Optimize Your Way To Success
A carefully thought and well-designed website is crucial if your brand is to make any progress in the marketing battlefield. Your website needs to however be optimized to make your brand successful. This means that you need to arrange your website in such a way that it will produce the best results.
Here are my suggestions:
Brand Your Website
Your website should boldly highlight the look and feel of your brand’s image. Remember, consistency across all platforms is one of the primary keys of a successful brand. This means that you need to feature your logo and the other creative elements of your brand. By so doing, your clients will already have a clear mental image of the kind of content they will find on your website.
You need to however be very careful about how you make use of these colors. Some colors and fonts will make it hard for visitors to read your content. As you can imagine, this will be very bad for business. It is always best to err on the side of caution and not to be too fussy. A modern or minimalistic look is sure to please any crowd.
Easy Navigation
Complicated websites are a thing of the past. Gone are the days when people had the time to search for what they really want to know. If the information they want is not readily available, your clients are going to simply find this information elsewhere. Ensure that you make use of navigation titles that are accurate.
Visitors should be able to get a clear mental picture of what to expect on a specific page before they click on it. It would also be quite helpful to include a search feature which makes it easy for clients to locate the exact content they need. Sitemaps are also a very good idea.
Mobile Friendly
Always remember that everyone is busy these days and always on the move. That means your target audience is probably going to use their phones to visit your website a few times. This has far greater consequences on your brand than you think. Over 50% of consumers, myself included, refuse to revisit any website that is not mobile friendly.
Thankfully, there are various conversion platforms that will do all the work for you. But if you are up for the challenge of doing this yourself, please remember that simply making images and text smaller will not be very helpful to your end-users.
You will need to adjust the maximum width of all your images, make preferred widths for individual web pages mobile friendly and even adjust any sidebar or header with a fixed CSS property position. You might not get it right on the first try, so always ensure you test these options before launching.
Regularly Update Content
Your website will reflect poorly on your brand if it features content that is no longer relevant. This includes promotions past the expiration date and products or services that you no longer offer. Irrelevant content is one of the biggest nuisances of online marketing.
Your clients will get the impression that you do not really care about how your actions will affect them and this of course will be very bad for business. As was highlighted in Chapter 3, the content you post should always be relevant and consistent.
Solicit Feedback
Communication should always be two-way. You need to find creative ways to solicit the feedback of your clients. This is an invaluable way to identify and isolate any key areas of concern that need to be addressed right away. It is always best to make your clients feel that their opinions can influence your product offerings and their overall customer experience.
This will also require that you make it easy for your clients to contact you or request information. Always remember to thank your clients for their opinions. A brand that cares will be a brand that sells.
Subscriptions
It is not enough to assume that visitors will return to your page often. You need to encourage visitors to subscribe so that you can reach out to them when you post new promotions or new content. Being able to send your message directly to their inbox is an opportunity I would not encourage you to miss. Please however be careful not to do so too often since your visitors may consider this to be quite irritating.
