Every successful business needs customers. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as setting up shop and hoping they find you.
With online sales skyrocketing and social media ads fast overtaking other advertising methods, the best way to market yourself and gain customers is to set up a website for your business.
There are different website-building tools, such as Wix, WordPress and Squarespace, each with their own set of tools to shape the experience of your users. But before deciding which platform suits your business best, you need to know the essentials of creating a trustworthy and engaging website.
Here are five tips on how to create a great website that will attract leads and turn them into customers:
- Be Unique and Innovative
Whatever your business specialises in, there are countless other businesses that do the exact same thing. What’s more, it’s likely that all these businesses use websites to help market themselves, particularly if they’re large global businesses. Here’s the problem: you have yourself a bit of competition.
To help give yourself a major advantage, the design of your website can make you shine amongst the websites of other businesses in your field.
While your business’ name will most certainly be a huge factor in how people find you – this can be trickier if the name is long and has both numbers and hyphens in it, so avoid these – the overall design and presentation of the website is key to your business. This can include the website’s template and colour scheme.
A great place to start is to ask yourself these questions:
- What can you do that other websites don’t do?
- Are there things that you feel as though other websites could have done better?
- Could you do something differently to stand out amongst the crowd?
You never know how innovation and uniqueness can be a trump card for your business.
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- Add a Privacy Policy
When a user decides to visit your website, their information will be collected.
This automatically includes their IP address and the ID of their computer or other device, as well as details they provide themselves. Name, age and any other details they input which can identify them will all be stored. Websites will even go so far as to record how users interact with it and take note of browsing habits with cookies.
In this digital age that we live in, there’s a lot of concern regarding how websites collect all of this data and how it’s used. To clarify the situation for users, you need to implement a privacy policy.
If you’re collecting information that isn’t yours, your users need to know exactly what details are being collected. This isn’t a case of you should do it, instead you must; the law demands it.
In your privacy policy, you need to specify how the data you collect is used and why you’re collecting it in the first place. This will create trust between you and the users by offering transparency. You might even want to add a banner that pops up when a user visits a website for the first time, asking whether or not they consent to cookies.
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- Think About the User’s Experience
The design of your website can either make or break the customer’s perception of your business. The experience they’ll have when they visit your website will decide their impression of your brand and, if smooth, lead to an increase in traffic towards your website, potentially resulting in new customers.
When it comes to the design of your website, consider the following:
- Calls-to-action – A call-to-action, or CTA, encourages the visitor to take an action during their visit. CTAs can include prompts to “contact us”, “subscribe now”, or “purchase”.
- Links to social media – Other than a website, you’ll also need to have social media pages to reach out and grab people. Instead of just having text that says the name of the social media site, use the icons of the respective sites for users to click on and go to your page.
- Consider mobile phone users – Instead of using a desktop computer or a laptop, many people tend to search the internet using their mobile phones. In fact, half of the internet’s traffic consists of mobile phone users. Websites will look different when viewed on a different device, and some website-building softwares fortunately offer mobile editors for this.
Read Now: How to Improve Your Website Experience with Responsive Web Design
- Add Testimonials
If your business has existed for some time prior to you setting up a website, you may have already had customers. This is a great advantage when creating an online presence. As well as taking on board any criticisms to improve yourself, the positive feedback can be used to show newcomers the quality of your service. This is known as a testimonial.
Testimonials can be displayed on your website in two different ways:
1) A simple quotation of what the customer had to say.
2) A video of the customer speaking to the camera about their experience. The video can either be uploaded onto your website, or to one of your social media pages and then embedded onto the website itself.
- Market Your Website
Once you’ve created your website, you’ll want to market it and your business as a whole so that you have plenty of new visitors and potential customers.
There are two key ways you can market yourself:
- Social media marketing – These days it’s pretty much essential that you have social media pages to help market your business. Social media also allows customers to reach out to you if they need assistance, making it one of the most interactive marketing methods.
- Email marketing – This is a great way of keeping existing customers and getting in touch with newcomers that have subscribed to your business’ service. You can send them emails about new products, price reductions, policy changes, and so on to keep them in the know.
Read Now: What is Inbound Marketing and How Can it Benefit Your Business?
In Short
In the current digital climate, a website is an essential when thinking about gaining new customers for your business.
To create an effective and engaging website, your design should be user friendly on all types of devices, link to social media pages and include calls-to-action throughout. Consider doing something different to your competitors and include testimonials to prove that your business is successful and well-received.
These were just five tips on how you can create an engaging website for your business. If you’d like to know more about marketing your business online, don’t be afraid to contact us today at Floodmaker.