Many small business owners leave the design and composition of their web site to a third party who is generally unfamiliar with the needs of their customer base. They also fail to incorporate a web marketing strategy that integrates social media with their web site and their overall marketing plan.
For you to avoid this trap, you need to completely understand your favorite customers, and how well you are treating them when they are accessing your web site and how well your web presence is meeting your business goals.
There are 5 key questions which must be answered to ensure a quality web site experience for your customers:
1. How well is your web site serving the needs of your customer base?
Are they getting timely responses to their queries or submissions? Are your online functions like order taking and invoicing integrated with your back-end financials, your inventory control and your customer database.
2. Are your clients experiencing performance issues and if so where?
Can they easily look up product displays and are the prices up-to-date? Are some pages loading faster than others. Do they have to wait for certain types of information.
3. Are these problems occurring in specific areas of your site?
Is the site content structured in a way that makes sense for the customers? Can they easily navigate the site and is there a site map. Is there a search function for the entire site?
4. Are your social media sites smoothly linked to your web site?
Is your Facebook page easily accessible from your web site and vice versa. Does the same hold for Twitter and Pinterest and do you use videos to explain how certain products work or give demonstrations and are these videos running on your site and is there a link to your YouTube channel?
5. Does your email strategy include your web site and your social media sites?
When you send out email does it have links to your social media sites. Do you make use of squeeze pages or Landing pages on your site and tie these to specific campaigns. Are you able to see the performance of these pages by marketing campaign.
In today’s world, your web site plays a very important role in your small business whether you are a bricks and mortar outfit or a clicks and mortar one. To build an effective web presence, it is essential that you fully understand your target market and your favorite customers. You need not only to know there geographics and demographics, you must also understand how they think and behave and most importantly the key words and phrases that they use. Only then can you fashion a site that services them correctly.
