You don’t need a building materials company website anymore. You need an online ecosystem.
In the early days of the internet, the approach business owners took to their online strategy was simple. Create a new website, driven by less-than-desirable objectives (i.e., look better than XYZ Competitor!), then launch it and let it sit until the cycle was ready to repeat.
And this worked, for quite some time. Web design trends evolved slowly in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But, as more and more companies came online, and the competition for eyeballs became fierce, the dynamics of online marketing shifted dramatically.
Today, your company doesn’t just need a website. It needs an entire strategic approach to the development of an online ecosystem. This means you need your website to serve as a strategic hub of all online activities, from content creation to social media, and from visitor conversion to lead nurturing.
How do you begin?
Well, typically it starts like it did before. But with different motivations. Instead of redesigning your website to “keep up” with competitors, or for other superficial reasons, you must focus on designing your website to accomplish very specific tasks. This means beginning with a thorough analysis and discovery of your customers. Who are they? What do they do online? What are they looking for and what will be of value to them so they can identify themselves to you?
From there, website design can start, but this time, with an eye for flexibility in the future. It’s important that you design your website in a modular fashion so that you can quickly and easily shift gears in the future without a massive redesign.
Reliance on a flexible and secure platform to house your website is important, too. Your goal with the initial web design is to begin tracking and collecting valuable data for your business. Data that you can analyze and use to actually affect positive change by means of altering your site in small increments over time.
We call this approach Growth-Driven Design.
In a nutshell, this is the concept of “Kaizen”, or continuous improvement. On the web, you have an ability to make changes on the fly, as often as you want. By doing so with an eye towards metrics of value, you can continuously improve your website’s performance.
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With your website continuously improving and becoming more conversion-centric, you can augment your efforts with content creation. The best way to prove credibility is to become a thought leader in your space. This is accomplished by maintaining an active content creation initiative.
We encourage clients to continuously add content to their websites, to the tune of 3,000 or more words per month. Blogging encourages repeat visitors, it creates a reputation of knowledge and leadership, and it enhances your search engine optimization (SEO) by increasing the number of pages in the search engine index but also by enlarging your exposure to additional keywords.
In addition, the creation of additional content areas on your site will achieve the same results. Don’t skimp on content.
The next piece of the puzzle: communication with potential and existing customers.
It’s important to show both your current customers and any future leads that you are active, relatable and accessible. Social media makes this easy. At a minimum, always try to maintain a Twitter and Facebook presence – even if “no one in my industry uses them”. There are many social media management tools that can help you post to multiple networks at once, making it easy to manage.
Don’t forget about industry-specific networks that may require focus as well! B2B companies should absolutely be leveraging LinkedIn. In our world, building supply manufacturers should consider being active on Houzz, as an example.
The final piece and the most important in many ways is a proper customer relationship management (CRM) system that is capable of marketing automation. Today, customers are being pulled in many different directions.
You have to be able to identify the stages of the buying cycle, and nurture customers through the stages with compelling content and repeat visits. The modern marketing automation platforms do a great job of providing the tools necessary to perform these tasks. But, you have to properly engage those platforms with time and effort to see the results.
With these pieces in place, your company now has a foundation for online success in a world where trends, technology, and marketing techniques are changing on a near daily basis.
