Along with being a “shop window” for your business – showcasing your products and/or services in a way that also creates a strong first impression for visitors – your website can also be an invaluable tool to help you manage your marketing materials strategy. Think of it as your online hub, through which everything marketing-related flow.
In this blog post, we talk about the various ways in which you extract the most value out of your website, along with some of the web design trends we’ve seen over recent years as the concept of the website as a marketing tool has evolved in the digital age.
Collecting Sales Leads
Rather than expecting your customers to pick up the phone, type out an email or perhaps even come and see you in person, you can take the effort out of the process for them by making it possible for them to leave their contact details as a potential sales lead interested in receiving a quote, leaving you to get in touch with them. It might sound quite inconsequential, but even the tiniest “effort barriers” can impact whether your site visitors come to you instead of a competitor. In addition, by collecting their email address as part of this process, you can build your mailing list (something we discussed in this blog post).
Alternatively, if you want to be really sleek, you can use a booking service like Calend.ly to make it easy for an interested site visitor to book their own time slot to speak to you – it can be as simple as one click!
A shift from custom-built websites
With the proliferation of flexible and user-friendly website design platforms, the likes of Wix and Squarespace, it’s now very easy to maintain and update your website without any reliance on external support and developers. Whether you want a regularly updated blog or product list, or want to revamp the look and feel of your website at regular intervals, these sites make it easier for you to do that without needing to pay a third party.
The rise of moving visuals
One of the main purposes of your website is to keep your potential customer’s attention for as long as possible while you try to convert them into a sales. For this reason, motion elements in the user interface designed to catch the user’s eye, whether they’re videos, animations, gifs or even page transitions, are ever growing in popularity. It’s crucial to ensure that, if your website embeds these eye-catching elements, your user experience isn’t hampered by slow loading time or bugs – fortunately, much progress has been made over the past decade in improving bandwidth, as well as allowing for good data compression without compromising quality.
Your website is an easy way for other people to share your brand
As awareness grows around your business and you build your customer base, you’ll start to develop “ambassadors” to your brand – whether official or unofficial ones, these are people who champion what you do in a variety of ways including involvement in events and online forums. Official brand ambassador programmes have become popular particularly in the food and drink startup space, with the likes of Red Bull and PROPERCORN developing legions of students around the country that sell their products into local stores and speak at university events. More unofficially, your ambassadors might promote you enthusiastically out of a sense of loyalty to your brand because of the great experience they had or the continued support they get from you.
Having a really clearly laid out website gives these people something easy and quick to share with anyone who comes across their path and, crucially, something over which you have complete control. This all helps maximise both the reach and the impact of your brand.
