There’s no doubt that ecommerce is becoming increasingly dominant worldwide. For example, in the UK online sales now account for more than 17% of the region’s retail market.
Despite this, just 50% of small businesses own and operate websites, making half of all SMEs in the UK incapable of driving sales online or generating a high volume of leads through digital marketing techniques.
Firms that do operate a website undoubtedly hold a competitive edge in the digital age, so long as they adopt a number of strategies to optimize this channel.
Read more on creating the best small business website.
Here are three techniques that can help entrepreneurs to achieve this objective:
Develop a Brand Strategy for Your Website
Let’s start with the basics, as it’s important to determine the precise role of your business website and how it fits into your overarching brand strategy.
After all, anyone can build and promote a website in the digital age, but it takes a strategic-minded entrepreneur to leverage this asset as a building block for their brand identity.
This requires you to understand the purpose that your website will service, whether it’s a key conduit for sales or a channel through which you choose to build brand awareness and generate leads.
With this in mind, you can tailor the core design of your site while also establishing clearly-defined metrics by which to measure its success (and failure).
Measure Your Website’s Performance and Make Use of Call Tracking
Metrics play a key role in developing and honing your website, as they enable you to measure its performance in relation to the key objectives that you’d like it to achieve.
Call tracking is a particularly important metric for website owners to observe, as this records conversations in details and provides a unique insight into your marketing activities.
This translates into highly efficient lead generation and an optimal return on investment (ROI), which should serve as music to the years of all entrepreneurs of which marketplace they’re looking to operate in.
Tailor Your Content to Suit the Purpose of Your Website
Once you’ve decided on a purpose for your website and determined which metrics to follow, the next step is to tailor your content to create a truly relevant and topical platform.
Make no mistake; you can publish premium or freemium content on your website, or a combination of copy to suit multiple purposes. At the same time, you can also use a fusion of written, audio and video content to create the most engaging site possible, based on your target audience and the ways in which they’re likely to consume information.
Free-to-download and instructional e-books or educational courses can be used to provide value to customers and establish your brand as a thought leader, for example, whilst paid content can be leveraged to monetize the site and drive sales conversions.
Either way, try to optimize the content published on your site and ensure that it helps you to achieve your core commercial objectives.
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