Developing a Successful Web Presence for Your Business

Introduction to information system Unit 10: website (selling) development

Unit outline Concept you should know • Absorbing the web into your overall business plans • Adjusting your marketing for the web and social media • expanding your market

Hypnosis of web base • You must have the business fundamentals right before you can have a truly successful web presence • Successful web marketing requires a combination of methods • The customer is the measure of all things web, from site design to marketing

Rearranging Your Marketing Mix • If you’ve been in business for a while, you might have forgotten some of your recurring marketing investments. Here are a few examples to spark your memory: a Yellow Pages listing, signage, business cards and letterhead, logo design, a listing in a local business club directory, T-shirts for the girls’ soccer team, newspapers or other print ads, direct mail, local fliers, word of mouth, radio spots, or billboards. If you’re not sure where new customers come from, ask them! You might be surprised where word has spread.

Rearranging Your Marketing Mix • If you don’t have extra money to invest in developing and promoting a web presence, decide which existing methods you can cut in favor of more cost-effective online marketing. If you duplicate your reach at a lower cost online, you can put the difference into your website.

Rearranging Your Marketing Mix • What you already know about marketing is true. Profit from your own success. Unless you’re starting a new business online, your new customers are going to look similar to your old ones. You already know how to sell to them, what they need, what appeals to their emotions, and what satisfies their inner cravings. Your website and web marketing need to do the same. Take advantage of what you know in your head and in your gut.

Reaching your current audience online • If you haven’t done so in a while, write a paragraph describing your current customers: age, gender, income level, education, geographical region, or job title (if you sell business-to-business). What else do they buy? What do they like to read? It’s easy to research your markets online.

Incorporating social media • Social media — online services that encourage interaction between you and your customers, or among your customers — presents both opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, services like Facebook (networking) and Twitter (short messaging service) open up potentially huge numbers of new prospects.

Incorporating social media • Here are a few key points to keep in mind about social media • Contrary to popular opinion, social media are not free. While many social media services don’t carry an up-front charge, they can eat up your time faster than the Cookie Monster consumes Oreos. Time is money! • You can’t use social media instead of having a website or blog with your own domain name. Research shows that people still go back to your website as the first source of information for your company; in spite of the popularity of social media, the website is king.

Finding new customers • ✓ Expand your geographical reach. • ✓ Go after a new consumer demographic or vertical industry segment for existing products. • ✓ Sell new products and services to completely new audiences.

Understanding What Your Web Presence Must Accomplish • A business site has to succeed on multiple levels to pull a prospect or visitor into your marketing orbit. • Without initial curb appeal, your site doesn’t have a chance to establish itself in visitors’ minds. • If your site lacks strong content, visitors don’t have a reason to stay long enough to find out what you have to offer and how wonderful • you are. And without a reason to return, visitors might never establish enough confidence to purchase your goods or services

Catching the visitor’s attention • You have only four seconds (that’s right — four seconds) to make a first impression. • That isn’t enough time for a visitor to read your content. It’s time enough only for our emotion-based lizard brains to react to color, layout, design, navigation (maybe), and perhaps a headline. If you haven’t caught people in your cybernet by then, they’re gone, probably never to return. • uses an attention-grabbing marketing tag, “Naked Travel, Fully Clothed” (located in the upper-left corner below the logo), along with great visuals, to engage viewers.

Catching the visitor’s attention • Fonts, images, activities — everything on the site must appeal to the target audience you’re trying to reach. You wouldn’t put bright colors on a site selling urns for pet ashes, or pastels on a site aimed at teenagers. • A high-tech site in silver and black has a very different look and feel than one selling country decor with gingham and duckies. • A site selling high-priced goods needs lots of white (empty) space to look rich; • a discount site does well with crowded images. That’s why I recommend finding a designer who knows about marketing communications.

What Makes a Good Website Homepage Design • 1) The design clearly answers "Who I am," "What I do," and/or "What can you (the visitor) do here.“ If you're a well-known brand or company (i.e., Coca-Cola) you may be able to get away with not having to describe who you are and what you do; but the reality is, most businesses still need to answer these questions so that each visitor knows they are in the "right place."

What Makes a Good Website Homepage Design • 2) The design resonates with the target audience. A homepage needs to be narrowly focused -- speaking to the right people in their language. The best homepages avoid "corporate gobbledygook," and eliminate the fluff.

What Makes a Good Website Homepage Design • 3) The design communicates a compelling value proposition. When a visitor arrives on your homepage, it needs to compel them to stick around. The homepage is the best place to nail your value proposition so that prospects choose to stay on your website and not navigate to your competitors'.

What Makes a Good Website Homepage Design • 4) The design is optimized for multiple devices. All the homepages listed here are highly usable, meaning they are easy to navigate and there aren't "flashy" objects that get in the way of browsing, such as flash banners, animations, pop-ups, or overly-complicated and unnecessary elements. Many are also mobile-optimized, which is an incredibly important must-have in today's mobile world.

What Makes a Good Website Homepage Design • 5) The design includes calls-to-action (CTAs). Every homepage listed here effectively uses primary and secondary calls-to-action to direct visitors to the next logical step. Examples include "Free Trial," "Schedule a Demo," "Buy Now,“ or "Learn More."

What Makes a Good Website Homepage Design • 6) The design is always changing. The best homepages aren't always static. Some of them are constantly changing to reflect the needs, problems, and questions of their visitors.

What Makes a Good Website Homepage Design • 7) The design is effective. A well-designed page is important to building trust, communicating value, and navigating visitors to the next step. As such, these homepages effectively use layout, CTA placement, whitespace, colors, fonts, and other supporting elements

reference • https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/34006/15-examples-of-brilliant-homepage-design.aspx#sm.000ke889n178mfgbskj1qbpdp0wtt

Developing a Successful Web Presence for Your Business