Why you need to upgrade your website in 2022
People are buying from you online whether you think they are or not. Even if they aren’t directly purchasing products from your website, they are buying into the decision to visit your store, call you up, or ultimately do business with you in the future.
This is why the need for an updated website is vital for your business. Updating your website is so much more than a redesign with parallax scrolling (although parallax scrolling is still cool). Your website should be your best performing employee. It’s greeting new customers, providing them with everything they need to know, booking appointments, closing sales, subscribing new clients, all while keeping a neat and tidy record of where your visitors came from and what happened to them.
If you can’t say that your website is currently doing all of this, here are few reasons why you need a website upgrade:
You Need to Provide Value
As much as your website needs to be compelling and current, it also needs to provide value to its visitors. A website is useless if the people who visit aren’t doing anything. Everything your business does on and offline should eventually lead back to your website. When your future customers arrive, you need to make sure it is worth their time, and you need to be able to keep their attention. Static content that lists off your products and services provides no value for your visitors. The harsh truth is, no one cares - yet. All your visitors care about right now is how you can help them.
Consider the problems your product or service can help solve and identify these solutions clearly to the people on your site. Provide information through blogs, tools, eBooks and software. If you’re always aiming to help your visitors, you’re more likely to gain their attention and their trust. Trust leads to loyalty.
Who are you? What do you do? How can you help me?
Nail those three points in the first few seconds, and you’re off to a great start. And don’t forget to make contacting you easy.
You Need to Be Mobile
The user experience your customers have on their phones is equally important as the experience your customers have on their laptop or desktop. By 2019, over 83% of all mobile phones will be smartphones, and it is expected that over 24 million people will own one in Canada. With more and more people using their phones to browse the internet and gather information, you don’t want to be losing customers because you chose not to make your website experience compatible for mobile devices.
If this wasn’t one of your main priorities for your website, it should be now.
You Need to Connect Your Gears
In today’s landscape, your website is only one very important gear in the machine. Other gears include things like social media, advertising, blogs, and email marketing. When it comes to your marketing platform, your website needs to be mission control and all of those gears need to be connected.
The purpose of ads should be to drive traffic to your website – even offline ads such as radio or billboards should feature a website for your customers to visit. Social media for your business is different from personal accounts, and should include a call to action that directs followers to your website where they can learn more about your business. Blogs need to provide valuable information and build trust with your customers enough to have them search your website for more solutions.
Having your website, social media, and advertisements stand alone and apart from one another could mean you’re wasting your time with all three. When all of the gears are connected, those paying attention to your brand can easily turn into customers, and your business can run like a well-oiled machine.
You Need to Gather More Intelligence
Your website has the potential to provide you with a wealth of information about your customers and where they are coming from. Optimizing your website is an important piece of the puzzle, and we’ll dive deeper into that in another article. But optimizing your site properly allows you to gather the intelligence required to improve your business.
All of that information you’re able to collect can be put to use and help you tailor your online marketing strategy. Reports can help you discover what terms people are using to find your business in search engines, and you can trace back page views to the links that brought them there from things like social media, blogs, advertising, or even mentions elsewhere on the web.
This is especially effective as it will allow you to tailor your message appropriately and use your online marketing budget more effectively.
If you’re reading this and thinking it is time to improve your website, hiring professionals is a worthwhile investment. Having a team to consult with who understands things like design choices, content marketing strategy, and SEO will take your website from ‘just existing’ to being a driving force for your business.
Click here to email us, and start the conversation on discovering the potential your website has on improving your business
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Mike Ross is the Content Creator for 902 Advertising Group and is part of a dedicated team helping businesses improve their brand through Content Marketing.
