When building a website one of the most important things is knowing “who” you are. Ok, not a great joke with the owl, but I think it’s a very important topic that people don’t spend enough time thinking about when planning a site.
A lot of times when people come to me to build a website, I find they are spending too much time looking at competitors. Now, doing your competitive analysis is important and it is crucial that you find a look and feel that reflects you’re brand and sensibilities. But, you need to know who you are, and what your company offers in terms of your value proposition.
This is one of the most important things your website needs to convey to potential customers/clients. There are things we all do very well. We may offer many services but we have one particular skill or a few that are our specialties and we need to make sure this is readily seen on our websites.
Using myself as an example, I design develop and manage websites and have so for over 20 years. But the thing that separates me from my competitors is my website management services which are second to none. So, I make sure that everything I put out on my website or social media also mentions that particular part of my business. I need people to know who I am and what I do, so they can know I can help them and their businesses. I realize that’s a mouthful, but I feel passionately that this is one of the most important aspects to anyone’s website.
People don’t have a great deal of time to find what they are looking for on your site. So you need to make sure they can find your value proposition within milliseconds of hitting your homepage. If you are using an image slider, one of the first slides should show your top service. Using myself as an example, my first slide is the about slide which sums up what I do, followed by my website management slide. Then as you scan the page you see my headline, Design, Develop and manage world class small business website. That is us in a nutshell, people know exactly “who” I am.
As they read on they encounter this line:
Our philosophy is much different from that of most firms. We have always felt that the management of your website is every bit as important as the design and development phases. As such we have industry best support plans which our clients utilize to add content, work on their social media, SEO, email marketing, pay per click advertising, and more!!
So as this key line shows, website management is a priority, rather than an afterthought. (which is how most firms view support)
Bottom Line: Anyone who views my homepage knows exactly “who” I am and what my company offers. This is something we work on with every client insuring that their value proposition is front and center.
My clients often ask me how often should they be reviewing their website and social media campaigns. Well, being a web guy I look at my web properties all the time, every day.
But I realize other people have other priorities, and running a business doesn’t allow you the free time in order to always check out your web and social media platforms.
So what I try to do is get my clients to review their sites at least a few times a year, taking a good hard look at everything they own. I look at the change of seasons as a perfect time to review everything you are doing. The leaves are falling down, schedule some time with yourself and review everything you’re doing. Make a list of what’s working, what’s not working and where you’d like to improve. Do the same at the start of each season.
Here is a handy chart to use. Put these dates on your calendar and have a meeting with your staff.
Next, schedule some time with your website management company. And if you don’t have a website management company, then you aren’t doing justice to your business. Contact us, we are happy to help you come up with a management plan that will work for you and your enterprise. Have a meeting to go over your findings, and also ask them what are they seeing, where do they think you can improve? They may have a different take on things, but between the two of you, you’ll be able to formulate a plan that will set you up for the next quarter or so. This is especially good time to review any advertising you are doing. Are your Google adwords working well for you? Are you using social media ads, how are they doing? You have to review these things from time to time and change up what you’re doing. What’s working today, may not work tomorrow. For instance, I have seen more success lately from my social media ads versus my adwords expenditures. This of course may change, so I review what I’m doing all the time. Now this doesn’t mean to panic, because you have to give your ads some time to percolate.
It is really easy, to let your website & social media properties go. The sad part is they will grow stale and people who visit your website or social media pages will not do business with you. Think of yourself as if you are a brick-and-mortar store. If someone came in and your inventory never changed, what do you think would happen? I can tell you what will happen, you will close. You will fail. So think of your website the same way, it needs to be up-to-date, it needs to have a pleasing design, it needs to be responsively designed so it looks good on mobile, and it needs to have current news & information. This will give your customers an opinion that your company is successful, that it is moving forward and they will be more likely to do business with your company.
