keeps them coming back genuinely wanting to use it again.
Some things that can help you change your website from just a page to an actual interactive tool that customers want to use can be very powerful.
We can’t overlook an enjoyment factor though, and using story-telling on your website is a huge trend for 2022 that companies are still overlooking regularly.
Some simple tools to put on your website that are considered “interactive” are assessments, quizzes, calculators, contests, and other effective tools.
That was the long answer but basically, it means don’t hesitate on focusing on user-first interactions and how they would want that work.
A few things to throw in there after a customer uses the tool put in a social sharing function button so that they can show the useful tool to other people in the industry.
Creating chatter about your webpage and generating more organic traffic!
Here is where I want you to become a content-making machine!
Now the most efficient way to do things content-making-wise is still video creation.
The amount of content you can create from just one video is staggering.
I know it seems kind of scary to get into video editing but I made a post about some tools that you can easily use right from your browser to really help with this process.
You can check that post out here, I really think those tools will benefit you in the process as well!
You can make one 10-min video and make something like 60 pieces of content.
Check out my social media for a content calendar if you’d like, the buttons are at the bottom of this post.
Getting into a habit of content-sharing will really elevate you above the competition that isn’t so much focusing on this.
It shows search engines that you are active and trying to help out the customers within your industry so it will help with SEO and ranking above your competition.
You already know how beneficial this all is and what it can do to your bottom line!
If you don’t want to make a video though, which I totally understand, you can at least take lifestyle photos of what’s going on in your day-to-day business, or make an update on news in your industry.
All of these things will help in the long run and that is the name of the game, with content marketing and SEO, think of it as a marathon and who can continue with consistency the longest.
The website of your business should be the money-making tool that you want it to be if you take the time to create it to do so properly.
These are a small set of things to follow when making your new website, and there is a ton of different opinions on all of these.
Follow a few or all of these tips and you will be off to a tremendous start yourself.
As always I’d love to help you and send me a quick message if interested in me making a website for you or our other various services!
TL:DR –
The first step is figuring out just who the heck you’re trying to build this new website for.
As a business owner, you don’t have time to be constantly updating your web pages and the layouts to work across all devices properly, and the minutia that goes into “micro-interactions”.
You won’t have to focus so much on testing different ad creatives since you will already know the “pain points” of your target audience, and you can just keep bringing those up on how you can help with them.
This will help you really narrow down on an option that suits your brand best and will resonate with your audience in the maximum way possible.
The templates will be ready to plug into the platform of your choice and start adding your own personal content too asap.
Promote your website through social media and other online channels.
This page does contain affiliate links, they really help out the business with further exploration into new tools to help people, and businesses out!
These are just a few simple things to implement in your website when you are contemplating
starting one from scratch.
If you are a beginner with this and want it all done for you in a professional, and friendly manner then send us an email quick. We would love to hear about your idea and how we can get that started for you!
We built this baddy, let us know if you want us to do the same for you.
We built this baddy, let us know if you want us to do the same for you.
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