You have about 3 seconds to keep a user on your site!
How will they find you? How will you get their attention?
For many businesses, your most important marketing tool is your website. It’s how potential customers find you. It’s how you interact with existing customers. It’s how customers can follow up from previous purchases.
Many small business people understand the importance of having a web presence but are overwhelmed at the prospect of developing a website. Our web developers will take the time to get to know your business and how a web presence can help you attract and retain more clients.
Many people mistakenly believe that a website is all about technology. Actually technology is simply a mechanism to deliver your message. Think of TV or radio. You really don’t care that much about the technology behind the TV or radio; you’re more concerned about the message. The web is the same. Yes, someone needs to pay attention to the technology. But your primary focus is on what you want your website to communicate about your business.
Tekpals is here to help you through every step of web development – from initial planning, coding, hosting and support. In fact, we offer a free hosting package that includes both web and email for all web development clients! We’ll create the web pages and host them on our servers. You can also set up your own hosting if your prefer. We’ll design your site so that you how you can make content changes or add pages through a web browser without impacting the underlying technology structure. That way, you can do simple changes yourself.
We’ve developed the Web Cycle to help you think about what you want out of your web site. While there will be nuances for each business, there are really five fundamental parts to your web message:
We call this topic attraction on purpose. This isn’t sales. Attraction is how your potential customers find you on the web.When you are your genuine self and your website is also a reflection of your genuine self, you literally attract your target market to your site.
Some people refer to attraction as search engine optimization. Yes, SEO is important and we’ll develop your site so that search engines can find you easily. We can help you with basic SEO and refer you to experts when needed. But we believe that there’s a lot more to attraction than just SEO. The first step is to identify your target market – being very specific. Who is this group? How do they think? What do they expect from your website? Do they prefer to communicate with you in person, over the phone or electronically?
Attraction may also include developing Google AdWords campaigns, Facebook pages, blogs or other feeds. Of course, what we recommend will depend on who your target market is.
Now that a potential customer has found you, what do you want this person to feel when they reach your site? We call this your impact. The impact happens quickly. It’s the look and feel of your site – often before anything is acrually read. Perhaps you want people to have a feeling of openness, fun and lightness. Perhaps you’re looking for a solid, professional response. Maybe you’re looking for a warm, earthy feeling. The design of your website should mirror the impact you’re looking for and we’ll make sure that it’s an extension of your brand.
The details of the contact phase are focused on the flow and feel of your website. Your site should be easy to navigate. We’ll look at the mix of text and graphics. We’ll apply heatmap theory to look at how someone scans your pages. Sometimes potential customers are willing to read to find out more about you. Other times, they want answers to specific questions. Sometimes, they just want to check things out.
Your site should accommodate all types of users. During this stage we’ll develop the wireframe – a web page template that will guide the positioning of elements, the colors and graphic images common to all pages on your site. Finally, we’ll help you with the word copy or text on your site. We can refer you to professional copy editors if needed.
Action is focused on what you want a potential customer to do once they have the impact you’re looking for. At Tekpals we call this action outcome. In many cases, the outcome is tangible: a purchase, an inquiry, a signup or a phone call. Other times, the outcome isn’t as clear: disseminating information, effecting an opinion, reinforcing previous contacts, or entertainment.
Be clear on the action you’re looking for. In many cases, you may want more than one action. For example, you may want a store sale, a newsletter signup, and a Twitter follower. In other cases you simply want to communicate information about who you are and what your product is. Whatever the case, it’s important to make it easy for customers to reach out to you. The design of your site should make it easy for someone to complete the action.
It’s also important to look at data. How long do people stay on your site once they land there? What is the percentage of unique visitors that complete a desired outcome? How many marketing emails that you send are opened and read? How many links are clicked on? We’ll help you design your site for maximum outcome.
How do you support your customers once you’ve completed a sale? What information does a customer want as a view into your support process? For example, a local printing shop sends an email at each state of the printing process: when the art is reviewed and approved for the press, another email when printing has begun, another email when the material is collated and cut and a final email when the printing job is ready. These status updates let customers know how things are moving along.
We can help you use technology to keep your customers updated throughout the process. We can help you automate this process so that these customer communications happen automatically. We can also help you set up web communities for your customers to interact with each other. Maybe a blog would be helpful for you to support your customer base; we can help you set up and maintain a blog to communicate with people interested in your business.
Your best source of future customers are existing customers. We can help you find effective ways of keeping your customer base. Many businesses find that electronic newsletters are a great way to give potential customers useful information along with marketing information. A newsletter announcing a sale may be read, but when you wrap that sale announcement with an article of interest to your target market, you can usually double your open rate!
Retention also means keeping your website fresh. If your website is continually updated with new information, customers will come back for the updates. We can set up your site so that content updates are easy for you to do on your own.