Set up your online presence

Set up your online presence with a great website

In today’s competitive landscape, not having an online presence for your business is missing out on a huge opportunity.

Some of the benefits of online marketing:

  • generally cheaper than more traditional forms of marketing
  • easier and faster to get in front of new business
  • you can network and keep in contact with your clients

The first step in setting your business up online is to design and build a website. Here are some simple tips to help get you going.

The customer comes first

Too many people start by working out the URL they want to use, the logo, and how they want the website to look, before thinking about the most important thing – the customer.

The key to setting up an online business is to start with your customers. Find out who they are and how you want them to interact with you.

 Too many people start by working out the URL they want to use, the logo, and how they want the website to look, before thinking about the most important thing – the customer.

You need to work out:

  • Are your customers local by suburb, city, state, Australia-wide or worldwide?
  • How do you want them to interact with you – do you want them to call, buy online, email or meet you in person?
  • What is unique about your business in relation to your customer’s needs – are you eco-friendly, cheap, luxurious, five stars?

Once you have established this, you can start building your website with these criteria in mind.

Example – A local cleaning company in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne

  • Customers: Their customers are all local offices in the eastern suburbs.
  • Customer contact: Because they tend to close 60% to 70% of enquiries into new business, they would prefer calls to emails.
  • Unique selling points: They are more expensive than their competition but they have invested heavily in their machines and they use the best chemicals to give a much better service and result.

So when this company designed their website they made these points the focus, they made sure the website did the following:

  • Explained their services and service areas through the content.
  • Had a large phone number in the right-hand side of the site and made sure the website was visible though mobile search, also had wording like ‘call now to set up a meeting’ to encourage more calls.
  • They described the benefits of the service and superior quality.
  • They provided a testimonial from a local business so that new customers would recognise how local they actually are.

Having these points in mind right from the start helps you get set up on the right foot and means that you give business the best opportunity to generate more of the leads that you want.

David Pocock, Manager, roi.com.au