Now more than ever it’s crucial to have your online operation looking slick and user-friendly.
After all, under current restrictions here in the UK, few businesses are immune to the ‘Stay at Home’ advice; making your online marketing more important than ever before.
So what can you do to quickly, cheaply and effectively improve the service of your website
for your clients and keep your business going until the outlook improves?
Our outsourced marketing manager Jess has five tips to support your customers through their online buying journey...
1. Call to actions
It might sound obvious, but making your ‘call to actions’ (i.e. prompts to get in touch or encourage a response) visible and frequent throughout your website will support your customer’s user experience. Think how frustrating it is when you see something you want to purchase online, but then you can’t find a way to ask a quick question? Your customers are busy people, and if all the processes to drive them to your business have got them there, you don’t want to lose them because they’ve given up due to a lack of information.
So think about putting your telephone number and email at the top and bottom of each page. Use call to action buttons, such as ‘Newsletter Sign-up’, ‘Free Trial’ or ‘Call XXXX for a no obligation quote’. And think of ways you can organically include a call to action in your content, such as at the end of a blog.
Above all, make sure each call to action is easily visible, attention-grabbing and concise.
2. Make content easy to digest
As we’ve already mentioned, your customers are time poor, so ensuring your content is written in an easy to digest format is essential to encourage the reading of it. That doesn’t necessarily mean cutting back on words, but it does mean breaking up large pieces of content with images, bullet points, pull quotes... anything that makes it look a bit more interesting than just blanket text.
When writing for your website, try and think of what action you want your client to take, and what information is useful to them. FAQs are a must; as offering answers gives confidence in your brand and supports your SEO strategy.
3. Ensure all your links work
Remove those 404’s! Having links and pages that don’t work is not only bad for your Google ranking, but does little to support your customer’s buying journey. It’s also an easy fix; so take the time to go through your site and fix any glitches you come across, instead providing useful links and relevant pages.
4. Be mobile friendly
It’s estimated that more than half of digital traffic comes from a device or mobile app, so making sure your website looks as good on a phone as it does on a computer is so important.
As well as consistency for your brand, a mobile website that responds quickly and is user-friendly is more likely to generate new business and supports how professional a customer interprets what you do. What’s more, the performance of your mobile site affects your Google ranking, so there really is no reason not to optimise your website for handheld devices.
5. Check everything is up-to-date
This is a quick win and one that will support your online marketing. Particularly if you’ve been in business for a while, take the time to do a full website audit and make sure all of the information is relevant and current. From small changes like the number of years you’ve been in business, to larger amends like the addition of a new service or a ‘Covid-19 policy’ page; these will all assist your customers in recognising your business as one with its finger on the pulse.
We hope that’s given you a few ideas of some of the easy things you can do to make your website marketing more effective. As ever, give us a call for a virtual cuppa and a chat to see how Cornerstone Your Business can support the marketing of your business on: 07929 905 229.