As a business, your business website is essentially your company’s own little slice of virtual real estate. What you do with that real estate is totally up to you. You can either take advantage — reinforcing your brand image and driving sales — or you can waste it.
While no honest business owner would intentionally do the latter, many are coming up short, nonetheless. You don’t want to fall into this category.
4 Tasks Your Business Website Should Accomplish
Businesses want different things out of their websites, but regardless of your industry, there are certain tasks your business website should always accomplish. Let’s investigate them in further detail:
1. Tell a Story
There are plenty of places where your brand can interact with customers online. There’s social media, industry blogs, ad space, press releases, YouTube, and dozens of other platforms. But the difference between your website and all of these is that you own your website. Nobody can tell you what to publish, remove your content, or alter your words. It’s an unabated mouthpiece for your brand. Make sure you’re using it to tell your story!
Brand storytelling happens in a number of ways, but it’s helpful to check out an example. The Mid-Atlantic Door Group, Inc. is a perfect illustration. As you’ll see on pages like this, their branding is all about developing a cohesive narrative about where the company has been and where it’s going. They’ve been a leading Overhead Door distributor since 1973 and use this rich history as a selling point.
Your story might include your history, or it might be more forward facing. It might focus on the supply chain through which your products travel, or it may center on what happens after the sale. The objective isn’t to follow a storytelling formula, but rather to identify your story and clearly share it with your website visitors.
2. Provide Contact Information
One of the primary reasons people visit a website is to find contact information and other important details as they relate to the brand. At a very minimum, you need to make sure your website includes the following:
- Physical business address (if applicable)
- A map to show where your business is (if applicable)
- Store or business hours
- A phone number and email address
- A basic description of what your business does
There are obviously different ways to list this information, and you don’t need to plaster it everywhere on the site, but do make it easy to find.
3. Collect Lead Information
You might hope to close sales with your website, but it’s not the only objective. Sometimes it takes multiple visits for a prospect to convert. In the meantime, you need to collect lead information via a lead capture form. A simple opt-in form, such as the one found on this page from Wrike, will suffice.
4. Overcome Friction
Your website must be capable of overcoming friction and providing a simple, streamlined user experience for visitors. Since poor navigation is the number one reason people abandon websites, it’s a good idea to start with user-friendly navigation.
“Whether your navigation menu expands across the top of your site or in a sidebar, it must be easy for site visitors to locate and should include logical categories that make it simple for site users to find the information they seek,” digital strategist Chris Pautsch writes.
In addition to navigation, you’ll want to increase page loading speed and limit distractions.
What’s Your Website Doing?
Is your business website living up to its potential? If you’re honest with yourself, the answer is probably no. You might be giving your website plenty of attention, but that doesn’t mean you’re focusing on the right things. By reallocating your time and energy to the tasks highlighted in this article, you can accomplish more than you ever thought possible.
Republished by permission. Original here.
Image via Due.com
This article, “4 Ways to Get More Out of Your Small Business Website” was first published on Small Business Trends