The trade and merchandise have been significantly revolutionized over the past two decades. With the rising threshold of modern technology since the mid 1990s, the business houses have adopted an unconventional approach towards their market and transactions. Meanwhile, the electronic media has provided a platform, which offers ease of accessibility to both, sellers and buyers, thereby setting new trends globally. But with this growth, grew competition. The exponential rise in the activity of striving to gain profits, by establishing superiority over competitors, brought about a 360 degree change in the marketing strategies worldwide. Business websites is the most eminent outcome of this universal change.

successful business website

One of the vital components of a successful business, big or small, is a business website. It helps showcasing your product, service or idea and enables you to reach out to the target audience. How? Well, the trick is simple, by identifying and implementing some basic website building blocks. This column here will help you through the process.

  1. Identify Objectives:

With the passage of time, businesses have realized that having a website is not an option anymore, it is a necessity instead. Buyers also abstain from heading to physical markets and get the burden off their shoulders, by exploring options online. The most important feature of a virtual market, from a service provider’s aspect, is to understand a customer’s mindset when he visits your website or online store. Hence, build a vivid picture of what and whom to aim with your website and be clear as to what you want, when you brief your designer. Is it about creating and raising brand awareness or about increasing sales? A clear intention, pertaining to your business idea, helps you implement better and connect efficiently with your customers. Ensure that your website aptly reflects your impetus and portrays the correct company image. An initial wrong impression can prove to be fatal for your business, therefore before connecting with the end users, it is important for you to realize the purpose of your business and connect with your designer.

  1. Know your company brand and make branding professional and consistent:

business laptops

Your corporate identity is one of your most valuable assets, which is designed the best through sophisticated content and graphics. As they say, words are the most powerful form of expression, a thorough yet precisely designed particulars on your website will automatically attract visitors. Incorporating keywords is a plus. Choosing appropriate images and colors can help giving your website a professional look. Refrain from making multiple font choices, pick one or two, and keep them consistent throughout your website. In a nutshell, all these elements should complement each other and neither of them should be a misfit. It is equally important to your business, as to the product or service itself.

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  1. Learn from your existing websites:

If you are rebuilding your old website, ensure your new one overcomes the shortcomings of the previous one. Eradicate the failure, bear in mind what has worked well with your previous website and consider how it can be developed further. For example, if your previous website took longer to load, you could ensure that your new version loads quickly by putting up small size images, fewer videos and linking lesser social media tabs. This way, the traffic which was directed to your competitor’s site, due to slow processing of your website previously, can be redirected to your current page or website.

  1. Apply ways to measure success:

Investigate ways to monitor and measure how your new websites is performing. Google webmaster tools can provide you with detailed reports about any of your indexed website pages. Asking your customers for a feedback is another way of monitoring success. Not only this, it can also help you reach out to your customers and build credibility, trust and hence, better public relations. Also, it will help you recognise your weaknesses and counter them. Research says- user engaging websites are likely to grow and sustain for a longer duration compared to websites that opt one directional information sharing, i.e. from seller to buyer.

  1. Know your target market:

target-market-of-businesses

Establish who is going to use your website. Will they be individuals living in a particular area, will they be small companies or will they be users who require specific features? For example, your website could be a t-shirt design studio, wherein visitors could customise their t-shirts by providing a design of their own and place an order. In this case your target audience would majorly constitute students and people from the corporate sector. Aiming at elderly section of the society and designing your website accordingly for this purpose, will bring no good to your business. Likewise, if you are selling a DVD home study course, you would target learners based on the study courses you would be providing.

  1. Push your USP:

Discover what makes you different to your competitors and use your website to promote your unique selling points. Put critical information above the fold, just as in a news paper, the headlines are embedded on the front page, over the fold. According to a recent research report, 80% of the users online, do not scroll down through the entire page, therefore place the most important information on the top. Make your pages easy to read and navigate. Most visitors would just want to scan through your page or website, so keep the language simple, readable and avoid convolution. A user friendly website can be obtained by following the basic navigation rules- minimising navigation tabs, consistently placed hyperlinks and including header and footer for key links. Ensure a clear and effective communication of these, through the contents of your website. An effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help increase the amount of visitors to a website, by improving its placement in any search engine results. This is done by adding trending tags, relevant keywords and appropriate content in your website, thus making it your top USP.

  1. Research your competition:

For a successful business, it is very important to identify your potential competitors and never underestimate them. Research well on your business rivals, their social media platforms and their characteristics. Thoroughly study what lies behind their ideas and invent new ways to do business better than them.

  1. Maintenance is important:

It is a human tendency to get bored of repetitions in our daily schedule. For instance, imagine reading the same book over and again or eating the same food daily! Since, internet has been a routine now, in order to satisfy your customers and search engine needs, your website must be regularly updated. Out of date and worthless content should be taken off at regular intervals. For a business to prosper, innovation and consistent updating is a must. Even before you build your website, ascertain who will look after it and give it a fresh face on regular intervals, without changing the insights or the underlying idea.

  1. Marketing strategy:

business profit

The best website is useless if no one can find it. Investigate the most effective ways to advertise your website so that it can be found by its target audience. Connecting to social media is the simplest way to market your website or page. It not only spreads a word about your products and services, but also increases traffic to your website. Mark out some trending pages and websites wherein people and general internet users spend their maximum time. Create back links on these and attract visitors. It further depends on your website to convert these visitors into customers.

Take a quick look on a few top social media websites to keep in mind, while building your market strategy:

  • Facebook: Biggest social platform to target ads.
  • Twitter: Communicates real time current affairs.
  • LinkedIn: Largest network for professionals. Ideal for work based relationships and getting hired.
  • YouTube: Most popular video website to share tips, tricks, expertise and any information coming from all spheres of life.
  • Instagram: the most recently growing social network, ideal for marketing retail and entertainment.

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  1. Keep your cool:

Rome was not built is a day! It takes time for a website to develop and attain top ranking with search engines. Setting up an idea, putting it up, delivering it across the audience and visitors, generating leads, tracking through web analytics and entertaining feedback is a way long process. It often entails lots of trails and errors but being patient and working with persistence will pay off in the end.

road to success

Eventually, the entire hassle the world takes up, has to do with monetary benefits, therefore genuine businesses deserve a website that makes them money. It would be unfortunate if an innovative business idea fails because it was not efficiently conveyed. There are certain websites that are so vaguely designed that it drives away the traffic, rather than getting people on board. If you have a business idea in mind, do not worry much about the implementation and related profits. Considering the aforementioned tips before you begin working on your website, will certainly result in achieving a triumphant web outlet.