As you can see, your company’s website is an essential medium for generating leads, provided that its preparation has been carried out with care. Too often I see organizations skipping steps by going, for example, directly to the choice of a template for WordPress, a Wix account, Squarespace or other solution or by creating a menu on their CMS to create a hierarchy of pages…
Stop right there, you wretch!
I recommend cutting off your internet connection, going down into the fallout shelter, locking it tight, and poring over a blank sheet of paper to figure out how to create your website…
The fundamentals of your marketing
If you haven’t already, start by writing down the basics of your business marketing.
Define your vision :
- What vision do you have of your field of activity?
- What are your goals? Specify them, are they ?
- What are the values you hold?
- etc.
Define your mission :
Use, for example, the Value Proposition Canva that you can find on the website . The company mission is generally summed up in one sentence in which you talk about your offer, your audience and the advantages they will find in buying your solutions
e.g.: “ We offer digital marketing advice to business leaders who want to use the Internet to generate leads by supporting them with our agency expertise and our cross-functional skills on all aspects of online marketing. ”
Define your positioning :
- What are your specificities?
- How are your customers different?
- Which market segments will you target?
- What is the competition doing?
- etc.
Is my business marketing in line with the market?
In short, is there a profitable and sustainable opportunity for my products, my services and have I correctly identified my potential buyers?
I must warn you that skipping this first part risks turning into a hot potato and preventing you from creating your website effectively. Indeed, as in a classic sales process, when you have poorly identified the needs of your client, it is the rake, and hop! the handle in the face, the client comes back to us with his terrible OBJECTIONS!!!
Also, creating content will be very difficult without a clear direction for the messages you want to communicate to your customers.
To maximize marketing efforts, businesses need to have access to an industry email list. It makes it possible to reach the proper audience with industry email list messaging through customized outreach. Businesses can create material that is both relevant and engaging for recipients by segmenting their contacts depending on industry. This tactical approach is a great tool for any marketing strategy because it increases engagement, fosters brand loyalty, and eventually boosts revenue.
But after all, this is part of any decent business strategy and this is perfectly clear to you, so let’s continue…
Your customer relationship
Essential to the survival of companies in an increasingly tense economic world as competition has increased, customer relations are a major issue in ensuring the sustainability of your business. For example, we know that winning a new customer can cost on average 5 times more than retaining an existing one and that the probability of making a sale with an existing customer is between 60% and 70%. As for the probability of making a sale with a prospect, it is between 5% and 20% (sources: Marketing metrics Marketing Management 2015)
Studying customer relationship management internally will be decisive in defining the services that you will put online for your customers and prospects and how you will increase your sales and operational strength.
It is also about giving your visitors (customers, prospects, partners, etc.) the opportunity to access specific content. Services are, as you have understood, the key to ensuring your solutions last over time and an essential tool for maintaining close contact with your customers. Each time you cannot answer one of their problems, you potentially send them to your competitors. According to Forrester, “72% of consumers prefer to find the answer to their question without going through customer service.”
Examples of online services :
- Customer area, stock tracking, orders, etc.
- Business information bases, reference catalogs, etc.
- Product documentation, assembly sheets, maintenance recommendations, etc.
- Ordering spare parts
- Customer Service: FAQs, Chatbots, Live Chat, etc. (see our article on )
- Project evaluation tools, calculation tools
And you, what innovative services will you offer to your customers?
This phase obviously involves a crucial step: bringing together ALL the company’s stakeholders who have contact with customers around. The project and working closely with them to develop your new website, i.e. the digital gateway to your own business world.
I suggest that you put at least 3 roles around the table that have a fundamental vision of customer relations:
- Strategic vision (Management, Marketing, Business Development, etc.)
- Commercial vision (Salespeople, distributors, etc.)
- Vision support (people who are in charge of communicating with customers during the solution lifecycle, after-sales service, installers, assistance, etc.)
Remember that Technology has become a decisive player, so if you have the skills in-house. Go straight away and knock on the door of your chief technical. Guru and have him sit around the table to get the thinking going on services for your customers.
Oh yes, I forgot! At this point you had only taken an A4 sheet down into the fallout shelter… go back and get a ream. It could be useful because I feel that how to measure the effectiveness of your reporting channel inspiration is taking over you and that new perspectives for your business have lit up your mind.
Architecture, Web design and UX
As you might have guessed, the previous points have allowed you to precisely define which content and services you want to put online in order to perfectly meet the expectations of your market.
Whether you choose to go for a template purchased on a marketplace, an online web solution like Wix or you have decided to focus on a unique custom design reflecting your personal vision, these elements will guide you in all your choices.
We also see that menus are used less and less on websites and that direct access will therefore have to be favored from the homepage.
E.g. an illustrated button to access the quality page containing your certifications or to a form allowing you to make a request for a particular service such as information for an ATA carnet or the pre-filling of an order.
For those who are interested in what was “formerly” called referencing
which has now become SEO (and we no longer really know where to place these activities because they are so global) and how to generate free and qualified traffic to “fix” prospects on the site, a clear structure of the content published on the site must be precisely established to offer visitors – as well as Google’s or AI. (the same AI obsessed with qualifying your level of services provided to your visitors so that they have an optimal experience) – a simple understanding allowing it to perfectly identify your solutions and offers.
Ex. the visitor lands on a product page because his query on Google was very specific, so your content became a very relevant “answer” in the afb directory eyes of Google’s AI (yes, I know, now you have to pay attention to AI…) and it placed it at the top of the results, Yay! Since then, can the visitor easily find information on this page that allows him to understand your offer? to know who you are? Can he easily contact you by phone, form or other?
MOBILE first?
You’ve heard about it for sure! , after 18 months of experimentation, they started migrating sites that are compatible with .
In the current context of Internet use, there is also a very high probability that your site will be require to offer a specific mobile experience. For this, the same questions must be asked: what am I going to highlight. what direct access should be offered? where are the customers in their customer journey (in order to possibly eliminate less important elements from the interface at this stage)?
The contents
Permission to go out and get some fresh air for a moment, you’ll have to be inspired!
You will have to create content to communicate your value proposition.
In order to prepare yourself well, make sure you understand .
There are two broad categories of content to create for your website:
- Editorial content : This is the text that your website will contain. It must be adapted to your positioning and tell a story about your products and services. The technical characteristics of your products and services must be presented as advantages. Finally, it must use the key words and expressions that will allow your visitors. Through the search results on Google, to clearly identify your products & services.
To create this content
You will once again have a choice. Either you have in-house skills that allow you to create professional quality. Texts and images that faithfully reflect your value proposition. Or you call on professionals who will share their experience with you. For images, many banks are at your disposal, but please do me a favor and avoid free banks. These images are used by everyone and therefore have little chance of setting you apart from the competition. On average, it costs between CHF 50 and CHF 100 to obtain relevant and much less used images.
