Turning Your Website Into an Engine for Business Growth

The internet is the future of your business. Not only are more and more transactions happening online in 2022, but it’s normal, now, for customers to scope out a business’ virtual presence before deciding to engage with it. 

This makes your business website paramount to your success. It acts as a virtual representation of your company and when leveraged effectively, can help you engage with customers, enable online transactions, and directly or indirectly benefit your bottom line. If you don’t have a website, on the other hand, you stand to lose a massive 70 to 80 percent of your potential customers, reports PixoLabo. 

Here, in this mini-guide, Gauntlet Creative explains how you can turn your website into a ceaseless engine for company growth:

To derive the most benefits from your website, you need to align it with your business type, your goals, and your customer expectations. Here are some considerations you should be making: 

• The purpose: There are informational websites, e-commerce stores, blogs, vlogs, and more. You could also have a website that’s a combination of multiple themes.
  
• The budget: Sites can cost anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. You can also use DIY website building tools to make them for free – but you will miss out on advanced features.
• The monetization strategy: There are several ways to make money from your site. Some examples are direct sales, advertising income, and commissions.
• Long-term maintenance and development: Valuable websites aren’t made in a day. Typically, the best websites are works in progress and take years to gain traction. Website maintenance is crucial.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are commonly used by businesses big and small. The former is used for managing internal processes and the latter to better engage with customers.

By integrating your existing ERP and CRM tools with your site, you can derive several benefits – real-time inventory updates, price quotes, buyer behavior analysis, faster transactions, personalized customer experience, and more.  

Essentially by integrating your site and ERP-CRM systems, all three will share data and, as Cleo can confirm, share a single source of truth. This information can be used by internal teams (like sales) to be more efficient and productive. 

Your site needs to be functionally sound in several ways: 

• Convenience: Your customers need to be able to find what they’re looking for quickly. That means simplified menus, clear CTAs, and a logical flow of information.
• Clutter-free: A messy layout and cramped content will turn visitors away. Clean and simple – organizing your site around a single CTA or theme – is best.
• Speed: If there’s one thing most people hate, it’s waiting. Fast loading times are essential.
• Content: Valuable, to-the-point content is important. This especially applies if you aren’t selling directly.

Customers expect different things from different businesses. With BPM – business process management – you can learn exactly what your customers expect from you – and then make changes to your site to align with said expectations. BPM works by analyzing how people, systems, and data interact.

This allows you to optimize processes – including your site – to be more user-friendly as well as provide an optimal customer experience. When creating a BPM framework, you have to constantly monitor the effectiveness of the site and then take steps to improve the process and output. 

Beauty sells. By creating beautiful design elements such as business logos, graphics, animations, and more, you can be more memorable and make a better impression on customers.

You can create a well-designed logo by yourself, if necessary, using an online logo maker. It beats paying for logo design services.

You can make an appealing and creative logo by choosing a style and icon; adding text; and picking your preferred font and color. 

Search engine optimization (SEO) is always a worthwhile investment. It allows your site to feature higher in SERPs, leading to more traffic and generally higher-quality leads.

SEO is a long-term endeavor, as it takes time to get the optimizations right, not to mention build up a repository of high-quality, optimized content. 

To sum it up, having a good website is essential if you want to remain competitive in 2022. Your site will help raise your profile, make you come across as professional, and finally make it easier to attract customers and clients.

You can partner up with an experienced developer to create a personalized site that aligns with your business and customer expectations.