You are ready to invest in a website that brings sales and customers to your business. The best way to achieve optimal performance from your new website is to be well-prepared.
Your media agency will guide you through website design, SEO, navigation, and other technical requirements. You, however, also have some work to do too: namely, to find your target audience and decide how you will be using your brand new website. Will it be a brand-building tool or an e-commerce money-making engine?
Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and look at your prospective website as an outsider. What do you see? What do you want? What do you expect? How do you accomplish your goals?
Here is a helpful list of questions to ask yourself so that you are better prepared to engage with your audience through your website.
Establish Your Budget
The first question to ask yourself is how much you are willing to spend on your new website. This will determine how your website development progresses now and grows in the future.
Besides the actual website development, you need to think about the future: who will be developing content for your site? How will you achieve the best SEO practices for optimal visibility? Who will run your paid ads?
A media agency like InSync Media can support your website project throughout the development phase and beyond. Part of your preparation is to evaluate your finances and establish a budget for the next 6 to 12 months.
Remember that for SEO to work properly you need to give it at least 4 to 6 months. It would be a pity to invest in a new website but fail to help it reach its true potential.
Find Your Audience
Who is your audience? What does your audience expect of your brand? How will customers use your website? How does your audience interact with your brand?
Think of your target audience. Don’t limit yourself to age and demographics. Think of your audience location, income, and education: is your website going to focus on budget-friendly solutions or tailored-made requests? Is your business geared toward local clients or are you looking into nationwide or even international sales?
Go one step further and analyze your audience’s hobbies, shopping habits, and how they think and shop. Does your audience come to you directly or through social media? Will your customers make repeat orders from your business?
Ultimately, your website should respond to people’s dreams and goals. It should address their pain points in a direct and easy way. Whatever you are selling, goods or services, help your audience find your business irreplaceable.
Zoom in Your Website Goals
What do you expect from your website: more sales or to build up your brand? If you want sales, you must set up an e-commerce website with product descriptions, reviews, and testimonials. For brand building, you need FAQs, blog content, and interactions with your audience. You will also need photos, how-to videos, and information about your staff and the people behind your brand.
Depending on your expectations from your website, your media agency will develop a comprehensive website plan that responds to these demands.
As a media agency, we listen to what our clients require from their website and come up with a plan that incorporates all of their needs into a broad, far-reaching online strategy.
Use Your Content
You may have heard it before: content is king. Google needs quality content to rank your website. If you already have content, your media agency may repurpose it. Older content that isn’t relevant anymore may be discarded if it hinders your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) goals. Relevant content can be given a new lease in life by republishing it.
A media agency will create additional, search-engine-optimized copy for you. You can help by preparing pointers and topics that interest your audience, based on your experience when you engage with your clients.
InSync Media can create new content from existing one or refresh older content to make it more contemporary and up-to-date. We can also include photos, videos, and infographics to make your website more engaging and interactive.
Organize the Website Navigation
Tell us what sets your business apart. If your architectural office has been a family-run business for 4 generations, you will want to highlight your company’s rich history on your ‘About’ page. If you have strong credentials, you may want to show them off. We will organize your website navigation depending on where you want to place your emphasis.
We need you to prepare your focal points and tell us what should go on the first-level navigation buttons and what can take a secondary place. While we will make suggestions about navigation practices and audience behaviors based on our experience, we also need your input as a business owner to make accurate navigation blueprints.
Gather Testimonials
Ask your audience to leave reviews and testimonials on your services or products. People value testimonials because they can easily relate to them. Reviews add a stamp of approval and give customers more certainty about the quality of the products and services you are selling.
While your media agency is developing your website, work on gathering reviews and testimonials from customers to enrich your content and create an all-encompassing experience for your website visitors.
FAQs Can Be Useful
You know your business better than we do. What do people ask you the most? What sort of questions adds value to your services?
You can prepare for your new website by letting us know the questions that clients and customers ask most frequently. We will use these to organize FAQs that add value and offer information about your brand. Send us up to a dozen questions that you feel best represent your business and help people find information before they pick up the phone.
We can also add FAQs of our own if we think they will be helpful for visitors and serve our SEO purposes as well.
Synchronize Your Website with Your Paid Ads
When you run paid ads, you need them to redirect people to the right landing page. Say, for example, you sell gardening supplies and different kinds of soils. You wish to run an ad that promotes your best-selling soil. Your landing page should be the product page for that particular soil rather than the generic page of your e-shop or, even worse, your home page.
When you prepare your website, keep in the back of your mind how you will promote your products with paid ads and consider where these should land. Discuss with your media agency the possibility of developing the necessary landing pages early on so that your website is fully optimized for paid ads on social media and search engines from the start.
InSync Media Is Your Media Agency
Here at InSync Media, we take care of your website from begging to end: that involves full website and eshop development, social media content, SEO, paid ads, and content writing.
