How to Grow Your Business by Optimizing Your Website

  • June 7, 2022

Website Optimization: The Secret to Growing Your Business

Prioritize Creating a Data Recovery Plan

Unfortunately, business owners too often minimize the importance of cybersecurity until after their company has been targeted and compromised by cyberattackers. Rather than waiting until disaster strikes, it’s imperative to educate yourself about cybersecurity data protection and be proactive about protecting your company’s website.

Coming up with a cyber-recovery plan to safeguard your company’s digital assets – including your website – should be your number one priority. This will allow you to get your website back up and running quickly in the event of a cyberattack. You’ll want to establish a proposed timeline with your preferred “deadlines” for system recovery, as well as details about which programs and applications will have to be addressed in order to execute recovery. Finally, make note of who will be responsible for conducting each task included in your recovery plan.

Develop Educational Content

Sure, your website is a sales and marketing platform – but it can also serve as a vehicle for customer education. Whether your typical customer is another small business, a nonprofit organization, or an individual consumer in your area, you can establish your website as a place that visitors can turn to for up-to-date resources on everything from product use cases to new developments in your industry.

So, how can you ensure that your marketing content is also educational? Business 2 Community recommends publishing blog posts that address your audience’s most common “pain points,” hosting live video lessons with product demonstrations on your website or even establishing a special membership section of your site with bonus content for paying subscribers.

Integrate Your CRM & ERP

Your customer relationship management (CRM) system and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software are both indispensable to your business. From tracking and capturing leads to managing your overall operations, these software programs can be leveraged to carry out a plethora of key business functions. You can use these programs to their fullest potential by integrating them and then connecting the internal, integrated system to your website. In doing so, not only will you boost your team’s productivity and efficiency but you’ll also be able to seamlessly transfer information from your website to these interconnected programs.

User-Friendly Design

Have you ever had an unpleasant experience while browsing a particular website? Maybe you found it difficult to find the particular page you were looking for. Perhaps you tried to use the search function to find an important piece of content, but it didn’t deliver accurate results. Or, maybe you were seeking contact information so that you could get in touch with a customer support specialist – but no matter how hard you looked, you didn’t see any contact forms, email addresses, or phone numbers.

Crafting an enjoyable user experience should be at the heart of your website design and management approach. But, how can you go the extra mile to make sure that your customers can easily navigate your website and make the best use of all its features? Rock Content recommends designing a clear menu that allows your customers to visit key sections of your website with one click, including an easy-to-find contact form.

In addition, it’s also essential to make sure that your overall site layout looks attractive – after all, visually appealing content might prompt visitors to stay on your website longer (and the longer visitors stay on your site, the more likely they are to take action, such as making a purchase or booking an appointment). If you can’t find a theme that you like with your current content management system, you might consider enlisting the services of a professional web design and development firm that can create a custom layout for your site.

Local SEO: How to Get Found Online by Customers in Your Area

You might be acquainted with the basic principles of search engine optimization (SEO), and perhaps you’ve even been incorporating some useful keywords into your website content already. But have you taken the time to focus on local SEO? By emphasizing local SEO in your website strategy, you can specifically target customers in your area who are seeking products and services like those that you offer.

What can you do to reach customers nearby using SEO tactics? BrainChild Studios recommends putting your city and state on your homepage, adding your city to your page title tags (including the local schema code in your website pages), claiming your Google Business Profile listing, and including your business in local online directories.

Boost Your Conversion Rate

The ultimate goal of your business’s website is to convert visitors into paying customers. Therefore, you need to find ways to boost conversion rates with your website. While implementing user-friendly website design principles can help in this area, there are also some other steps you can take.

A/B testing is key to increasing conversions – you can run tests to analyze your conversion rates with your current site features. Then, as you implement new features like headlines, calls to action, or contact forms, you can run additional tests to compare their effectiveness. By conducting multiple A/B tests at once, you won’t have to wait until a new feature has been thoroughly tested to analyze the impact of another.

Speed Up Your Website

The ultimate goal of your business’s website is to convert visitors into paying customers. Therefore, you need to find ways to boost conversion rates with your website. While implementing user-friendly website design principles can help in this area, there are also some other steps you can take.

A/B testing is key to increasing conversions – you can run tests to analyze your conversion rates with your current site features. Then, as you implement new features like headlines, calls to action, or contact forms, you can run additional tests to compare their effectiveness. By conducting multiple A/B tests at once, you won’t have to wait until a new feature has been thoroughly tested to analyze the impact of another.

Final Thoughts

Your website doesn’t exist just so your company will show up in search engines. In reality, your website might be an unrealized tool for your business’s growth. If you haven’t prioritized growing your business by maximizing your website’s potential, you can get started by integrating some of these recommendations.

If you need help with your website optimization, creating a new website from scratch, boosting your SEO for greater discoverability in Google searches, or any other aspect of your digital marketing, you don’t have to go it alone! HighClick Media is here to help! Call 252.814.2150 today or drop us a line here to see how we can help elevate your brand!

*************************

Guest blogger Cody McBride’s love for computers stems from high school when he built his own computer. Today he is a trained IT technician and knows how the inner workings of computers can be confusing to most. He is the creator of TechDeck.info where he offers easy-to-understand, tech-related advice, and troubleshooting tips.

Related Posts

know someone that needs to hear this? share it!

Facebook Linkedin Twitter Pinterest Envelope

Branding for Beginners

Branding for Beginners

Branding for Beginners

Social media marketing. Search engine optimization. Branding. Copywriting. When people find out the type of work that I do, they will undoubtedly ask all the questions about what it actually entails. Look – as a digital marketer, I could take you down the rabbit hole at any given time trying to explain what goes into it, but it would take hours… days… YEARS! Maybe not years, but you catch my drift. My goal for this blog as a whole is to help you get your feet wet and inform you of the importance of digital marketing, little by little, without totally overwhelming you.

So, today, we’re talking about branding.

What Is Branding, Exactly?

Well, I’m delighted you asked! Like most digital marketing terms, branding means more than just one thing, and typically, it means different things to different people. Some see branding as good public relations, and some believe it to be a simple logo or slogan. Branding can include both of these things and so much more. For me, your brand represents your business’s identity, enhances your culture, and extends your value proposition. Your brand is your personality, your story – a story that cultivates your vision, influencing your mission. The strongest, most successful brands use a distinct direction and a powerful message to guide the creative and visual aspects of their brand.

“A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”
~ Seth Godin

Mr. Godin is totally onto something here. You must communicate your story clearly so that your audience can pick up what you’re putting down. The goal is for your audience to develop a positive feeling and a grasped concept regarding your brand. Your brand is your foundation. It is the fundamental ground that upholds your values, message, mindset, and more.

When Evaluating Your Brand, Keep These Tips in Mind:

  1. Invest in Discovery: Conducting a brand audit is the only way to review where your company’s brand stands today. Check out your brand’s past history. What’s working and what’s not?
  2. Be Confident in Your Direction: Ensure that your employees (especially those with leadership roles) have a firm grasp on the vision and mission for the company. This may not be fully mapped out before you begin a branding process, but having some sort of concept in mind is beneficial.
  3. Keep an Open Mind: Let go of your preconceived notions and restrictions, as they may be holding you back from brand growth and direction. Immerse yourself in any and all ideas, even if in the end, the reins are pulled back. Being open-minded will allow you to reach and exceed your creative potential.
  4. Work with a Third Party: Branding or rebranding is difficult for any company. Sometimes you’re just too close to your own brand, and an outsider’s perspective can give you the fresh insight you didn’t even realize you needed.
  5. Enjoy Yourself: Branding is important stuff, and falling into a state of constant stress and worry is easy to do during this process. But if you have fun with it and work with a proven agency or consultant to guide you through the madness, your journey will be all the more positive and exciting!

So, are your wheels turning yet? Do you know what your brand stands for? How well are you communicating your story? Is your brand strategy aligned with your marketing plan? If you’re unable to answer these questions, or you think it may be time to revisit your strategy, we’re here for you!

Related Posts

know someone that needs to hear this? share it!

Facebook Linkedin Twitter Pinterest Envelope

How to Build Brand Affinity with Your Customers

How to Build Brand Affinity with Your Customers
How to Build Brand Affinity with Your Customers

How to Build Brand Affinity with Your Customers

Conventional wisdom says that if you put your customers front and center, they’ll stick with you no matter what. But it’s not as simple as that. You have to give them a reason to stay. The best way to accomplish this is by building brand affinity with your customers.

Brand loyalty is something many companies strive to cultivate with customers. But what if you could take the concept of brand loyalty one step further?

Connecting deeply with your customers on an emotional level can build a long and healthy relationship that’s not only essential to growing sales, but also influences how people speak about your business to others.

Brand affinity involves looking at the customer as an individual, determining how closely connected you are to them, and figuring out how to further cement that connection to secure their steadfast allegiance.

Customers become advocates for a business when they feel connected to its purpose and personality. Defining what you stand for as a company can help cultivate a long-lasting affinity for your brand.

 

Brand Affinity

What Is Brand Affinity?

Brand affinity is the most enduring and valuable level of a relationship between a business and its customers. It’s based on the mutual belief that the customer and the company share common values. When businesses are able to form this kind of deep emotional connection with their customers, there’s nothing better than that!

Every buying decision a customer makes is based on a mixture of emotional, rational, and behavioral factors. When a customer feels an affinity toward a brand, the emotional aspect is likely to play the dominant role in their decision.

Consumers demonstrate their affinity in a number of ways, including: the likelihood that they’ll stick with the brand over time; the high probability that they’ll purchase the brand when free to choose among others; the good chance they’ll refer others to the brand; and the tendency to describe high levels of overall satisfaction with regard to the brand.

Branding Terminology: What’s The Difference?

You may hear marketers like us kicking around a number of different words to describe the brand-building process. Between brand awareness, brand loyalty, brand equity, and now brand affinity, it can be difficult to determine the difference. Let’s take a closer look at each.
Branding for Beginners

Brand Awareness

This is, quite simply, the extent to which consumers are aware of your existence; or, more specifically, how familiar they are with your brand. Being the first brand name that pops into someone’s head when they’re asked about a particular product is a clear indicator of strong brand awareness. When a consumer is aware of your brand, they may buy it or they may not – but at least they know it exists.

Brand Loyalty

A customer might be loyal to a brand for any number of reasons. It’s possible that they appreciate the quality of the product or the value it adds to their lives. Perhaps they’re motivated by compelling, or maybe they just buy it out of habit because they always have before. With brand loyalty, a customer may prefer your brand and generally choose it over others; but this a purely rational decision on the part of the buyer and doesn’t necessarily indicate a strong personal connection between the customer and the brand.

Brand Equity

Brand equity is the overall added value that a brand bestows upon a product or service. Based on awareness, perceived quality, associations, and loyalty, brand equity is how a brand justifies the value it’s seeking to get in the market. Companies with a high level of brand equity can set higher price points for their products, knowing that most consumers will be willing to pay.

Brand Affinity

This factor is measured at the individual customer level. Customers with brand affinity don’t just like your brand – they love it! They don’t just buy your products – they tell others about your brand and encourage them to buy your products as well. Creating brand affinity with consumers is the pinnacle of any brand-customer relationship.

The Benefits of Brand Affinity

From promoting trust to building stronger relationships, brand affinity comes with a variety of unbeatable benefits:

  • Minimizes the Competition:  Customers who are emotionally connected to your brand are far less likely to run to your competitors the first chance they get. In fact, customers with a high level of affinity tend to buy more in general, shop with you more often, and complain less about inevitable price increases.
  • Helps Build Relationships:  People would much rather do business with a brand that’s not afraid to get personal with customers. Humanizing your business can go a long way toward building relationships with your customers.
  • Develops Brand Personality:  If your brand was a person, what would they be like? What would their goals be? Once you’ve nailed down your brand’s personality, you can use it to better target your ideal audience.
  • Creates Trust:  In business, as in life, trust is the foundation of any solid relationship. Customers are more willing to trust a brand if they know it treats its customers and employees well. Communicate the things that you do well, as a brand, to take care of your clients and your workers. Being open and straightforward with customers – especially when something goes wrong – can also improve a client’s impression of your company.
  • Improves Satisfaction Levels:  When people like what you do, they’ll want to shout about it. If they also have a strong emotional connection to your brand, they’ll want to shout about it even louder. The more that potential customers hear about how satisfied your clients are, the more they’ll come to realize that you’re a brand worth doing business with.
  • Boosts Your Bottom Line:  Perhaps the biggest benefit of brand affinity is that it can convert “regular” customers into brand ambassadors for your business. When these brand advocates share their positive opinions about you to others in their social networks, it’s likely that you’ll receive an increase in word-of-mouth referrals – which can turn into more leads, which can translate into greater sales.
Brand Affinity - We Like You Too

How to Build Brand Affinity with Your Customers

Brand affinity isn’t something that you can force or manufacture – it must evolve naturally between you and your customers. However, if you are willing to invest some time and resources into cultivating this level of connection with your customers, the payoff can be huge.

Here are 11 tips to get you started:

 

1) Improve Your Customer Service

Determine what your customer base values in terms of customer service, then do everything you can to meet and exceed their expectations. Once customers have come to identify your brand with excellent and responsive service, you’ve created a way to set yourself apart from your competitors. Ongoing positive customer experiences help build strong, rewarding relationships with your customer base.

 

2) Encourage Customer Engagement

Give customers the motivation to keep coming back to your brand and interacting with it. Encourage comment engagement on all your social media posts. This gives your audience a forum to interact with each other as well as with your brand. Try to determine the ideal platform for reaching your specific customers and consistently post content that followers will be excited to engage with. Photos, images, and videos get a higher number of likes and comments as compared to text-only posts, so keep this in mind.

 

3) Keep Your Customers in the Loop

Be sure to keep your audience up to date with new announcements and features. Whether you’re launching a new product, going through organizational changes, or giving your website a facelift, make sure you let customers know what’s going on. Being transparent with your objectives and taking the time to communicate with customers can help build trust and organically boost affinity for your brand.

 

4) Use Social Media to Your Advantage

Engage with your followers on social media by replying to messages, commenting on posts, and participating in groups and communities. Interacting with customers on a personal level increases brand awareness and develops trust in your company. Establishing strong connections with your audience boosts the likelihood that they’ll share your content and spread the word about your brand in a positive way.

Monitor and listen to online communities to find out what people are saying about your brand. Spend some time talking to people and reading comments online. Try to figure out what motivates consumers to buy or not buy from certain brands.

 

5) Connect with Your Audience Using Targeted Messages

Remind your customers on a regular basis that you’re there for them, to alleviate their pain points and address any specific concerns they might have. Reinforcement helps customers continually associate you with the value they originally experienced with your brand.

Track and study how your customers interact with your products, services, and website in order to figure out what interests them. This will allow you to build messages that are customized just for them, which demonstrates that you’re more genuinely interested in your customers as people, not just as potential sales.

Email marketing is a great way to stay in regular contact with your audience. Whether you’re sending out promotional emails about upcoming sales or conveying important information, keeping an open line of communication with customers is key. This will help keep your business at the forefront of their minds while reminding them why they chose you in the first place.

 

6) Create a Seamless Customer Experience

Customers don’t like it when you make them work in order to contact you or to purchase from your store. A previous stressful experience with your business will linger in the back of customers’ minds and make them hesitant about doing business with you again.

Whether you set up a 1-800 number that connects customers to a live service rep or design a website that’s easy to navigate – if buyers can purchase what they need without any issues or significant delays, they’re likely to think more highly of your company when considering your products and services in the future. Make it a point to regularly review your customer’s journey so you can continue to find ways to make their interactions with your business smoother and simpler.

 

7) Use Affinity Tools to Analyze Your Customers

You can’t be everything to everyone, so don’t waste your time trying. When companies try to appeal to everyone, they often lose the unique, emotional connection upon which brand affinity is built. A number of online tools are available that you can use to help home in on your target audience.

Google Analytics offers a wide range of audience demographics including age, gender, location, and browsing behaviors. Its “Affinity” category helps inform you what type of lifestyle choices your website’s visitors make. For each “Affinity” category, you’ll also be able to see data related to website visits, new visits, bounce rates, pages per visit, and visit duration. For websites that are set up for ecommerce, Google Analytics displays data detailing transaction, revenue, and conversion rate information for each “Affinity” category.

 

8) Offer a Personalized Experience for Customers

Personalizing their experience makes each of your customers feel that they’re valued. One way to do this is by allowing customers to create a profile on your company’s website. Set up form fields that specifically focus on which aspects of a user’s profile will help create the most personalized shopping experience. Offer customers some type of reward around their birthdays. Consider offering a one-time discount that customers can use on their birthday month – instead of just on their actual birthday – to make this reward experience easier to redeem.

 

9) Implement a Loyalty Program

Setting up a points-based reward program allows your customers to earn points by making purchases with your business. After earning a predetermined number of points or spending a certain amount of money, members receive a reward. In many cases, these types of rewards come in the form of discounts toward future purchases.

Tier-based rewards, by comparison, are based on how much a customer spends with your company within a set amount of time, typically within a year. Higher tiers unlock greater rewards – these might come in the form of deeper discounts or access to exclusive sales.

 

10) Understand Your Brand Associations

Social intelligence will provide you with knowledge about how consumers currently view your brand personality and the brand associations they make. Create a search for all “mentions” of your brand. Take a look at topic clouds in order to identify common themes when people talk about your brand. If there are specific qualities that you wish to be associated with your brand, search for those words within all the mentions of your brand. Conduct a comparative study to see how you stack up against your competitors.

 

11) Be “On-Message”

When you have identified your targeted audience and come to an understanding of how customers associate with your brand, you can better determine how closely your perceived image aligns with the reality of your audience. Work on highlighting the areas that fit the message you wish to convey.

Make sure your brand stands for something, and that it’s a well-defined “something.” If you communicate that message effectively, you’ll soon have customers buying into your brand values.

Final Thoughts

Building brand affinity is one of the most effective ways to nurture both short-term and long-term growth. But it isn’t something that happens overnight. Like any other relationship, one between a customer and a company takes time to grow, mature, and strengthen. But by integrating these approaches into your business, you can secure a more successful relationship with your customers today – and enhance and expand that partnership tomorrow.
 

At HighClick Media, our marketing experts are ready, willing, and able to assist you with all of your branding needs. We dive deep with you to answer the questions that matter most to your audience. What makes your company different? What competitive edge makes you worth someone’s time, energy, and money?

A strong brand identity will stick with your customers. We help you create a corporate identity that will build trust and resonate with people. From your tagline to your brand persona, we’ll help you find your brand voice.

Call us today at 252.814.2150 to find out how we can help your business connect with your target audience like never before!

Related Posts

know someone that needs to hear this? share it!

Facebook Linkedin Twitter Pinterest Envelope

Growing Your Business vs. Growing Your Brand: What’s The Difference?

Growing Your Business vs. Growing Your Brand: What’s The Difference?

Growing a business and growing a brand often go hand in hand – but there are a few key differences. If you Google the phrase “the difference between a brand and a business,” you’ll come up with an infinite number of search results consisting of explanations aplenty describing what a brand actually is. The two work in conjunction, naturally, but growing each is a rather different endeavor.

A brand can generally exist autonomously of the businesses that operate under its umbrella. You can have numerous businesses or companies under one brand – Procter & Gamble or The Coca-Cola Company, for example – but the majority of the time, you won’t have multiple enterprises under one business. A brand is a broader representation of your business – it’s the image or identity behind your business, your ventures, and your community.

In this article, we’ll explore the major differences between growing a brand and growing a business and reveal how you can successfully do both.

Businesses Are Centered On Sales, Whereas Brands Are Community-Focused

Presumably, the aim of any business is to generate income. But the broader goal of building a brand ought to be to establish a community. Having a dedicated community can certainly lead to sales – that’s how business and brand go hand in glove, and why both are so crucial to your success.

That said, in order to grow a brand, you’re not going to be concentrating on the number of products you sell or the number of leads you generate – you’ll be much more concerned with engagement, reach, and recognition. Whereas building a business entails expanding products or offerings, developing a brand often means zeroing in on a singular concept or focus that you want your brand to encapsulate.

Your brand forges a reputation for you and any businesses that operate under that brand. Simply put, your brand is what helps people recognize and relate to your business.

Your Brand Is Bigger Than Your Product

Since building a brand transcends generating income or marketing new products, it concentrates more on public perception and sentiment. Establishing a brand isn’t about what you sell, it’s about how you make people feel.

For example, let’s take another look at Coca-Cola: this sweet, carbonated soda brings to mind unanticipated moments of happiness – not necessarily as a result of the product itself, but due to the branding around the product.

Lots of us have probably seen the Coca-Cola commercials depicting cheery people sharing a cola as part of the brand’s “Share A Coke” campaign. In this manner, Coke becomes more than simply a beverage; rather, it serves as a community for people who favor the brand and its products.

This is a clear-cut example of how product, business, and brand come together to construct a community and stimulate sales. These are the types of campaigns and connections that loom large in people’s minds and invoke an indelible impression of your brand and how your company functions within that brand. By linking your products and offerings together, you create the connections you need to have with your customers so as to maintain their interest in those products and offerings.

Your Brand Can’t Be Stripped Away from You

Your business might possibly fail, but a brand doesn’t work like that. A brand only fails if you neglect to find the right community and keep growing it. If it’s not working, you can attempt to alter the direction of your brand or change its focus. Your brand can’t ever be dispossessed of you, nor can it be appropriated outright. Your brand is an embodiment of your values, views, and goals rather than a physical offering of services or products.

For one reason or another, your business may ultimately cease operations – but your brand can unquestionably endure beyond that. A brand is the image and voice of the companies which it comprises. In a sense, a brand is more of an idea than an actual entity – and no one can take an idea away from you! Thus, growing a brand becomes just as critical in any business undertaking as growing the company or business itself.

Why Not Both? ~ Joel McHale

Growing a Business and Brand Are Different, Yet Equally Essential

As an entrepreneur or an established business owner, it’s just as important to grow your brand as it is to grow your business. Your business permits you to meet the needs within the community that your brand creates. Your brand affords you the opportunity to reach more people whose needs your business can help to resolve. Growing both of them concurrently helps you achieve your business goals more effectively. Certainly, these concepts can function independently, but the most successful businesses have devoted communities and a high degree of recognition around their brand. Therefore, it’s crucial that you make the effort to establish and build up your brand in addition to your business.

If you find yourself in need of a brand refresh, if you aim to increase brand awareness, or if you need some help establishing an air of authority around your brand, HighClick Media can help! Give us a call today at 252.814.2150 or visit our website to see how we can help you #elevateyourbrand!

NOTE:  An earlier version of this article originally appeared on Entrepreneur.com.

Related Posts

know someone that needs to hear this? share it!

Facebook Linkedin Twitter Pinterest Envelope