Marketing covers a broad spectrum of different tactics and techniques to all drive traffic (and hopefully leads) to your website. Whether the traffic comes from your content marketing, paid search advertising, search marketing or email marketing – you invest a lot of time and money into these channels. Despite this, these marketing tools aren’t the most important.

Your website is.

All your marketing efforts point to your website, so it doesn’t matter if a prospect discovered your site via the search engines, a tweet or an email campaign – if they are met with a unresponsive, poorly designed website then what a lot of investment you have wasted!

Polish Your Digital Shop Window

If you do not have a bricks and mortar store, the only way consumers can view your products is through your digital shop window i.e. your website. If you opened up a store on the high street wouldn’t you want it to be having a beautiful layout with the most important products easily accessible rather than a pile of clothes on the floor for people to rummage through? You can see where we’re going with this; your website is the only thing showcasing how amazing you and your products are, so why not wow your customers rather than leaving them feeling a little cheated after clicking on your fabulously designed display ad to land on a rather bland landing page.

 

Lasting First Impressions

First impressions are crucial, in social situations as well as online. Let’s say you are looking for a bespoke furniture designer to craft you a one of a kind piece for your new home, would you purchase from the website with a well-structured page with case studies and examples of work or the website with dozens of pop ups and no images?

Studies show that it takes user under two tenths of a second to form an opinion of a website which then reflects how they rate a company, with this in mind how does your website perform?

Your website should have clear call to actions as well as a branded logo and prominent top navigation so consumers can easily browse through your products and pages to find what they are after.

It’s How Customers Find Your Business

When a potential customer is searching for a product you stock or service you offer, they will more often than not consult a search engine to find your website– not your social channels or TV ads – your website. If you don’t make the time or investment to fully optimise your website then you will be missing out on a lot of visibility in the search results which also leads to sales. Did you know that websites that rank in position 1 for a search term receives 33% of all traffic for that term? With 92% of people never even venturing to page 2 of the search results, if you want to be found you really need to be on the first page.

 

It Proves You’re Legit

Ever receive an email or phone call from a company offering you the world only to search for them online and find nothing? Having a website to legitimise your existence is crucial in this day and age; if you don’t have a website then you will often be deemed a bit sketchy. Users like to see case studies, testimonials, and team photos – anything to prove you are a legit business and hold a solid spot in the market.

If they search for your brand and nothing comes up, it’s likely that your competitors with similar offerings will. If you don’t want to keep handing customers over to your competitors, it’s time you consider investing in web design or creating your own website via platforms such as WordPress; it doesn’t have to cost a fortune and the ROI is worth it in the long term.

Learn More About Your Customers

The major downfall of most traditional marketing methods is the lack of monitoring and analysis available to you. You can’t see how many people actually read your flyer and don’t throw it straight in the bin! Your website has so many actions that a user can take, and with analysis tools such as Google Analytics installed you can see everything you want to see and so much more. Visits, downloads, average time on page, sales, referrals – the list is endless.

Your website is continuously recording data on every user that visits your site; by identifying the actions they take you can use this valuable information to understand your audience and market to them better.

Already have a website but can’t get users to do what you want them to? Enquire about our conversion optimisation service

Have a website in the development stages and need some pre-launch site analysis? We do that too!