According to a recent study, 49% of users say they use Google to discover or find a new item or product, and “Where to buy” and “near me” mobile queries have grown by over 200% in the past two years. This is an opportunity to get your business in front of your potential customers and start increasing your revenue. In this post, I will walk you through taking your business from completely offline and expose it to the vast possibilities online.
Set your goals
I know, planning and setting goals are not the sexiest part of doing business, but where websites are concerned, your goals will determine the design, the copy, the content, and finally, if your website is going to work for you or not. Now look at your business and think why would you want to have a site. After you get a website what do you expect to happen on your business, like what are your expectations? Do you expect more people to know about your brand(brand awareness)? Or, are you expecting to see an increase sales or leads? Depending on the type of your business, some goals may include.
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Raising brand awareness
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Increasing sales
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Increasing leads
So what is your goal for your website? Your goals should follow the SMART framework
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Specific (simple, sensible, significant)
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Measurable (meaningful, motivating)
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Achievable (agreed, attainable)
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Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based)
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Time-bound (time-based, time-limited, timely, time-sensitive).
What this means is that when you set your goals make sure you will be able to track success or failure over time. This brings us to the next step.
Define your KPI
What does success mean for your business, over time how do you know if your website worked for you or you just wasted your money, time, and investment? Welcome to Key Performance Indicators, a way of measuring success in attaining your predefined goals. Example KPIs include
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Monthly visitors
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Number of sales
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Number of newly acquired leads
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Conversion rate
Defining your KPIs upfront will help you to track the progress of your website. You will also be able to identify areas that need improvement. To learn more about Key Performance Indicators check out this article.
Define your audience
I always ask our clients “who is your ideal customer?” and almost always their is answer “Everyone”. Now take for example you want to sell an insurance policy to your best friend and a random stranger you met on the street, who is more likely to buy from you? I bet it’s your best friend, this is because you know what they like, you know them in and out ( mostly), you know what makes them tick. Defining your audience will help you answer the first question a visitor has when they visit your website, “is this for me?”. Have you ever came across an ad and said to yourself “this is exactly for me”. These advertisers took their time to understand their audience and the same concept applies when it comes to a website. Get to know your customer’s pain points, what their problems are. After all, a website is not about your business, it’s about your customers and how your business can solve their problems.
Information architecture
Information architecture or “IA” is how information on your website is going to be organized to achieve your goals. The term might sound technical but you don’t need to be a web developer or UX designer to create one. This comes down to how many pages your site is going to have. Is it going to be a multipage site or a single-page site? A typical information architecture is a home page, contact page, about us page, services page, store, or shop if its’ an e-commerce store. To learn how to create an IA take a look at this introductory post.
Building your website
There are many options to consider here depending on your budget and business requirements you can choose what will work for you. The first choice is to use a Content Management System (CMS). This is a website building software that will give you a ready to deploy website and templates to customize the design.
The other option is to hire a specialist, a web developer. You don’t have to worry about any of the technical stuff you just have to worry about working on your business. Make sure your developer understands your audience and your goals.
Post deployment
After your website is live you need to make sure your visitors find it. There are many ways to promote your website including paid ads and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You should also install analytics software on your website, Google Analytics is a popular choice. Analytics will help you track your KPIs and see which search keywords are bringing in the most traffic. You will also identify pages or sections that are performing better than others. All this data will help you make informed decisions about what changes to make or which type of content to produce.
This was just an overview, you should keep promoting your website and keep it updated with the latest information about your business. Contact us if you need any help setting up your business online. At Flixtechs we create websites that bring customers to your business fast.
