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Setting Up Your Website to be Your 24-hour Sales Team | Part 2 | Designing or Re-Designing your Small Business Website

Setting Up Your Website to be Your 24-hour Sales Team | Part 2 | Designing or Re-Designing your Small Business Website

Apr 15, 2024 | Online Sales Team, Online Sales Team Part 1, Online Sales Team Part 3, Online Sales Team Part 4, Online Sales Team Part 5, Online Sales Teams Part 2

Part 2: A well designed website is the first step in creating your digital sales team.

Designing or Re-Designing your Small Business Website

Sometimes small business owners want to design or re-design their websites themselves. There is much to consider in taking on that task and we hope this series will be helpful to you.

Online marketing begins with your website, so having a well-designed and functional website is crucial. Some of the future topics we will discuss are content marketing (June), social media marketing (July), and AI (August). But first, you need to start with a well-designed and functional website.

For small business owners who haven’t yet dabbled with web design, WordPress is a good starting point.

Selecting the best WordPress theme for you

Themes are templates you use to build your website. They include “behind the scenes” coding to facilitate design such as fonts, layouts, functionality for importing images, integrating with features like eCommerce, etc.

Every WordPress installation comes with a couple of built-in free themes you can use. These may suffice for a basic site. However, business websites will probably benefit from added features found in third-party themes. Let’s look at some considerations in terms of design and move on to choosing the right template for your small business needs.

Features. Don’t choose a theme with a lot of fancy features unless you need them. They can slow down your site.

Responsiveness. Do choose a responsive theme. This means that your website will visually adjust itself to all types of devices. This is especially important for mobile phones since more and more people are viewing websites from their phones.

Color. Keep color in mind when choosing your theme. Color is hugely important because it reflects the mood you want to set for your website. Some colors do not translate well to websites, so it’s important to use a color that’s approved for websites. The importance of color can’t be understated. Coming up in May, I will discuss the psychology and nuances of color when designing a website.

Fonts. Don’t choose a theme with a font that’s hard to read. Make your fonts simple, sophisticated, and readable using two different fonts, one for the heading and one for the text. Mixing up too many fonts can look inconsistent.

Type of Theme for Your Small Business Needs.

Are you building a business page? Themes designed for businesses often include the ability to create landing pages, a call to action functionality, and pages for products, services, and contact data.

Are you planning to sell online? By choosing the right theme and plugins, you can build a powerful and secure eCommerce solution to propel your business using your website as a sales tool.

Are you planning to use a blog? If so, a basic theme will probably work well for your needs.

Do you want a membership site? Look for a theme that will allow you to provide information to members and visitors, enabling a sign-in option for restricted access to members only.

Finally, make sure that the theme you choose comes with good support. Consider buying a premium theme. Free themes will provide a space to design but have minimal flexibility to create a design that suits you or your business. Free themes might not be regularly updated, and there is little support included with a free theme. And speaking of support, make sure you get a theme that provides support just in case you run into a problem with the theme. Be sure you get a theme from a vendor with an excellent reputation and prompt, responsive tech support. We can’t over-emphasize this.

How to Make Your Website Your 24 Hours a Day, 365 Days a Year Sales Team

How to Make Your Website Your 24 Hours a Day, 365 Days a Year Sales Team

Apr 15, 2024 | Online Sales Team, Online Sales Team Part 1

How to Make Your Website Your 24 Hours a Day, 365 Days a Year Sales Team

Building Your Website to Work for You | Part 1

Your website has great potential to work for you as well as a full time sales team if it is designed to work as one.

1. Equip Your “Team” with the Right Tools

  • First of all, you’ll need a well designed, professional website
  • Optimized for all mobile devices – most people are looking at your website on their phones so it must be ready
  • Optimized for the search engines so you can be easily found in the search results
  • A fast website; one that loads quickly so as not to keep the visitors waiting
  • Great content
  • Good quality images (preferably of your own products)
  • Security to provide safety for your business and your visitors
  • e-Commerce if possible

2. Basic Communication Tools that Need to be in Place

  • Contact information either using forms or with phone number links at crucial places throughout your website.
  • A chat option is helpful for instant communication. Join Chat is a very simple chat box to install and configure. 
  • A good CRM platform such as Zoho, Salesforce, or Oracle to keep track of visitors who interact in some way with your website.

Next Week: Setting Up Your Website to be Your Sales Team | Part 2

Creating Good Content for Your Website and Why it’s Important

Mar 1, 2024 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Small Business Marketing Strategy, Social media marketing, Web Design

Creating Good Content for Your Website and Why it’s Important

Often, in conversation, it’s not what you say, but how you say it that can make all the difference in the world. The same principal can be said for your website content. There are many ways content can be presented, and how it’s presented might make the difference between increasing customer interaction and a customer closing down your website as soon as it’s opened.

Video

Videos provide an entertaining way of presenting content in a short period of time. Because it allows for movement, videos can invoke more impact through motion graphics, visual effects, and musical scoring. Videos can be used to communicate different types of information such as how-tos, demonstrations, testimonials, facts, and statistics.

Charts and Graphs

These have been used for years for visually presenting data. They have their place particularly when providing data in business meetings or research. Statistics add more credibility to your content, but reading them in textual form make them hard to grasp. Turing text into a visualization like a chart or graph makes it easier for people to see why those figures are important.

Infographic

Being a designer, this is my favorite. Infographics have been around alot longer than we think.

Infographics are a great way to present study findings, statistics, and complex information in a way that users can easily grasp and understand. So instead of going through long texts, infographics presents all that essential information at a glance.

You might ask, how are these forms of content used in your marketing. The great news is that once you have them, they can be repurposed in many ways. For example, this article started as an email. The email is created like an outline; snippets of information so as not to force the reader to read through paragraphs of text.

For this blog article, we added a bit more text to the email format. After publishing it here, we post it to various social media platforms. Finally, fleshing out the “outline” more, we use the same content for our newsletter. Developing this process even further, you can create a series of articles on one topic, turn it into an e-book and offer it on your website for people to purchase and download.

As an example of “it’s not what you say, but how you say it,” I created an infographic based on the three forms of content mentioned at the beginning of this article. Which is more interesting to view? Which helps you grasp the data easier? Which takes less time to read?

 

Determining the Best Marketing Strategy for Your Business.

Mar 1, 2024 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Small Business Marketing Strategy

If you operate a small business or practice it can be difficult to determine a cost effective way to stand out among the larger businesses or firms. The goal of our weekly newsletter is to provide you with back to basics marketing strategies and website trends and ideas specifically aimed at helping small businesses and professional practices become more visible among all the “voices” competing for your prospects.

Consider your website. While it is your most important marketing asset; driving prospects to your website can be challenging.  With a 1) plan and 2) persistence, you can successfully use your website as your primary marketing tool. We will be discussing this in more detail next week.

Consider your marketing strategy. Trying to fit into a one size fits all marketing strategy; one that seems to work well for other businesses, is a recipe for failure. It’s so easy to be tempted to spend money on digital marketing strategies that promise a good ROI. Not that this is not a viable option but you have to make sure it’s right for you! Your strategy should reflect your business objectives and “personality” (a reflection of you as owner or principal).

Consider the SWOT analysis. This chart will help you evaluate your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and it will help you plot your marketing road map. You likely completed a SWOT analysis when you started your business or practice. Now, take a step back and reevaluate your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in terms of marketing.

Consider this. There are many forms of digital marketing and they can be implemented singly or as a unit to determine which one works best for you. Just because certain marketing strategies are promoted and it seems like all the other businesses are using the same strategies, doesn’t mean they are the strategies you should be using. You have your own special area of expertise and sometimes, in order to stand out you have to NOT do what everyone else is doing! We know that sounds counterintuitive but that’s how we end up getting lost in the crowd.

“Smart brands don’t just ride trend shifts. They start them.” – Ann Handley

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