Is Your Website Working for You? If you treat your website as this mystical way to reach consumers in some altered reality, you’re missing a huge opportunity to attract loyal customers to your business. The truth is: websites should be treated like employees. You certainly pay, train and provide a workspace and reimbursements for your employees. You should do the same with your website. Stick with me.
Paying with Content
Instead of paying your website a monetary salary, you pay it with new content. Whether it is a blog, a learning guide, a whitepaper or other example of content, the best way to improve your website’s performance is a steady supply of new content. If you quit paying your employee, they would quit working for you. The same is true with your website. Content is still king and without new content being added, your website will become stagnant and you will lose out on opportunities to engage your audience in a meaningful way.
Power of an Outside Perspective
You can’t really give your website a traditional promotion or send it off to get more specialized training. But you can hire a marketing firm to review the analytics, structure and content of the site and make recommendations for changes. The older your site, the more updates it will need. This is also a good time to look at your brand and your key messages. Tackling it all at once creates a unified solution that excites employees and customers. The new look will encourage creativity and help you continue to develop more targeted content for your customers.
Investing in Resources
You don’t have to pay for a desk and chair for your website or reimburse it for travel expenses but skimping out on hosting for your website could be disastrous. Pay for reputable hosting that helps secure your site from crippling attacks. No website or hosting is hack-proof, but good hosting companies spend millions of dollars to combat and prevent cyber-attacks and that means they will cost a little more. Cheap hosting looks great on an expense report until you’re forced to pay another company thousands of dollars to rescue or rebuild your site. The short-term gain is not worth the risk.
There was a time when people visited your website to see if you were a legitimate business and how to contact you. That followed a time period when a handshake and a business card led to closed business deals. Those times are long gone. Now, people want to find out the personality of your business. Does your company culture align with the site visitor’s outlook and does your website show how your team lives out the culture? Are you a good corporate citizen who supports your community? Are there superstar volunteers in your organization that give time outside of work to serve others? Does your business support them by giving them a little more time off or donating to those causes? If your business isn’t helping staff do this and you’re not promoting it on your website, you’re missing a key touch point with today’s consumer―in both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) markets.
The workforce is changing. Your website is a key tool to attract and engage a new generation of consumers. Consider that a majority of Americans are influenced by the evolving workforce. Think about the adoption of the mobile phone that’s actually quite more than a phone. Consumers have embraced the ability to track steps, check email and monitor text messages from a wristband watch. Ponder the popularity of PayPal and Venmo over writing and mailing a check.
Your website needs to evolve with society to connect and engage with customers, prospects and influencers. Your business can embrace these trends to reduce customers’ friction when contacting you and truly encourage them to buy. (Having to pinch and zoom on a site that’s not mobile-friendly, having to click too many times to access key information fast and using huge graphics that weigh down the loading of your website are just a few frustrations to address). Can you really expect to attract new employees to your company, if your website is locked in the past?
The process need not be complicated or take months and months. It all starts with a conversation with a proven company that’s interested in partnering with you for your success. After all, every good company treasures its best assets: its people. Contact Tell Your Tale today to jumpstart your growing business.
