Month: October 2021

The most vital asset to any business is its customers. Each business needs to find the best way to maintain these customers, and there is no better way than to keep them engaged. Statistically speaking, companies possessing the most potent customer engagement practices can keep up to 89% of their customers, while those that don’t can only retain 33% with weak customer engagement practices.

The majority of the company’s profits come from good customer engagement, which is at two-thirds, statistically speaking. To create customer engagement is a top strategic priority for companies. These customers represent a higher profitability share of 23%, revenue, and relationship growth. Many business benefits come from good customer engagement practices.

Good customer engagement practices should place the customers at the center of the business to offer them positive experiences, encouraging customer loyalty and company growth. Good customer engagement emanates from continuous interactions between the customer and the company, offered by the company but chosen by the customer for the best experience.

It should be able to foster loyalty and lasting relationships with your customers. Companies should understand that every customer wants to have a different experience when shopping. This kind of experience is the determinant to the success or failure of many businesses. 

 

13 Tips On How To Create Customer Engagement

Having established that this is a core to ensuring significant gains in your company, let’s now look at how to create customer engagement practice that will elevate your company to the top heights of business anywhere in the world. 

1. Understand Your Customers And Their Journey

Knowing who your customers are and how they interact with your business is the first step to create customer engagement strategy. Map your customers’ journey, all the essential, relevant experiences, and the challenges they go through. These statistics will help you meet their needs effectively and also identify opportunities for engaging them. 

Create customer profiles. Pick out the characteristics that are relevant to your company. It also helps to look into other factors like their location, earnings, or even based on the questions that they ask, base it on building profiles.

 

2. Customer Segmentation

Customer segmentation refers to making use of the data collected from the customers to create helpful audience segments. Segmentation considers such factors as the customers’ interests, demographics, interests, age, sex, and many others from what the company collects. 

The main aim of segmentation is to deliver services that are relevant and personalized to each customer. It helps to generate better-qualified leads when segmentation is done in consideration of the individual customer needs. 

 

3. Personalize Your Services

There are high possibility that your customers are from different parts of the world and have other interests. One of the most common customer engagement strategies in recent years is personalization. Each customer wants to be offered services that are tailored to their specific needs.

There are several ways to apply the principle of personalized services. For example, showing your customer an ad of an event near them or using their first name when sending them an email could entice them as it is not generalized but more personalized. Starting businesses could start small before growing more significant by offering hyper-relevant services to their customers.

 

4. Replace Forms With Lead Generation Bots 

The primary method of lead generation is filling up forms. Forms are an outdated method and are tedious and boring to the current generation. A team-up with chatbots and lead generations can bring your business several leads. They will also reduce the friction and smoothen the data collection process, making your customers enjoy your services better. 

Suppose your business aims to collect lead information essential for creating a chatbot to ask relevant questions and respond to new questions from previous visitors’ answers; in that case, your company needs lead generation chatbots. It will equip your company with better-qualified leads as compared to companies that still use forms.

 

5. Crowdsourcing 

Crowdsourcing is a method of acquiring data from numerous sources, within and without the organization. It targets to find solutions to different problems and reach customers at their individual needs. You can do crowdsourcing by making visitors participate in voting on your website, organizing surveys relevant to the visitors’ interests request tips from your customers on your publicly shared development strategies.

 Involving your customers in your business-critical decisions and processes makes them feel empowered, appreciated, and valued. They will want to participate more in your sales and, in the end, elevate your business. 

 

6. Educate Your Audience 

 It can send educational messages about your business or promotional messages on upcoming webinars or discounts on products. Inculcating a CRM in your bot can amalgamate every subscriber’s data, making your lead management system free-flowing.

 

7. Make Use Of Visual Engagement Tools

Lead generation strategy relies on certain key aspects, one of which is audience education. Your customers will only purchase your products when they have adequate information about what you are selling. Chatbots could play an essential role in your business by providing the much-needed education your customers need on your products.

Engaging your customers visually through co-browsing, annotations, or screen sharing enables your customers to better understand and connect with you emotionally. A Forbes News research indicates a customer satisfaction rate of up to 89% when customers are engaged using co-browsing. Co-browsing enables the agents to interact with customers in real-time.

Customers receive instant support and are guided as soon as they need it. The customer’s online shopping experience is improved drastically with co-browsing. When your co-browsing is integrated into your e-commerce website, sales agents can help customers complete their purchases. 

Credit card details are sensitive information that most people shy away from providing due to security issues. However, with co-browsing, sales agents can help customers fill out order forms, reducing cart abandonment rates. Visual engagement tools are beneficial assets to the success of any business. 

 

8. Learn From Your Mistakes

When a customer is unhappy with a product or a service that you offer and comes back to complain, they want to be listened to and understood. They want to feel that engagement and human touch. They are not interested in being provided with a solution, making them feel like you are just rushing through to close off the issue. Instead, accept your mistakes and talk your customers through the step-by-step strategies you would take to solve their problem and ensure it does not occur again.

An unhappy customer will also feel so much better when you apologize to them whenever it fits. Realize that your unhappiest customers amount to your honest critiques. Take their complaints into consideration as this will place you on track to make improvements in your services. It also helps you to update your customer profiles from the complaints they make.

You will understand their likes and dislikes and offer them better services the next time they purchase an item.

 

9. Learn What Drives Your Customers

If you know how to put it to good use, customers’ feedback can be an excellent asset to your business. Organize and perform customer surveys to give you insights into what drives value for your customers. Learn what value they have placed on your services or products. Make frequent and short questionnaires and have your customers fill them.  Consider asking them how they feel about their experience with you.

Allow your customers to give suggestions on how they think you can improve the experience they’ve had with you. Ask your customers if they are contented with the kind of support you gave them. Find out what they liked from their experience with you and why. Give them space to make suggestions on how they think your employees can do better.

Apart from these questions, give them a free allowance to say anything else that they think about your business, which could be feedback or just a comment.  Answers to these questions will significantly impact your business if only you would put serious consideration into them and make improvements to your customer’s complaints. 

 

10. Schedule Appointments with Lead Bots

Appointment booking is essential in companies that operate on a business-to-business basis and healthcare services that experience several meeting-related requests. Customers can schedule appointments on the website, and after that, the notifications are forwarded to the relevant teams.  Businesses with lead bots can cut the cost of hiring personnel to handle appointment traffic. Lead generation chatbots enable you to schedule appointments even in the absence of your teams.

 

Whenever an appointment is scheduled, an email notification is sent along with the customer’s contact information. It keeps your customers engaged offline via a call, and the same is confirmed. A bot will never replace human personnel, but it can ask relevant questions and personalize each customer’s experience. Healthcare providers, for instance, could use such services the bot offers as easy booking of appointments and sending notifications with reminders.

 

11. Adopt Live chat Handover On Complex Sales Conversations 

The primary channels for customer engagements are live chat and chatbot. Awareness of both advantages and disadvantages will place you in a better position to either use live chat or chatbot or balance both. I will equip you with guidelines to help you decide on which choice to make. 

You can use chatbot as your primary contact channel for real-time responses, but move to live chat to respond to more complex questions that would call for human assistance. Chatbots would better serve businesses that demand continuous activeness. When your sales team is away, they can engage your customers by acknowledging the issues and scheduling appointments. 

While bots will make instant responses and provide answers, the customers are looking for a more humane touch that is always appreciated when you can understand your customers and meet their needs. Conversation rates also increase when customers get a great experience and have their needs well taken care of. 

Cost is also of concern when you are a small startup. Bots can be easily scaled on peak hours without the additional cost of infrastructure and resources and are more worth investing in. 

It would be appropriate for businesses to balance these two technologies to create more leads and a better customer experience.

 

12. Offer Unparalleled Customer Service

Customers tend to fall in love with businesses because of their uniquely friendly customer service representatives. The rate at which customers buy from a particular company relies on how they feel treated by the customer service.  The staff plays a huge role in the engagement of customers. Adopting a customer-centric business model plays a vital role in improving customer engagement rates.

Build connections with your customers that go much deeper than just the buying and selling exchange. Your customer service team should be equipped with the right tools and equipment and emotional intelligence to handle the different customers that reach out to them. With these, you will be able to offer the best possible customer service experience.

 

13. Engage Customers Who Intend To Walk Away

The primary reason why customers leave your website could be because they don\’t get accurate information in time. The best tool to engage the customers who intend to abandon their online shopping cart or leave your website would be lead generation chatbots.  With lead bots, customers are provided with real-time sales assistance that they are in most need of. With this sort of real-time help, customers can quickly decide what they want to buy, which significantly reduces bounce rates. They also engage customers with accurate information at the right time and lead customers to their final purchases.

Customer engagement, as we have seen, is a crucial pillar to the success of any business. The proper customer engagement practices will enable you to retain the customers you have and, by extension, attract many more customers. Everyone wants to be confident that they are experiencing the best services when they walk into a store or visit an online platform to make purchases.

How you engage these customers will determine whether you make a sale or lose a potential customer. With these insights, you should place the best practices possible to elevate your business to the next level.

 

If you have been browsing the internet, chances are you have already come across landing pages. Anyone in the marketing field is no stranger to landing pages. When you click on an ad, you are taken to a page. This page is referred to as a landing page. Sometimes, a landing page can be the page that follows a call-to-action button or one that serves as the homepage of a website. You might have clicked an attractive ad before in a bid to look for more information. Other times, you may have abandoned the website landing page either because it was too confusing or it did not hold enough information.

Essentially, the purpose of a landing page is to encourage you to convert to a lead or customer. This tells you that landing pages are uniquely powerful components of a business’s digital marketing strategy. Usually, landing pages contain lead forms that ask visitors for their contact information in exchange for something valuable, otherwise known as an offer. Regardless of the several existing landing pages, the intent is the same across all of them- to acquire more leads.

Still, building a landing page can be deceptively easy. Regardless of whether you are using a plug-and-play solution like HubSpot, Unbounce, or Marketo to make your landing pages, going in blind is not recommended. This article provides you with some of the best practices proven over time to boost conversion rates. Keep in mind that a targeted, uniquely designed landing page with a solid format and sound copy is all you need to get almost anyone to submit their contact information.

Why do You Need a Website Landing Page?

Imagine how protective you are of your personal information. What will it take for someone to willingly give up their contact information over the internet? Is there a point in creating a particular page just for people to fill out a form? How about just using your homepage or about page?

You will be able to answer all these questions at the end of this article. But to answer briefly, a landing page gets rid of distractions by removing navigation, competing for links, and alternate options to capture your visitor’s full attention. Landing pages are specially designed to create conversions.

 

Best Practices for Website Landing Page

Let’s now cover the Landing Page best practices that will go a long way in boosting your conversions. 

1. Ensure the design is straightforward and easy to navigate

I have no doubt you have ever landed on a page and just got confused or somewhat lost. Or sometimes, you are looking for a particular icon to help you execute a specific command, and you simply can’t find it. Probably because there are too many dropdowns, display ads, and distractions. You may actually be losing conversion because of this reason.

Your landing page design must reflect your brand colors. It should look like something you would want to include on your website. Besides this, you also want to make the page navigable.

 

2. Create a benefit-focused headline

More than two-thirds of the people who visit your landing page will bounce off the page. Keeping this number low is vital for the success of your business. So, how do you achieve this? Ensure that your visitors know and understand what is in it for them within seconds of arriving. 

The first thing people will encounter when visiting your page is your headline. That being the case, your headline should clearly and concisely communicate the value of your landing page and offer.

 

3. Settle for an image that illustrates the offer

Visual representation is critical. An image representation should represent your target audience. The main aim of the image should be to convey a feeling; it should provide a clear illustration of how your visitor will feel once they receive your offer. Some images may work better than others. It will be best for you to always split-test your options.

 

4. Make sure your message matches your ads

One of the main reasons you should be using landing pages is to ensure that you send people to a page that matches their expectations. Matching your landing page copy and design to the ads you are running in search or social is essential in making sure that your visitors have made a “good click.”

It will also be ideal for you to consider creating variant pages or using dynamic text replacement to ensure message match if you are running many ads with different headlines.

5. Include social proof and case studies

Regardless of how good you are or how good your offering is, including the voices of satisfied customers and community members will add an air of authenticity to your claims that even the best copy will lack. Even more important is that you should humanize these testimonials by including personal details such as full names, place of residence, job title, biographical details, videos, date of purchase, or even portraits. Understand that most of your visitors are going to distrust the typical marketing spiel unless you are profoundly original.

If you are in a position to include the nice things your customers have said about you, do it. So what if you do not have a large cache of compliments? Simple- lean on logos instead as long as you obtain permission. A few different platforms will integrate with your landing pages to keep reviews fresh such as Trust Pilot and Yelp. It is even possible to use simple embedded codes. 

However, try and keep these reviews at the bottom of the page. This ensures that your audience is not distracted from the action you want them to take.

 

6. Perform regular tests and updates for your landing pages

While best practices are essential, A/B testing your landing pages is one of the best ways to ensure that you are converting as much as possible. Do you maybe feel that your problem-focused headline is not working? Or do you probably want to ask questions in a different order on your form? Or maybe you have your boss insisting that your CTA button should be fluorescent pink? Well, the best thing to do is test it out before you commit and make decisions based on data rather than gut instinct.

The content on your landing pages should be up to date for obvious reasons, just like any blog post or site page. If you notice that your previously best-performing ad is falling off, the problem may be outdated landing pages. Sometimes even a simple refresh of the background colors, some fresh copy, and a new CTA will prevent fatigue. It will also serve as a signal to Google and any other ad platform that the content is fresh.

 

7. Create a mobile-friendly landing page

It is essential for any marketing to make your landing pages compatible with any device or viewable on any screen size. A significant number of people browse using their smartphones. This implies that their screens will be smaller, interactivity will be more limited, and load times will be longer.

Looking at all these qualities, none is good for your mobile conversion rates. That means you’ve got to ensure better performance by designing a mobile-responsive landing page that adapts to these devices. You can shift the layouts, make CTAs more visible and shrink images or remove them entirely.

 

8. Search optimization

Optimizing for search with target keywords is very critical. Much as you will be driving visitors to your landing page through email blasts, social posts, and other marketing strategies, your page needs to be optimized for your paid campaigns and organic search Which means that when someone searches for your key phrase, they should find your landing page.

9. Place the important information above the fold

Like an email, you want to ensure that all the critical stuff is visible first when someone is clicking through your landing pages. Initially, the term ‘above the fold” refers to the upper half of the front page of a newspaper. Nowadays, this term more often describes what is visible on a screen before scrolling down. If you want to enhance visibility, keep your headline, call to action, and your unique sales proposition above the fold. Be careful not to cram more than you need to onto the screen, as it can make it difficult to see your CTA. Still, ensure that everything a visitor needs can be seen from the get-go.

There are things like testimonials, client logos, and case studies that you can comfortably place below the fold. Even suggested content can be placed below the fold. 

 

10. Ensure your landing page loads quickly

Higher chances are that you already have landing pages if you are a marketer. A high bounce rate on a certain page could be a result of the long load time. While it can be pretty easy to cut corners with one-off landing pages, make sure that there is nothing too heavy or big on the page. When your landing page takes a long to load, it may damage any SEO you have done for the page.

How Do You Design a Landing Page?

It is not enough to only know the best practices regarding your landing pages. Ultimately, you will need to come up with one. When this time comes, you need to know how you can design one. When you think about design, what comes to your mind are creativity, colors, and pretty pictures.

But for a landing page, we look further into the meaning of design to mean functional, effective, and direction-oriented. To develop a well-designed landing page, you will have to tap into both your right and left brain. This article looks at how you can incorporate both concepts to get yourself a landing page that will convert your visitors.

• Structure of the Landing Page

The good thing about landing pages is that you do not need to get too creative. Many landing pages are characteristically structured in this manner because it has been proven to work. While it is still okay to infuse your creativity through branded elements and images, you must stick to a landing page format that people are used to seeing. Here, we look at the five elements of a good landing page:

Headline: commands the visitors’ attention

1. Lead form: sits above the fold to capture visitors’ information

2. CTA: action-oriented and compelling

3. Relevant image

4. Copy and description: informs and entices your visitor to complete your form.

This doesn’t mean that your landing page is only limited to the components mentioned above. You are at liberty to include more than this. Ensure you know your audience, where they are from, and where they are in their buyer’s journey to know how much you need to include. 

• The layout of the Landing Page

Most people do not read every word of your well-crafted copy. Often, people will skim through and pull out the most important bits of information. You need to ensure that these bits stand out so that your visitors do not meet anything important. This brings us to a few critical things:

1. Ensure that you place the most important information above the fold so that your visitor can see it without needing to scroll down.
2. Do a blink test on your page. This means that a visitor should be able to gather the main message in less than five seconds.
3. Make use of negative space to prevent your visitor from feeling overwhelmed. Negative space will enhance comprehension, engagement, and focus.
4. Use bullets and short paragraphs to convey your message. This makes your copy easy to digest.
5. Try working out the important copy into an F-pattern. This is the direction that most people scan a page online. Ensure that you work with the flow of visual patterns to drive people to the key points. These key points will get them to convert.

• Page Colors for Landing Page

It is only expected that the design of your landing page, which includes the colors you use, should bear a reflection of your website. You realize that you are aiming for a long-term relationship with the people who visit your landing page. The implication here is that people visiting your site need to familiarize themselves with your branding colors and unique style. Ideally, the more people recognize your brand, the more trust they develop in you. And the more people trust you, the easier it is to get them to do what you want them to do.

Consider using alternate colors on the elements of your page that require to stand out. One of these areas is your CTA button. What you’ve got to embrace here is the art of contrasting colors; you will want to go for colors that can easily draw your audience’s attention. Go ahead and research the colors that perform well-the colors that convert best- and use them on your landing page.

• Images on your Landing Page

One of the first things that people will see on your landing page is the image there. People naturally process visuals quicker than they do text. Consequently, the images on your landing page set the tone of their entire experience. The question, however, is- how do you choose between the millions of stock photos taking up space in your computer? Let’s look at a few things that will guide your selection, shall we?

1. Your target audience: The knowledge of your target audience will come in handy when selecting the images for your landing page. Ask yourself questions like: “what is your persona?”, “How does your persona look like?”, “What is their dressing code?” “what are their interests?”. Such questions and their answers will guide you in determining the images to be placed front and center on your landing page. If you are looking to appeal to your audience, then your images must represent them in some way.

2. The point of focus on your landing page: The concept of knowing where you want your audience to look on your landing page is based on the idea that people follow directional clues. It is like where someone is pointing. What I’m trying to say is that if you want people to do a particular thing, consider an image that drives their attention toward that very action.

3. The message: Ultimately, the images on your landing page should act as a reinforcement to your message. Keep in mind that every element on your landing page has a specific purpose. Because your image is the first thing that people will see, it is important that it helps clarify what the visitor can expect from your page. The whole point is that you need to make sure that your image adds value.

1. 1.  

Most of the tips covered apply to all landing pages. Still, lead gen landing pages require a little bit of something else to work optimally. This list goes over some of the few extra pointers that will make a difference, especially for your nurture-based campaigns:

• • Reduce friction with multi-step forms
  • Include a privacy policy
  • Avoid manual entry
  • Say “thank you.”

 

Website design practices have gone through an evolution process over the years. Every year brings forth advancement or improvement in website design practices. Let’s get more practical here, shall we? Envision the last time you saw an old-school HTML-built website ranking highly in search engines. I bet you can’t actually do it. If you can, then you can admit that it was way long ago.

New practices, new standards, and just about new everything else emerge regarding website design over years. As such, websites have had to continuously change and evolve to stay current with the trends. Your website’s effectiveness today largely depends on website practices that you adopt.

If you want to stand out and be apart from your competitors in the current competitive market, you need to throw out outdated web design trends. Now is the time to give search engines what they want and give your users what they are looking for. You risk losing leads to your competition if your website is not up to par. And you don’t want that, do you?

Well, if you are in a situation close to this, you are in the right place. We provide you with the best practices for website design that will significantly impact your website’s relevance.

 

Best Website Design Practices For Small Business

 

1. Make a user-oriented design

Your primary target when designing your website is your leads, which will eventually convert into sales. With this in mind, you should be able to develop a website that attends to your users’ needs. The user experience should be impeccable.

What exactly do we mean by “User Experience?” Commonly abbreviated as UX, User Experience is the process of enhancing user satisfaction with a product. You achieve this by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction.

To put it simply, your customer’s needs should be your priority when designing your website. How so? Make it simple. Make it easy to use- a website that will allow visitors to quickly and efficiently interact with it. One that will keep them visiting again and again and again until they make purchases.

If you settle for a poor design, you risk sending your visitors back to where they came from. You miss the chance to attract potential leads, some of who may convert to sales. Creating a helpful website with original content will fulfill your visitor’s needs. It should be a usable website, one which is easy to navigate.

Not just on desktops or laptops, no. A good website design should provide smooth access even on mobile devices. This is especially important because a lot of users nowadays access various websites through their mobile devices.

A desirable website will attract visitors. Take a look at your creation. Do your brand and website elements speak about you and your business in the best way possible? How about credibility? Does your website represent you as the industry authority that people can turn to and trust?
See, it is not just about coming up with a website. You must keep all these things in mind while developing your website to help you stay focused on what matters the most- your visitors.

2. Identify your target audience

Any time you develop your website, you need to know who your target audience will be. Before going into the details of the website, you must know who you are targeting. This will help you create a website that will best serve your audience. Crucial information like demographics, buying habits, income, and occupation will help you meet your audience’s needs to the latter. You should be able to analyze even your typical site visitor’s pain points, hobbies, and interests.

Such kind of data will help you understand the specific characteristics of your target audience. In turn, you will be able to know what exactly your audience wants from your site. You will know the site’s components that are critical for providing your audience with the best experience.

Additionally, you will be in a position to the way between information that is more important to your audience and how you can retrieve the same and get it to them. Your audience’s knowledge is one of the fundamental best practices of website designing when looking to build an effective website.

3. Embrace Consistency

In anything you are taking part in, consistency is critical. It does not matter whether you are building a business or a website. What will keep you going till the end, or rather the peak, is consistency.

Consistency is what differentiates a loser and a winner in any field. This means that regardless of your story or history, your branding cohesiveness across all your platforms is crucial. That applies to your website too. Why is this vital?
You see when people are researching or looking across products. They are more likely to go to a website that:

• • Evokes familiarity.
  • Is visually appealing.
  • Looks trustworthy.
  • Aligns with them and their beliefs or personality.

When your website achieves all the above, you are more likely to get more visitors. More visitors mean more leads. And more leads mean a higher conversion rate. How then do you ensure consistency with your branding? Simple: Keep your branding in line with your business and your customers. Do this by ensuring that your website has the same logo, uses the same motto, uses the same colors, and has the appropriate personality and tone in the content.

Keep in mind that your business or website’s size does not really change the importance of branding. Ideally, branding is essential for everyone. By being consistent, you will help people quickly identify and remember you across all your platforms.

4. Provide an insightful navigation

Let me begin by helping you understand how critical your navigation bar is. You have your website in place. Depending on your offer’s services or products, chances are that your website has more than one page, right? This means users have to go through pages one at a time to see what you are offering.

One of the best practices for website design is creating organized and functional navigation. Your navigation bar is critical in helping your users find information fast.

Rather than having a generic tab that includes all your products, it will be very beneficial that you break it down into smaller tabs. Ensure that you use the correct headings to separate your information effectively when creating your navigation.

Another thing you should factor in is that your navigation should be simple and easy to follow. No one wants to spend loads of time trying to familiarize themselves with your navigation when they can find a better option out there, right? It is essential that your users can find the product category that is of relevance to them. At the same time, they should see the subcategories of different types of products that fall under the main category. All these, they should access with ease.

5. Make use of negative space

Utilizing negative space between your design elements and content provides breathing space for your website. It allows you to present your website in an appealing and catchy manner. Leaving ample padding space between text images and headings will go a long way in helping you achieve this kind of look.

You do not want to overload your website with text and visuals when building it.

Often, crowded pages will leave your audience feeling confused and overwhelmed. Some users may even leave your website altogether. Negative space will help keep your audience focused when visiting your pages. It will allow them to browse through your site with ease.

6. Maintain Familiarity

When it comes to your Call To Action, you must avoid distracting your users with different shapes or colors. Your users want to experience some kind of familiarity when visiting your website. Take an example of Amazon’s website.

You do not see their website using different colored “Add To Cart” buttons, right? Well, that tells you something. Try experimenting to find a good balance of color and shape that attracts the visitor’s eye and stick with that which works best for your website.

7. Focus on Writing Better Website Content

Your website’s content is no doubt the most crucial factor when it comes to converting visitors and appealing search engines. While this may be the case, it can be challenging to balance the two. Here, we look at some of the practices you can adopt to achieve this balance:

A. Write the Content on Your Service Pages For Converting Visitors

Creating high-quality content on your service pages will go a long way in helping you gain higher conversions. How so? Typically, people will visit your service pages to learn more about your company and the services you offer. Consequently, high-quality content on the service pages will help your visitors determine the following:

• • The service or product offered.
  •  Some of the features of the services or products offered.
  • What do you do to provide the service or product?
  • The benefits of selecting you for this product or service.
  • How to contact you?

The best thing you can do is push to highlight the benefits of your service and not just focus on the features. That’s because focusing on the features of your product or service will put you on the same level as every other website or business in the same industry. Try describing your service by pointing out the benefits of your service. In doing so, you stand a higher chance of converting your visitors to customers.

B. Write Educating Content On Your Blogs For Visitors

People usually visit blog posts to seek answers and more in-depth information regarding a topic. That says a lot about the importance of having a website with blogging capabilities.

If yours does not have this feature, it may be time to consider a change. When done in the right way, blogging is the key to increasing your rankings on search engines. It is one of the ways you can achieve loads of free organic traffic in search engines.

However, if your blogs are too shallow, self-promoting, and are targeting keywords, you will find yourself not ranking unless you are investing some very serious effort. Your blogs should be relevant to your business. It should be uniquely crafted, one that provides in-depth and valuable content without being too self-promoting. Below are some of the typical and well-performing blog topics that you may want to consider:

• • Answers to frequently asked questions related to your business, services, or products.
  • Guides to some of the things that your customers may be interested in learning or doing themselves.
  • Comprehensive information related to a specific service or topic that you would otherwise not be able to include on your service page.

 

Providing this kind of content in your blog posts will help educate your customers. Additionally, you will be able to increase your brand awareness. At the same time, your website will rank higher and reach even broader audiences in search engines. You may want to consider some additional content writing tips listed below:

• • Incorporate keywords and onsite SEO in your content. These two are very crucial to both service pages and blogs. Go even further by making sure that you are researching and implementing the two correctly. If you cannot do it by yourself, get a professional to assist you.
  • Make use of proper headings to bring about a clear distinction between the different sections of your content.
  • Make your content sound natural, especially when read aloud.
  • Use an easy-t-read font style and font size.
  • Use short paragraphs.
  • Utilize bullet points in displaying items that would otherwise be separated using commas.
    
    

8. Design call to action (CTA) buttons that stand out

Having CTA buttons on your website will help your audience know how to proceed in the buyer journey. People will typically browse through your site to learn more about your products and service. As they do so, what they see will determine their next steps. Without the CTA buttons, your audience will not know what direction to take.

Because of this, you need to create CTA buttons that stand out so that your audience does not miss them. CTA buttons will help guide your audience whether you want them to sign up for an email list, contact your business, or buy a product.

9. Optimize your website for mobile

One of the most critical best practices for web design is having a mobile-responsive website. Over 50 percent of the internet traffic comes from mobile. Consequently, you must offer a site that works efficiently and effectively on handheld devices.

This practice is crucial for your website- it will help boost user engagement and earn you more conversions for your business. Statistics show that more than two-thirds of users are more likely to buy from a mobile-friendly company.

A great way of making your site look great on mobile is by integrating responsive design. This feature will enable your site to adapt to whatever device a user uses. This means that regardless of whether a user uses a mobile phone, a laptop, or a desktop, they can still access your site effortlessly. Your website will fit just fine on any device being used.

If you are looking to provide a better experience for your audience and hoping to keep them engaged with your site, creating a mobile-friendly website should be one of your primary concerns.

10. Ensure search engine optimization for your website

If you want to improve your ranking in search results, you may need to invest in search engine optimization (SEO). SEO involves optimizing your website to rank in relevant search results. Some of the SEO strategies include:

• • Quick site loading.
  • In-depth research and optimization of relevant keywords.
  • Ensuring your site is mobile-responsive.
  • Coming up with content that drives traffic to your site

Ensuring that your website is optimized will come in handy if you will put the time and effort into building your beautifully designed site. Even more, you should keep your website’s onsite SEO up to date. Search engines like Google are consistently updating their algorithms and standards when it comes to analyzing and ranking websites. Because these updates can occur multiple times in a year, they can significantly increase rankings for millions of websites.

Avoid any potential severe drops in rankings by keeping your website’s SEO to current standards. This way, you will also be avoiding the loss of traffic to your site.

 

Take-out 

About 50% of people acknowledge that a website’s design is their number one key factor in determining the credibility of a business. Suffice to say, updating your website to factor in the best practices for web design is worth your time, effort, and money.

It is time for you to reinvest in your website to stay current with website design practices and industry standards. It gets even better because most of these best practices have been covered here. If you find making a lot of changes to your website overwhelming, you can always seek professional assistance.

 

One of the most significant and most popular ways of building an online presence is by creating a website. In this digital era, businesses are beginning to rely more on their websites as the primary contact point.  Consequently, small businesses need to be very attentive to what their sites are saying to customers. Once you establish an online presence, you can develop a more detailed digital marketing strategy. Your strategy will depend on your business goals.  

It is very likely that as a small business, you have encountered the concept of digital marketing. While it appears easy, there is so much more to this concept than just the surface. Before we go into the best practices, we must understand why a small business website is crucial.

10 Best Practices For Small Business Website

1. Use a Simple and Easy-to-Use Navigation

When it comes to website loading, the less time it takes for people to find what they are looking for, the better. Most people expect minimal loading time and simple navigation. One clear thing is that you really don’t have the luxury of time through your website. If visitors do not find what they are looking for, they will get frustrated and leave your site.
Consider following this navigation layout for your website:

– Home
– About Us
– Services/Products/Who We Serve
– Blog/Content
– Contact Us

You can choose to include subheadings to provide further guidance to consumers on the information they are looking for. The most important thing is that you do not want to overload your navigation system. Ensure that your most important pages have the highest accessibility. Optimize the viewer experience of your site if you’re going to make all the difference for your brand.

2. Focus on Developing a Good Design

A good design creates a good impression. A good impression will attract more leads and more sales, eventually. The overall design of your small business website is very vital. It is not just the face of your brand. Your small business website has the potential to attract new business and convert consumers to clients. Don’t just for an aesthetically pleasing design. Your web design must be functional. It must appeal to your consumer’s senses. When visitors come across your site, what do they see, hear, and feel? This appeal will directly affect your reputation.

3. Invest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Visibility is a very critical aspect when it comes to your small business website. Does your site appear in Google search results? Search engine optimization is a very vital practice. If you are hoping to stand apart from your competitors, invest in learning how to optimize your site and its content. It’s okay if you cannot do it yourself- that’s why we have experts, right? In the long run, you will be able to increase the overall quality and quantity of your website’s traffic, helping gain exposure to your brand through organic search engine results.

4. Be Familiar with the Content you Create

Are you looking to build your brand’s exposure? Or perhaps you want to create a sense of trust and authority with your small business website? Simple- check on your content creation. Is it SEO optimized? Because SEO-optimized content will help bring in those views that will hopefully convert into sales down the line. It’s not about any random stuff. This is an opportunity for you to take advantage of your site.

Let your site be a place to expand your knowledge of your business. Let it be a platform for you to showcase your expertise. Make use of social media channels to drive traffic to your site. It’s not about any random stuff. This is an opportunity for you to take advantage of your site. Let your site be a place to expand your knowledge of your business. Let it be a platform for you to showcase your expertise. Make use of social media channels to drive traffic to your site.

5. Provide Contact Information

An up-to-date and readily available contact information will make it easy for sure prospects to reach you. And that’s not all. Contact information shows how credible your business is. People will find it difficult to believe you if they have a hard time connecting with you. Your prospects will have a hard time believing you can help them with what they need. Ensure you provide up-to-date contact details, including your phone number and email address.

6. Build a Mobile-Friendly Website

Most people access websites via their mobile phones. You might build a great website that looks fantastic when viewed on a desktop or laptop. But if your website becomes very cluttered, disorganized, and difficult to navigate when viewed on a cell phone or tablet, you may need to rethink.  A mobile-unfriendly website will cause you to lose potential leads. About 8 out of 10 consumers will stop engaging with a site that does not display content properly on their device. Go for a responsive design that automatically adjusts to the size of your website. It will serve all devices with the same code that adjusts for every screen size.

7. Social Media

No one can understate the power of social media in business. And you can use the various social media platforms to promote your brand and even drive content. In line with this, ensure you link your social accounts anywhere you can. You can connect it to your emails, guest posts, social bios, or blog articles.
More than two-thirds of the existing websites include social media website icons in the footer.

This kind of statistic already shows that this is a standard. It is one of the best practices recommended for the most traffic to your site. Your social media icons will steer your audience outside your website. Because of this, it may cost you traffic increasing the bounce rates and hurt results. For this reason, place your social media icons in your site’s footer. This ensures that a visitor only finds the social icons by the time they’ve probably explored your site for a while.

8. Email Marketing

Although considered an older form of maintaining connection, email marketing is still one of the most effective ways of conducting a follow-up. Email marketing plays a significant role in keeping customers and potential customers in the loop of your services and content. By looking at statistics, email marketing is still a very relevant form of marketing. Ensure that your site’s email capture forms synchronize with your email marketing system to enable smooth access and connection.

9. Consistency

Make your website consistent with the look of your business cards, brochures, and other promotional materials. Your website serves as a point of contact with your customers. Inconsistency will lead to confusion between projects. Customers will not be sure of who they are dealing with—being consistent shows that you are organized and have your act together as a business.

10. Display Quality Photos

HubSpot reports that people can recall up to 65% of visually depicted information for 72 hours. On the other hand, they can only remember 10% of the information they hear for the same period. About 37% of the population are visual learners. Using this to your advantage, you should feature high-quality photos and logos. Quality photos that speak about your brands will help your audience gauge your brand and content quickly. In what way are quality photos compelling?

• • You will attract more views to your site. The more the views, the higher the chances of conversion.
  • You will decrease the bounce rate. A reduced bounce rate means more traffic and a chance to rank higher.
  • Photos from a link between customer and company. In the long run, users are more likely to choose your services.
  • Photos increase user engagement which makes them spend more time on your site.

 

Familiarizing yourself with the various kinds of web pages is very crucial. It does not matter whether you are a small business owner or a designer. This knowledge will help you meet your specific needs and you can discover which website is right for your business. Additionally, studying and comparing what your competitors choose allows you to create the perfect format for your website. Not just that.

Seeing the different examples will also serve as an inspiration in your work. From this, you can start figuring out what websites you want to create, what type of website you are best at building, and how you can improve your website based on the current design trends.

 

Types Of Business Websites: Which Website Is Right For Your Business?