Level The Playing Field: How To Go World-Class With Your Website
If your business does not have a website (or it isn’t updated and user-friendly), it is safe to say you are swimming in a pond while your competition is doing big business in the open seas. You’re playing too small. We want to help you level up.
People need things all the time. Desires are continuously triggered and problems are stumbled upon on corporate levels. Your business may have the perfect solution but it means nothing if you’re not there when people need you. We don’t want to hunt our own food. We want it cooked and served on our dining table by a doting waiter. Ever heard of Point Of Market Entry? It’s the point where a customer becomes receptive to your offering. This is where your website shines, leading users down the sales funnel with useful content and calls-to-action (CTAs).
Your Home Page is the first thing customers see when they open the front door. Is there a striking display of products and services? Mouth-watering copy that promote their benefits? Do we get a stimulating sense of the soul of this company? Is it overwhelming? Crisp or confusing?
Your website is no less important than your physical office. We dare say, even more so.
Do you know about the bounce rate? It’s the difference between the time a user opens and shuts the front door of your website. If the bounce rate is high (anything above 70%)- that means people are peeking through the front door, affronted by the sheer lack of utility, and promptly exiting. A low bounce rate, on the other hand, means users are actually consuming your content, going through your pages, spending time with your business. A bounce rate below 40% is excellent; keep doing what you’re doing!
A website with good UX (User Experience) design makes it easy for the user to invest their valuable time and money in your brand. We’ll spend more time on UX in the articles to come.
There are plenty of small businesses that have leveraged their websites to become global entities. The Dollar Shave Club is one such success: a subscription e-commerce brand that launched in 2012 into a market dominated by Gillette. The key to their success lay in their business model: positioning themselves more as a men’s shaving club than a razor supply company. Their website is clean and minimalist with one focus: converting visitors into buyers. Their content marketing strategy includes an online magazine, a ‘Bathroom Minutes’ pamphlet with every delivery, and an irreverent podcast. By 2016, The Dollar Shave Club was the number one online razor company with 51% of the market share (Gillette had 21.2%).
They don’t just sell razor blades at a competitive price. They sell community, a strong sense of culture and a ‘lovable scrappiness’ that none of the other brands could compete with. “Nobody had tried to build a community around affordable men’s products,” said Michael Dubin, the CEO and founder.
The keyword I want you to take away is community. There’s a reason people tell stories around a campfire. We tend to gather around something warm and nurturing. That something warm and nurturing could be a fire, a person…even a website. As long as you provide consistent, relevant and valuable content, your website can be a thriving hub of activity. Use this platform to be highly responsive to your customers, like Jack Ma does with Alibaba Group.
Use it to showcase your transparency, like the e-commerce clothing brand Everlane does. Use it to curate travel stories from around the world on its ‘stories’ pag, like AirBnB does. You can educate your customer, inform them, entertain them and guide them in the ways of your industry. You can market to investors, stakeholders and emerging markets using more accuracy and reliability than traditional offline advertising. You can lend your business credibility.
Size doesn’t matter when it comes to websites. You can compete with almost any brand, as long as you have the vision, strategy and will to execute. For a fraction of the cost, you could be expanding your market, David and Goliath-ing your competition, cementing customer relationships and much, much more.
Is your website functioning the way it should? Is it helping you smash business objectives? Contact us now on 0743 830 663 and let the building begin.
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Our writer, Barbara Jebet, is a content strategist and a brand storyteller. Check out her blog: the slightly curious world of story pot.
