When it comes to running a website, especially if you’re using it to drive commercial opportunities your way, you’ve got to make sure you’re selling yourself properly as well. You need potential customers to know they’re in the right place as soon as they see your landing page or homepage, and you want to make it easy for them to click on your tabs and links. After all, that’s where you’re hiding the products and services they want!
No matter what kind of business you’re running, you always want to make sure your online marketing efforts aren’t going to waste. It’s how the majority of your target market are going to find you, especially if you don’t have much of a physical presence outside of your own home office. So to make sure you’ve got the right words and thoughts in mind, and that you’ve got an improvement plan for the next few months to run your website through, here’s some tips and tricks you might want to hold onto.
Your website is the main portal via which anyone is going to find you, customer or not. And if they have the want and intention to buy something that day, you’re going to want them to find you a little more worthy than any of your competitors that are just a couple of URLs away! So you’re going to need to freely broadcast your mission or your statement, and make sure it’s a friendly sentence or paragraph anyone can easily read through.
Your business has a story, of course it does. The idea for it alone came out of the depths of your mind, and was workshopped with plenty of twists and turns along the way. Maybe you had a break in your career that you desperately needed to fill, when inspiration suddenly struck you. Maybe you were stuck in a dead end job and couldn’t stop dreaming about your own business. Maybe your own mother was one day frustrated about a certain gap in the market, so now you’ve done your best to fill it for here.
Every single one of these narratives is crucial to pull in the market you’re looking for, and they need to be available for a potential customer to look at. You never know, your ethics and their morals might just match up perfectly - you’ll never know unless you tell them!
There’s a lot of methods and techniques out there when it comes to selling yourself properly, seeing as we’re doing so via a digital platform that uses software and code to run. And that means you need to know the algorithms that run the advertising world, and how you can use them to your advantage.
For example, one of the main ways to make sure your website and all it can offer is hitting the front page of Google is via a method known as SEO. It’s a concept few people understand, and even fewer employ to its max effectiveness - it’s why a digital marketing agency is always coming in handy to any new business owner looking to carve out a portion of the online world for themself.
SEO means you have all the right words and phrases for an algorithm to pick through, and thus the right image to display to anyone looking for a website like you. Don’t worry, the more you direct yourself towards giving your customers the best experience possible, the more natural your SEO efforts will be - they work hand in hand!
At the same time, you’re going to want to reach out to other online portals, maybe via a pay per click program or simply an affiliate marketing scheme. If you have your links on a page that already has quite a few hits to it, and you’ve got a product or service the owner itself believes in, you’re going to have a much easier time of exposing your company to new and fresh faces. You’ll have a better chance of establishing yourself as a trustworthy business if you have reputable sources on your side.
You want to connect to your customers. You want them to know you’re a business of the people, and you’re always around for them to ping a message to. It’s something we do quite well in the digital day and age - you have a platform that works on the basis of providing a social life, and a free space to fit your company into it. All in all, you need to get yourself a social media presence, and a good one.
Yes, you’ve got the contact details of your company clearly displayed at the bottom of your website. Sure, most people who access your homepage are going to see these, and use them if need be. You’ve clearly explained how they can put in a complaint or leave a review, and you’ve even enabled a submissions box to be sure there’s a dedicated space for any customer who needs your help. But there’s no telling if all of the traffic that drives your way are going to have the same eagle eyes, nor the want to read through sections like these - you need to make your connectivity a lot easier for this certain portion of your market.
Get yourself on Facebook and Twitter, at least, and get yourself a social media manager. These people are Godsends in the business world, as they’ll always have their eye on your business’ digital profile and adjust it to the current trends accordingly. Maybe you yourself could take on this role? That way you’ll have the kind of direct connection you’ve always wanted to the people who keep you in profit, and you can handle any commercial situation as you see fit.
Selling yourself online is going to take a lot of finessing, but you’ve got plenty of time to workshop it!