Increasing Sales and Profits Delivered by Your Content Managed Website

Before you start your website development process it is important to consider your business objectives and desired outcomes. Your objective may simply be increasing sales and profits or it may be more complex. How would an effective website help you achieve your objectives? As a starting point it may be worth stepping back and answering these key marketing questions: • What product or service do I provide? • Who is likely to buy such a product or service? • Why should they buy from me? • Who are my competitors? Then consider which of these objectives are relevant and place them in priority order. Are you trying to: • Generate more enquiries • Convert more enquiries into customers • Increase sales to existing customers • Streamline operations to cut costs Or do you simply need a brochure style website which will appear if a prospect types your company name into a search engine. Consider how your website may address these objectives. With the basics in place it is then time to move on consider who will use the website and what you want your visitors to do when they reach your site. Then write down what you feel the objectives of the visitor will be when visiting your site (put yourself in their shoes) and how your site may address those needs while guiding them to your end objective of increasing sales and profits. Based on this information it should then be possible to create a website map describing the proposed website pages. Only then will it be possible to decide what content should go on each page to satisfy your visitor needs and reach your increasing sales and profits objective. Content creation is often a problem area when building a website but consider existing resources like brochures, fliers or newsletters. Also consider the keywords your customers are likely to type into a search engine when they are searching for your services and build these into the text. Keywords are critical to ensuring your website is found but choosing appropriate keywords and incorporating them into text is a time consuming task which requires some expertise. It is worth considering sub-contracting this task to an expert as fail to complete this task correctly and the whole website promotion process will fail. You could have one of the best websites around but if it is not found then it will all be a waste of time and effort. Know your website objectives before you start and put appropriate effort into the design and content to achieve those objectives. Then, most importantly, make sure your site is found when a potential customer types in appropriate keywords into the search engine. Finally, when choosing a website developer make sure they deliver a content managed website which will give you ongoing control over keywords and content.

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