Building a new website can often seem like a herculean task. Where do you even begin? Surely it’s easier to just whack up a page containing your contact details, operating hours and a price list?
The fact is, you do not exist as a business if you do not have a web presence. An extremely detailed and high profile web presence at that. The days of relying on traditional media and delivery methods to get access to your audience are past.
So you know you need a banging website to promote your business. But it’s not a straightforward response.
Websites are challenging in that they need a strategy. A strategy that is both communication combined with a design and programming process.
So don't get bogged down in fear when creating and building your website. By incorporating these six easy steps, The Kingdom can help get you started.
Understand where you currently are and where you want to be. This is the most important aspect of the entire process. By defining your aspirations and your current capacities you are essentially detailing the strategy and creating a business model.
Many people start out by saying they want a new website. However what they are really saying is they want to increase sales leads. So they see the website as a requirement to getting better conversion in the modern day Internet-dominated world.
This is true, up to a point.
The first thing you must appreciate is that your website is about sales. Not just about building a pretty picture on the Internet.
To understand this, you need to evaluate your capacity. Do you want to double your business? Do you wish to improve the value of your business? Want to be able to say yes to more customers? Would you like to sell your product or service for more?
These are all questions that start the website process. Define your capacity and from there you can move forward.
How much would you like to grow? Are you being realistic? I have just come from a meeting where the prospect wanted to double their web traffic, with no investment budgetted. It simply will not happen. Set real expectations.
If it were easy and cheap to get thousands of website hits, everyone would do it.
There is no point in having the world's finest website if you do not have people visiting it.
Most people end up buying Google AdWords. This is weird because the same people, when polled, do not click on the paid advertising ads, instead preferring to click on the organic search ads.
Why invest in something that you don’t use, understand or believe in yourself? SEO is more than chucking in keywords to a block of text. This kind of transparent click-baiting is goading to your clients.
So how are you being found? How do you want to be found?
The answer to this is great content creation. By providing your customers with an education blog post or e-book offering that is relevant, you build a connection.
Consumers want to connect, they want an open dialogue and lines of communication. It’s promotion and propagation that gets results. They want to trust you.
It used to be okay just to put up a website and then forget about it, having faith that all would work out. However in today's fast moving world of website technology, your website content is the foundation for your business. It needs to be added to and built on a regular basis daily.
Why is this so important? By creating content, you are going to increase your search footprint and provide that oh so important connection. Creating a website then forgetting about it for four years is so 2008. It's just not that world anymore.
So who is going to create the content?
Do you or anyone on your team even have the capability to be curating content into a believable and cohesive format for your audience?
It takes a skillful copywriter to create the right tone for your website and blog, it takes social media experts to propogate it, and programmers working with designers to make it look good.
It’s not a simple case of cutting and pasting dregs from Wikipedia to hash out a post. You need a capable researcher who can turn that research into a believable and relevant post. One that also contains SEO which in turn build up your Google footprint.
It’s all very circular, like dropping a stone into a pond, you generate waves that propagate. You increase those circles into ever widening caches of information and client based leads.
Think of a website like a bottle of wine. Say you are planning an enormously important business dinner. You do your research on your guests, find out their tastes and what appeals and figure out your budget.
Having taken the time, you invest in a respectably priced vintage and lay it down, carefully turning and letting it appreciate in both flavour and value.
At the perfect moment, you crack it open for your dinner party guests and everyone benefits from the effort and time you put it.
Is reflected in the experience and flavour that is imparted. The wine is a winner. Now you are a winner.
Cheap websites are cheap, and they show it. The equivalent of the wine analogy is of using a sack of goon and leaving it to go lukewarm in the sun, served out of a plastic cup. How successful is your dinner party in comparison?
Website building is hard. Are you prepared financially for the challenges?
Don’t forget the cost of human time spent building websites on the cheap. Who is going to make it? Are you? Who is going to spend all the time providing the content required to build the website? How much are you paying them?
How are you going to know who comes to your website once it is actually built?
The HubSpot automated marketing platform includes website building tools.
Importantly, the HubSpot platform connects your contacts database to the website environment. So you know who is coming to your website and what pages they are clicking.
The HubSpot environment is much like WordPress and other popular content management systems. It’s simple and straightforward to use.
The major point of difference being though that the because the contacts are connected you can see who has been clicking on your website. From here, you can build a history of the clicks that have occurred over time to build a profile of your customers. Normal websites do not do this.
This is a powerful sales tool for your business. Would you like to understand who is on your website? What your footfall and audience conversion rate is?
Salespeople see this and jaws drop. For this feature, knowing who is on the website, is one of the singular most powerful business tools.
Unfortunately, this level of tailored sales data is simply not available on regular website tools from regular website builders.
HubSpot provides these figures and more.
Consider what happens when you actually land a lead. So you got the lead. Congratulations!
Now, what?
Do you have the workflow in place that will nurture that lead? Can you follow through to making the buyer experience more enjoyable? HubSpot has automated marketing programs which will nurture your lead through the funnel, and complete the buyer's journey.
Creating a successful and profitably functioning website is hard.
Unless you truly understand the Internet and website building process, most people will struggle to understand how the technology functions and operates.
As such, they are put at a significant disadvantage. This leaves them having to take that time to discover how to build a website and manage the content within it.
However why not speak to The Kingdom? We will provide you with all the information you require as well as the power you need to make your digital marketing take off. We have resources available that will assist you in the decision-making process.
Download our free e-book, making it easier for you to understand what you need to invest in for your new website journey, or schedule our Website evaluation, normally $249, free for a short time.