Is your front door attracting and retaining customers?
Your website is your business’ front door. It’s where people find you or check you out before doing business with you. Does your website help or hurt your business? In the end, your website will help make the phone ring, help you close the deal, or encourage potential customers and clients to call your competitors.
Here is some basic advice — yes, it’s basic, but many companies don’t get this easy stuff right:
– Make sure your design reflects your company’s sophistication. If it looks like it was built in 1998, it’s time to make a real investment in building your website. Use good judgment when engaging a professional web developer. You don’t want to let your sister’s brother-in-law’s cousin who dabbles in Web design cut his teeth on your site. Your image is at stake. You can’t afford a site that is a liability.
– Yes, this is a cliche 10 years in the making, but content still is king. If your site is static because your company isn’t updating the content regularly, there’s no reason for visitors to come back. You want people to revisit your site regularly. The search engines aren’t friendly to static websites. Some easy ways to develop dynamic content is to add a blog that makes consistent posts and have a frequently updated news section. Include blog posts or news updates with links to other stories and information that is relevant to the readers of your site. Add polls or surveys to give your readers a chance to interact with your company and offer feedback.
– Create links to your social media outlets. In today’s Facebook and Twitter world, people on the Web may find you first on your Facebook page before visiting your website.
– Cross-pollinate your Web traffic and leverage the links from your website to your social media and vice versa.
– If you really want to juice up your website’s visitor experience, add video or animated sections to your home page. Video can provide a flavor of your product or explain what you do with the type of persuasion that words on a Web page just cannot match.
Following these basics will help you ensure you are putting your best image out to the world on the Web. A sophisticated design that matches your company, content that is updated regularly, links with social media outlets and animation and video will give you the results you are looking for in both a vibrant, easily visible website and in increased numbers of customers for your business.
What’s your door look like?
Josh Sommers is president and CEO of Focus Media, a leading Hudson Valley advertising and public relations agency. He can be reached at josh@advertisingandpr.com or 294-3342, ext. 303. Read his blog at www.adverxtisingandpr.com. His column appears Fridays.
