As your business’s biggest marketing asset, strongest sales tool, and most useful branding moment wrapped all into one, your website deserves your best.
A quality, high-performing website can set you apart in your industry in functionality alone — tack on SEO value, visuals, good copywriting and strong UX, and it’s possible to gain miles of separation between you and the competition.
At BOWEN, we specialize in custom web builds, and have had the privilege to be a part of some truly noteworthy projects. Along the way, we’ve discovered just what makes a good website tick, which has led us to compile some tried-and-true strategies for leveraging websites to their full potential.
Here’s the broad strokes.
Fueling Your Sales Pipeline
Some businesses tend to think of their sales team as their sales team, and their marketing team as their marketing team. A well-positioned website splits the difference.It starts with the simple things. Collating emails from your newsletter subscriptions or previous purchases is only possible with a website that’s both legible on your backend and accessible to the audience — without appearing exploitative (remember the good copywriting we mentioned earlier?).
Where you can truly make leaps in your sales pipeline, however, is by integrating an easy-to-use CRM like HubSpot to your website to arm your sales team with all of the useful data that might otherwise stay in your marketers’ hands. Capturing lead information and demographic hints right from your homepage gives your sales folks the opportunity to trim their search and spend more time with the audiences more likely to convert.
HubSpot trickles all the way up to your executive team, too, generating powerful marketing reports and analytical tools that can allow you to forecast months — or even years — of visitor trends.
Long and short, a good website stocked with the right CRM helps drive not just more traffic, but better quality traffic.
Building Trust
Of course, sales is a science of relationships. While the right behind-the-scenes tools can help you drive traffic, there’s still plenty of work left to do to ensure your visitors understand your product, its benefits and why you’re a trustworthy provider. And a good website is readily equipped to deliver on those.
As an extension of your brand, your website should walk, talk and act like you. Building rapport with leads starts before you ever get on the phone or send an email: It’s how you present yourself to the world at large.
It’s tougher to put a number on those metrics (though believe us — we’ve found some pretty good ways to do it), but trust building via your website is one of the most effective avenues for lubricating your sales funnel.
Long and short, being yourself online pays dividends.
Enhancing Your Existing Customers’ Experience
Capturing leads and increasing your sales is all well and good, but it can never come at the expense of your existing customers. A good website also provides tools, intel and real value for repeat visitors.For example, we’ve participated in plenty of custom web builds designed for both new and existing customers, be it blog content, information hierarchy or fully segmented experiences. Newer visitors may receive information about your product, concise calls to actions and direct methods to contact your sales team, while existing customers may receive company updates, opportunities to engage as a community and potential product add-ons and extensions.
Long and short, retention is a key measure for any company looking to grow. And a well-made website is key to keeping your users engaged.
Attracting Top Tier Talent
Build a solid website, and your HR team will be singing its praises soon enough. As the world’s first point of contact with your brand and its values, a website serves as the perfect container for your company’s core values, mission statements and out-and-out benefits. So while you may intend them for potential customers, they’ll be pulling double duty for potential talent.
We like to make sure everything is considered before we fully flesh an About Us, Company History or Careers page. You see them everywhere, but not all of them are working as hard as they could be. Each should infuse your brand’s voice to give visitors the full picture of where you see your company in the world, doing more inspiring than selling.
The world-building gets results. When prospective employees can get a genuine glimpse inside your walls, your likelihood of finding top candidates increases. Job boards and recruiting agencies can only take you so far in sussing out qualified candidates, whereas an authentic slice of your brand works like a magnet for attracting them.
Long and short, let your website be true to your brand, and you’ll soon discover a recruitment tool you never knew you had.
Customizing Your Operations
Here at BOWEN, we’re not huge on templates. We like to integrate only the web tools and features that make the most sense for your company, rather than shoehorning your services into a dated outline of what worked for some other brand years ago. And if those tools and features don’t exist yet? We’ve got the brains and muscle to build them ourselves.
Pretty pictures and well-written copy is a good place to start, but greater success depends on actual website functionality and relevance to your customer base.
Live chat. Calendar integration. Service scheduling. Internal forums. It’s all possible with a custom web build. From pre-sale to post-sale to all the servicing in between, your company has particular needs that a custom website can fulfill.
Long and short, a good website does more than display information. It meets your customers’ needs.
Growing Your Network
There’s a third audience beyond your customers and potential employees we haven’t discussed yet. One that gravitates equally to a well-built website.
Potential partners.
A strong SEO presence can help you draw in the collaborators and like-minded people who can help you along the way. When prospective partners are roaming the web for services exactly like yours, you want to make sure your site shows up at the top of their Google search.
Using the right words in the right places, building a credible web of backlinks and fine-tuning the code in your website can get your website in front of the right sets of eyes. By making your offering loud, clear and highly readable, you can keep your visibility high and your presence strong on google and beyond.
Long and short, a good website is your best friend for cross-company collaboration.
Hearing Your Audience
Made right, your website hosts an unbelievable amount of data you can use to your advantage, and the most accessible analytics typically come in the form of viewership numbers.Connecting HubSpot or Google Analytics to your site can provide valuable feedback in real time regarding the ways your audience views your company, product or services. You’ll get the bird’s eye on things like the amount of time each user spends browsing select sub-pages, or which demographics are more likely to convert — and under which circumstances.
These powerful reviewing mechanisms give you the opportunity to tilt your operations one way or another, responding quickly to the way the world sees you. Whether the feedback is positive or negative, the data trends can provide near-instat catalysts for growth.
Long and short, when you know how to read the browsing data behind your website, you’ll find new ways to take your business based on exactly what your audience is telling you.
Telling Your Story
Your business isn’t the same as it was yesterday. Or the day before that. Your website should evolve with it, telling the story of your evolution along the way.
Older, dated web presences can’t provide a truly accurate depiction of your brand, and may also include broken or antiquated features that customers no longer need. Whether it’s through visuals, functionality or good writing, a modern website keeps your audience up to date and clued into your messaging and current value propositions.
Long and short, however you’ve refreshed along the way, your audience can benefit from seeing it front and center on your website.
Everything Considered
At BOWEN, we treat your website like the high-performing asset that it is. Sparing no detail and seizing every opportunity, we can give it the touch-up, refresh or ground-up build it fully deserves.
It’s not just a place for your visitors to land. It’s not just an inventory for your products. It’s one of the most effective sales and marketing assets you have at your disposal.