A Good Website Is Never Finished

We’ve been redecorating the house over the last month, hours of long dirty work to get the beautiful end. I have to be honest I find the hard work of diy dull, striping walls, pulling up flooring, going the tip, not my ideal use of time but I do love the end result.

Now we’re putting the finishing touches and little additions, new pillows, an owl ornament and some new picture to get the end result we wanted. I also know that in six months – or a year I’ll need to give it a relick of paint or a change of wallpaper to keep it looking fresh and working for us. The same applies to your website and marketing.

Many business owners I speak to tell me their website does nothing for their business.  99% of the time it’s because they put no effort into keeping it in line with what they want it to do for them.

They spend some money, get it online and forget all about it.

A Good Website Is Never Finished

I’m not saying you continuously need to be re-building or changing the design of the website on an annual basis, but as your business goals change so will the way you use your site.

The marketing campaigns it supports and the message it portrays to your audience and the functionality it needs to systemise your business.

I’m continually testing, tweaking and using my website to make my life, my team’s life and my customer’s life better. I will spend an hour a month looking around the site with this in mind “does this reflect where we are now and the direction we’re heading right now?”. If it doesn’t, I re-write, remove or add what I need now.

It’s all about having a website that can be changed to meet your goals right now.

If you’re launching a new service, you’ll need a sales page to sell the service, maybe an opt-in to get people interested and a sales system behind it.

The key to success with a website, launch and fine tune as you go, so many people are so worried that it won’t work for them the first time, so they don’t do anything or seek perfection. Having this mentality is what’s holding your website back from being a success for your business

Our most successful clients have the philosophy of getting it done and assess and address after.

So when I look at our website, and our client’s site here is a list of things that  I’m assessing.

Brand

Is the design, logo, fonts, tone talk to our ideal client?

We realised that our old logo and headline font was a little too quirky and didn’t fit the type of client we wanted to attract, so we changed it.

We also felt that the colours needed to be toned down a little. Sure it meant work but I know that the benefit of doing this was that we would be more aligned with our target market. You need to be asking yourself this on a regular basis.

Content

Your website should be your media outlet.

Having a regular publishing schedule that drip feeds relevant content onto your site will be a great help for getting found on Google but by sharing this content with subscribers and on social channels helps to build top of mind awareness with your customers and followers.

If you want people to do business with you, they need to trust you and that you can deliver what they want you too. Find out how to build trust on your website here.

This needs to be clear in the content you share, pricing guides, reviews, testimonials, free content, blog posts, podcasts, videos.

Again ask yourself does the content reflect what we do and what our clients are asking before they buy.

It also needs to be easy to find. So look at your google analytics, what is the most popular content people come to in the last 12 months, can you expand on this or break it down into a series of other posts and make them more obvious on the site.

Your marketing and sales

Most people have no clue what’s going on with their website; they have no idea how much traffic is coming to the site and where visitors go.

The website isn’t doing what they dreamed it would, so they blame the design. They repeat the whole process with a new site and lots of money and time wasted. The issue when you look deeper is always, not enough people or the wrong message to the wrong people.

Assumptions VS Testing

My old boss used always to say assumptions are the mother of all f*ck ups and he’s 100% right.

We all think we know what our potential clients want or need but we don’t research or test things, so we keep making the same mistakes again and again.

No one knows precisely what will work right now, sure you can apply best practices to give you a better start, but there can be no guarantees. Different things will work for different markets

One of our clients is killing it on Facebook, I modelled what he was doing and got a fraction of the results, why because Facebook isn’t right for our service and market. What works for him doesn’t work for him.

But I know now because I tested.

How can you fix this – talk to your clients and ask them why they work with you and test things. Test small and scale the successes. That way you don’t waste months and thousands on expensive marketing campaigns.

Testing

Testing requires discipline to sit and sift through analytical data.

Sounds boring but a lot of the problems you face the answers are in the data.

If you don’t feel you are getting the results you want – test new things like headlines, all to action copy, the imagery used, the testimonials, the button colours.

The trick is to make these small changes one at a time and give them time to build up an insight into if it has made a difference. This is where the discipline comes in to make the small change and them analyse the impact.

It’s these small iterations that will make the massive differences.

You’ll be amazed at the things you discover that break your assumptions.

Adding new features that serve you and make life easier.

Your website should work for you as a way to improve your business systems.

Let’s say you use invoicing as your primary method of getting payment from clients – Chasing unpaid invoices can be an annoying and time-consuming thing.

By putting a payment system on the website and insisting on payment first, you can get paid quicker and eliminate chasing money. You can even integrate directly with your accounting software to automatically generate and clear the invoices on a completed order removing that headache from your life.

If there are any pain points in your businesses processes, there is a good chance it can be solved in some way through your website.

Improving your customers experience with you

Let’s say your client signs up for a new service

Once they become a client – you can onboard them with a series of emails pushing them back to hidden pages on your site just for them to educate them on the service, this gives them a better experience and makes you look like a much more professional business.

There is also a solid chance that your current customers are willing to buy more from you than they currently do – they just don’t know that you have the product or the service they want.

You can also trigger a series of marketing automations that will inform your client of the other services you offer.

Regular maintenance is very important

I’m not going to go into too much detail here, but make sure that your web hosting, website and the plugins are as up to date as they can be is crucial.

Something that takes a small about of time every month but stops big crisis when it all goes wrong 12 months down the line when an incompatibility issue kicks in.

It’s important to do this

Building your website is only the first step.

Having an effective website for your business takes time, lots of tweaking, testing and updating as you grow. You need to look at your site as an investment bot an expense to get the best results possible.

Finding a good web company that understands your business and what you want to achieve and can help you to implement your goals is crucial – We work with only 22 clients a year on this basis.

If you’d like more information about our Success Plan click here.