An engaging mobile ready website is essential to your online success and provides the hub for your digital marketing campaigns. Your email or PPC campaigns are what drive your potential clients or customers to your website. When they land, your website needs to take those visitors and lead them by the hand, converting them into leads and ultimately buyers. So, there are some key things to consider when refreshing, redesigning or building your website from scratch.

Here are seven key steps that will help you achieve website success.

1: Discovery – Understand What You Need
Most websites have to achieve more than one goal and you may well have many marketing objectives; brand awareness, education and sales are just a few. It’s important to focus on what your customers and potential customers want. Understanding who your customers are and what they want from your site is essential. Using buyer personas is an ideal starting point to guide you in the right direction.

2: Budget – Think Investment, Not Cost
Many people still see a website as a cost – something that just forms part of doing business, but it’s not, it is an investment and should be seen as such. A website is no longer a static shop window, it’s an interactive platform that will keep your customers engaged and create brand loyalty. If you are selling online it will allow quick and easy purchasing and repurchasing as well as effective online customer support. Your digital marketing budget should reflect this.

3: Planning – Crucial to Your Success
When we say planning here, we don’t just mean the website. Once you understand what you need in terms of website look, feel and functionality, you will need a complete marketing plan that includes other online strategies to attract visitors to your site. After all, when it comes to your website the old saying ‘build it and they will come’ just doesn’t hold up. You need to drive visitors to your site. Once you have your strategy you’re ready to start building your full digital marketing campaign

4: Design and Build
If you do a good job of the discovery and planning stage, the design and development strategy for your website will be become obvious. Your online strategy and objectives will guide the construction as you will know what your customers want and how you want or need to guide them through your site. Don’t forget to consider things like colours, fonts, social media and images – they all have an impact.

 5: Test and Debug
It can take a while to get to this point and you may be tempted to just launch and worry about the testing later – don’t! This step is often rushed, but is vital for delivering a great customer experience that will keep visitors coming back. It is essential that everything works in the way it should. Make sure you allocate enough time for all the necessary Quality Assurance (QA) and User Experience (UE) checks to be completed thoroughly. Follow your processes through as though you are a customer. There is nothing more likely to turn a customer off your site than something that is broken.

6: Pre and Post Launch Activities
It’s important to make the most of the marketing opportunities your new website will provide when launched. Incorporate and maximise your social media coverage, search engine exposure and data capture. You can involve your fans, followers and existing customers both pre and post launch. If you’re replacing an old site, don’t forget those previous page redirects!

7: Analyse and Improve
The work doesn’t stop once your site is launched and your marketing campaign in full flow. Regular measurement and analysis of the data your website provides will allow you to continually tweak and improve to ensure you achieve a return on your website investment.

If you would like us to help you on the road to website success, get in touch.

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