What’s the Importance of Websites for Businesses?

A well-designed website can be a powerful marketing tool for a business, especially in this digital era. That online presence is crucial, especially since customers often have a look at a business’ website before committing to a purchase. 

A website can also act as a central point or hub to link all your social media accounts to tip Google search rankings in your favor.

What a Good Website Offers Your Business

Credibility

One of the main reasons for having a website as a business owner is to build credibility for your business. The point here is to stand out from competitors offering the same services. A well-crafted website with details like contact details, physical address, and the services you offer will assure your customers that you are a real business and provide a fantastic first impression.

84% of consumers think a business website is more credible than just social media accounts. As such, it is highly advisable to accompany your online marketing methods with a business website to build your brand’s credibility.

Discoverability on Search Engines

When customers search the web for keywords related to your business, the results include a list of websites related to the search. Having a search-engine-optimized website means customers can easily find your brand when they search for topics related to your business. 

This is a fantastic gateway to get potential customers to know about your brand and acquire leads. Once people find you online and potentially become interested in your product or service, they will contact you thanks to the information on your website.

This generates free traffic to your website as well as potential sales.

The Opportunity to Build Your Brand

Showcasing your brand is one of the most important things you must do as a business. Building and showcasing your brand means establishing who you are, what you stand for, and what you offer clients. 

Without a professional website, it is rather difficult to effectively build your brand because there is no source of quality, credible information about your business other than your socials, which may not hold enough convincing power with potential customers. 

Improved Customer Service for Small Queries

As a business, it is almost guaranteed you will get lots of phone calls from customers and potential customers inquiring about things like operation hours or product prices. As important as this is, phone calls may distract staff from focusing on more important parts of the business. 

This is an area where a website can come in handy. Whenever a customer needs such information, they can just access your website and find all useful information without the need to call.

How to Get the Best Out of Your Business Website

After getting a business website, the goal is to get the most out of it without necessarily spending a fortune, especially for small businesses and startups. You do this by attracting website visitors, converting said visitors into customers, and building your brand.

Here are some practical tips to maximize your website’s ROI:

1. Set up an E-commerce Store

E-commerce is the buying and selling of goods over the Internet.  Integrating e-commerce into your website will allow your customers and potential clients to browse your catalog and securely make payments to complete transactions.

What you need to set up an e-commerce store:

• Product catalog: The product catalog includes the list of products you offer including crucial details like images, description, price, and the availability of products. 
• Online shopping cart: The online shopping cart is exactly like the shopping cart you use when visiting the supermarket. As customers browse for products, they select whatever they wish to purchase in the online shopping cart. 
• Checkout and payment processing: After a customer is satisfied with their product selection, they now need to check out and enter particulars like shipping address and preferred payment method. This is the checkout process. Your website should then be able to securely process the payment, preferably via multiple digital wallets like M-Pesa as well as credit/debit cards. 
• Shipping and delivery: After successfully completing the transaction, make arrangements for how the products will reach the customers’ billed address. Don’t forget to send them updates on their packages, including dispatch and arrival.

2. Set Up a Blog (Content Marketing)

Another excellent way of maximizing your website’s efficacy is having a blog section where you regularly publish articles and posts related to your business. These blogs will serve a host of purposes, from providing valuable information to customers to attracting new visitors to your website via search engines through SEO. 

Business blogs cover topics like how-to-guides for customers, current industry trends, case studies, company news, and on occasion, customer success stories. It is highly advisable to include multimedia content (images and video) in your blogs to enhance customer engagement and provide information that’s as detailed as possible.

Including a blog section in your business website will play a crucial part in your marketing strategies, helping drive more traffic to your website and increase your search engine rankings. This will ultimately improve the overall success of your business’ online presence. 

3. Having Clear Calls-to-Action

A call to action simply describes prompts to website visitors leading them to your desired action, which could be making a purchase, subscribing to your business newsletter, or simply contacting your business. 

They are typically presented on websites as clickable buttons or links. Make sure they are strategically placed to get the best out of them. Accompany or present them in persuasive language, or include incentives to encourage website visitors to click on them. 

Customize your calls-to-action towards your business’ particular needs; be it driving sales, generating leads, or simply customer engagement. Whatever you need the CTAs for, the bottom line is they should be clear and compelling and guide towards your desired outcome. 

4. Implementing Lead Generation Techniques

Lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers and converting them into customers.

At this attraction stage, where they have shown interest in what your business has to offer, they are referred to as leads. Lead generation is an important part of marketing and sales aimed at growing your customer base and increasing sales revenue.

Lead generation can also be used for email marketing and here is how it works:

Use Your Website to Get Leads for Email Marketing

From the potential customers or leads, you can build a solid email marketing campaign. There are various ways to do this, and the recommended method is permission-based opt-ins.

It is crucial to obtain leads’ permission before you begin sending them marketing emails. Leads can opt into your emailing list by ticking a checkbox or submitting a form, depending on how you have your website set up. 

After collecting leads’ emails, have that information stored in a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system to allow proper organization and management of your leads.

Once you have all that setup, you can now regularly send these leads marketing emails like welcome emails, promotional offers, and business newsletters. Your email list can be a useful tool for nurturing leads into customers, retaining your clients, and getting clients interested in other products you offer.

5. Using Your Website to Understand Your Customers

Website analytics refers to the collection, analysis, and interpretation of key metrics about the performance and usage of a website. The end goal is to gain crucial insights into visitor behavior, engagement, and interaction with content on your website. Here are some key insights that can be of great use to your business:

Website Analytics Can Aid Your Target Market Research Efforts

Once your website is up and running, you can analyze its performance through free platforms such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Such tools will give you invaluable insights, including:

• The keywords that lead people to your sight. This will help you understand the language your target market uses. You can then optimize your marketing campaign and make it more successful.
• Emerging needs in your market. Sometimes people will land on your website after searching for certain keywords only to find that the services they need are unavailable. Website analytics helps you discover such keywords, which aids in product development.
• Content needs. Studying website analytics helps discover what content readers are most interested in. You can use these insights to generate better content or generate content about topics you haven’t covered.

E-commerce Metrics

This applies when you have an e-commerce system already set up on your business website. In this regard, you can track metrics like sales performance, particularly the number of sales, revenue generated, and the average value of each transaction.

Tracking metrics like these will allow you to take note of trends like peak-season demands and seasonal variations. This will help you make informed decisions on stuff like inventory management and customized product promotion with regard to current market trends. One rather crafty way of doing this is launching targeted marketing promotion during promotional seasons like Black Friday. 

Another key metric in e-commerce is product performance. Through these insights, you can have a clear idea of the products that are most popular among your customers. The particulars of these metrics will include factors like sales volume, page views as well as add-to-cart-section statistics.

Analyzing these metrics will allow you to identify best-selling products and accordingly optimize product listings.

Such in-depth website analytics will ultimately give you the opportunity to identify gaps for product and market expansion based on customer preference and market trends.

6. Incorporating Chatbots for Live Customer Support

Chatbots are a powerful tool when it comes to business websites, and you can leverage them to improve customer support. They can engage website visitors and ask relevant questions. Additionally, based on the responses, they can capture valuable leads and their contact information.

The most important bit in this regard is the customer support bit. The bots should offer round-the-clock support to website visitors by assisting with frequently asked questions and other trivial tasks like guiding customers through your website.

This will certainly improve overall customer satisfaction for website visitors and reduce the need for human interaction, especially during non-business hours.  

What to Avoid Doing With Your Business Website

After covering what you need to have and how to get the most out of your business website, here are some tips on what to avoid when crafting your business website: 

• Don’t use outdated content: You will need to keep all the information and content on your website up to date so your website visitors interact and engage with accurate information. Having inaccurate information like broken links and expired promotions will give your customers an impression of negligence, which is bad for business.
• Don’t forget to consider accessibility and user experience: Before considering what a business website offers you, the first thing to consider is how your visitors on the website perceive their experience. It is pointless to have positive content if the website is not accessible to all potential users and the overall experience is terrible.

Our mission at GVL Solutions is to enhance SME success by professionally handling non-core business processes and empowering businesses with modern ways of work. One of the services we offer is expert website building – perfectly tailored to your specific business needs. 

Revitalize Your Online Branding with GVL Solutions: Harness the Expertise of Our Professional Website Design Services!

Contact Us Today!