There are many known ways on how you can improve your business’ performance and success. Depending on your product and location, there are many ways to promote your business using the more traditional methods. But with our constant reliance on technological devices and the internet, you could be missing out on a lot if you don’t bring your business online. Having an online presence like a website can bring benefits like many prospective and potential customers in the long run.
And with building a website comes also creating a website strategy. Now, you have to ask, what is website strategy? Because you might make the mistake of confusing it with marketing or branding strategies. To dive deeper into what a website strategy is, it refers to building the foundation of your website and constantly updating and improving them to the best of your ability. It also includes communicating with your customers. A web strategy is a continuous process because the environment where you are supposed to thrive is also constantly changing. Thus, you have to keep up with everything that is going on. You have to keep your content fresh so that customers will stay with you and even promote your business.
What Makes a Profitable Website Strategy
- Customer-centric. Many websites and business owners tend to make the mistake of focusing on how they can promote their products. However, a good website strategy emphasizes how they can help the customers and all that they have to offer.
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- High-quality content. Creating a website strategy should involve spending much time and attention coming up with the right content for your website. Without high-quality, useful, and relevant content, your customers will not have much to enjoy on your website and, thus, will not have much motivation to stay.
- Optimized for any device. When you start to build a website strategy, you should keep in mind that not everyone uses laptops or desktops when accessing your website. Thus, you should optimize your website to appear as an amazing website no matter what device (mobile, tablet, etc.) your customers are using.
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- SEO-optimized. No matter how complete and updated your website is, it won’t matter much if your website strategy does not include optimizing your content for search engines. You have to help your customers find you by introducing your website to search engines and making sure they introduce you.
- Useful and Organized. Sometimes, our dedication in coming up with the right content gets the best of our emotions and passion - and we go overboard. A profitable website strategy would be to narrow down the most important and relevant content so that your customers will not have difficulty finding where to look and eventually purchase.
- Dedicated Team and Budget. They say "two heads are better than one", right? Having a team dedicated to implementing and thinking up ways to further improve your website strategy is one of the best things you can do for your business. But, people can't work much without the right resources at their disposal. So make sure that you also have a budget planned and set aside for your website.
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10 Tips in Creating a Website Strategy
1. Define Your Customer Segment
When you build a website strategy, your target audience is one of the most important things you have to give attention to. By knowing the specific customer segment that your products or services are most appropriate for, you can define the right techniques and develop the most effective and profitable website strategy. Knowing where to direct your efforts and what exactly those efforts are will help you not to waste any resources, time, and workforce in strategies that will not be useful and helpful for your business and your website. Getting the hearts of the right people will make your website and your business efficient and profitable in the long run.
2. Set Realistic and Attainable Goals
While having a destination can sometimes take out the fun in the journey, creating a website strategy is necessary, and it will make the journey worthwhile. See, setting realistic and attainable goals would set your eyes on those goals - you would have somewhere to focus and direct all your efforts and attention towards. This will help you not just carelessly throw elements, techniques, and strategies here and there. Each endeavor that you set out to do will have a purpose. Each of the elements in your website strategy would have a role in reaching the goals that you set. In addition, this will also allow you to monitor your progress.
3. Do Your Research and Know the Facts
An effective website strategy cannot be taken out of the blue. You need to invest time and attention in gathering enough information and data to back up and/or support your ideas. A proper research will tell you all you need to know for creating a website strategy that would be best for your business. This is not to say that you cannot develop your own ideas driven by passion and love for what you do or sell. On the contrary, doing your research will help bring your ideas up to their full potential. When you find the right information, you will also find the right ways to bring out the best techniques for your website strategy.
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4. Know and Align Your Branding Strategy
Your brand is another important element of your business. However, as mentioned earlier, some website and business owners tend to make the mistake of merging their branding strategy with their website strategy. But what they should be is only aligned - not merged. That is, these two strategies should complement each other and work together in overall improving your business and your website. The branding strategy that you come up with should be appropriate for your target audience while also really serving the brand (as it is intended to do) and when you build a website strategy, you should also consider if it is suitable for your branding.
5. Master the Art of SEO
Search engine optimization should be a vital and major part of your website strategy. If your website is not optimized for search engines, your customers will have a much more difficult time finding and accessing your website. Thus, when you are creating a website strategy, you have to fiddle with and eventually master the different search engine optimization techniques to help your website rank higher in the search engines. A profitable website strategy requires that your business website be found by customers and prospective customers. Many articles talk about SEO techniques, so if you don’t have much knowledge about it, start reading up and exploring.
6. Build a Team to Work and Brainstorm With
As we already discussed earlier, having a team to support you an important to building a profitable website strategy. We’re sure you have many bright ideas and wonderful plans for your business and your website - having a team only enhances those ideas and plans, not impedes them. When you have more brains to develop a website strategy, you are more likely to cover everything you need to cover or that you might have overlooked if you work alone. Collaborating with a team not only helps you when you build a website strategy, they can also help you in making sure that your website strategy is executed correctly.
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7. Come Up with a Budget
A website strategy requires more brainstorming, research, and talking to be built and created. Nevertheless, you have to come up with a budget set aside for your different website-building strategies. Having resources waiting for you and your team would help you be more efficient with your work and website. In addition, you also have to set aside a budget for contingencies. While we, of course, don’t want it to happen, there will always be unfortunate circumstances that might come unexpectedly. And if you don’t have enough resources to cover its recovery or to veer away from it.
8. Be Ready to Change and Improve
You have to have the mindset to continuously add and build a website strategy. Remember that creating a website strategy is not a one-time thing. So having an open-minded perspective will help you be more accepting of the changes that you have to enact somewhere along the way on a technique, endeavor, and strategy because it is not working anymore. Improvements have to be made.
9. Monitor Your Data Analytics
Your data analytics are your performance metrics. They would tell you how you are doing for a certain period. This is important when creating a website strategy because it will tell you which of the elements or techniques you currently use are working and which are not. When you monitor your website analytics, you arm yourself with more information about your customers and their behavior. This would help you in further improving your website strategy and your website content. If you know and understand your website data analytics, you essentially know and understand how everything is coming together for your business and your website.
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10. Test, Adjust, and Test
Furthermore, your website strategy can only be a profitable website strategy if it works. You can test this by testing your website strategy. You can do this by incorporating something in your website (a call to action button, specific content, an interactive feature, etc.) and seeing if your customers take the bait. Doing so would enable you to adjust what needs to be adjusted and retain what seems to be working well.
Building a website is not an easy task, but so is creating a website strategy. But much like other things, its difficulty is what makes it worthwhile when you reach success. Just keep in mind our tips about how to improve and build a website strategy. With the right team, the right resources, the right ideas, and the right partners, you can arm yourself with everything you need to be successful in coming up with a profitable website strategy and, ultimately, in being successful in this business endeavor. Sign up with Strikingly now and have that right partner in the bag.
