Website Foundations For Online Success
Just like every business is different so are websites.
There are 3 Website Foundation Tips you need to consider when setting up you website:
The 3 Tips are:
What is the Main Goal Or Purpose Of Your Website?
Who Is Your Website For?
Traffic & Conversions
What is the main goal or purpose of your website? (Your End Goal)
To get more customers? To showcase your product or services? To educate potential customers? To sell your product?(shopping cart). Digital Presence? Booking & Scheduling events?
What you want to get out of your website, which way you go with your website and how to go about setting it up.
Remember to anticipate your needs for the future? Think of things like payment processing, CRMs, Email Marketing, etc. Think about potential problems that you will run into due to growth.
Example ( If too many manual processes are time consuming you will be bogged down trying to manage this instead of actually running your business.)
There are multiple tools out there and 3rd party software applications to help you with just about anything in your business. This comes into play when you go to build your website and you need these systems to communicate with one another.
This is important when deciding how to go about setting up your website. There are a lot of ways to build a website.
There are open source applications like wordpress & Magento,
There's self hosted solutions like Wix & Squarespace - These are free
Theres also paid versions. These are called Software-as-a-Service. (SAAS)
Or You can have a developer code it straight up
Along with Many other ways out there.
Keep in mind the additional costs and potential pitfalls associated with each one. You want to make sure you understand what it will take to Manage, Maintain & Update Your Website.
Who is the Website For? Target Audience
You need to as specific as possible in defining who you want your ideal customers is, so you can serve your clients the best way possible.
Customer Avatar
Do you have an ideal customer avatar written up?
This is deeper than having a target audience; this is more about having a real persona in mind that you can refer back to when creating anything for your business. Everything revolves around your customers so you want to make sure you have a clear understanding of who they are.
You Can Download Our proven Customer Avatar worksheet to determine who your ideal customer is, where they are and what they will buy.
In most cases, if you are a working professional in your field so you have a general understanding who those people are. It is still helpful to write this information down for when you have questions about an opportunity.
Branding, Design & Copywriting
Your Customer Avatar dictates what your website will look like and what it will say.
Most people don't give any thought to this until they are sitting down to do their website and they don't have an idea of where to begin.
Do a little research, look at your competitors, and use your customer avatar to guide you to the promised land. This is not about what you like and what you want. Its about the customer and the end goal.
Responsive Web Design
This is the approach that design and development should respond to the user's behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. Why is this important?
RWD is more that just the way your website looks within these devices. It also takes into account the performance and user experience. All factors in the way that Google ranks your website when it comes to SEO and other aspects of paid advertising.
So now you have your amazing responsive website that looks great and are ready to show it off.
You have to get your customers to it right?
Traffic & Conversions
Now that we have our awesome responsive customer centric website its time to focus on getting potential clients to it.
How Do we do that?
What are some of the various traffic sources that are out there?
SEO
Facebook Ads
Google Adwords
Social Media Marketing
Paid Advertising
Media Buys & Sponsorships
And a ton of other sources of traffic...
Obviously some cost money and some don't but where do we begin? (Customer Avatar)
Where are my customers?
But before we get into any of these sources of traffic and how to go about that first we need to have something really important in place if we want to be successful.
Data is powerful and the more you have in regards to your customers the better off your marketing will be.
Well you want to collect data of your customers & visitors so you can make smart decisions?
If you are going to be spending money to get people to your website your going to want to know things like?
How do you know your advertising is working? How do you track what is going on with your visitors on your website? Where are people coming to my site from? What the most effective channels? Where do you I keep spending money? What campaigns do I stop immediately?
Thats where the magic of google comes in because they provide a FREE tool called Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is crucial to the success of your business and website. For those of you that do then that is great and I'll tell you how that will benefit you in a sec.
Google Analytics provides you with a ton of data that is helpful in a variety of ways. Short of telling you how to run your business you can get amazing information from this tool.
Everything from the amount of traffic to your site, audience insights, acquisition & behaviour on your site. All helpful information about what is going on with you website.
So when you go to Run Traffic campaigns to your website you can actually track and see the effectiveness of it all.
If there is one thing you implement from this presentation, is that you need to have Analytics installed on your site.
Without a tracking tool installed on your site you are pretty much shooting in the dark.
But I heard that Google and Facebook are struggling right now so you can give them your money if you’re feeling generous..
Plus if you go to anybody for help for anything related to your website, its the first thing they are going to ask for. Whether it be social media, redesigning your website, running ads, SEO or anything else online. That's where everything stems from.
Ok so now, you have Tracking installed on your site, you can now focus on advertising.
Running Advertising Campaigns
Choose your Source of Traffic
Create your Audience
Advertising Copy & Creative
Run Your Ad Campaign
Test, Track & Optimize
Nothing online is static. If you're staying the same you're falling behind. Consider Everything as ever evolving. You have to test different things until you dial in you campaigns. Then you have to keep testing. Over and Over Again.
So to Recap Here Is Everything We Just Covered:
What is the Main Goal Or Purpose Of Your Website?
Define Your Objectives
Anticipate Your Needs
Manage, Maintain & Scale
Who Is Your Website For?
Customer Avatar
Look & Feel
Sales Copy
Responsive Web Design
How To Prepare for Traffic & Conversions
Traffic Sources
Data Tracking
Google Analytics
Advertising Campaigns
Test, Track & Optimize
