Websites are the tangible thing that every business thinks of when it comes to getting their business on the web. It’s what every client asks for. The old adage “If you build it they will come” doesn’t apply to websites. It’s important to realize that the website is just the tip of the iceberg in building an effective online presence.
That’s not to say that websites aren’t important – they are essential. It’s the one asset that the business owns and has complete control over on the web. The key point here is that there are a lot of things that need to be done to make your website findable, interesting, and effective in terms of converting visitors to leads and leads into customers.
So when planning for an effective web strategy, businesses need to plan and budget for the following: a content strategy, optimizing the content to be found and shared, and promoting the content that you create. This is all needed to help your website be found.
Additionally, you need to think about a conversion strategy, specifically how do you design your website get visitors to become leads and to help move them through the sales funnel to become customers. Once you get all these things in place, it is important to analyze, measure, and improve the performance of your web strategy. Getting traffic is only part of the battle. Getting them to come back and to become customers is vital.
Anyone who currently uses Facebook or Google knows that the web is not static. Things change all the time. New features are added. New search results are returned. New competitors appear. Too many times businesses focus on creating a website, and then nothing. No changes or updates for months.
So back to the iceberg analogy – it’s easy to see the website investment. It’s the visible “tip” of the iceberg. But it terms of budgeting, building or redesigning the website is just a fraction of what a business should plan and budget for to build an effective web presence. For many businesses, think about your website investment is the 10% of the iceberg. The remaining 90% are things discussed above that too many people forget about, and many website companies don’t tell you about.
Without thoroughly thinking about the cost, strategy, and effort required to build an effective web strategy, those businesses that focus only on building a website will likely be disappointed in their investment, and at a minimum underwhelmed by the results they received.