Challenges or opportunities of meeting your website needs and goals
Do you get a sinking feeling every time you look at your company website? Are you not seeing the results, leads and enquiries that you were promised and keep reading about? Is it time to accept your website isn’t fit for purpose? Acceptance is the first step – but then what?
Have you defined what your website needs to deliver?
If you’re in the process of considering launching a new website or redesigning an existing website, it’s essential that your starting point defines a concise articulation of the challenge or opportunity your website needs to deliver – your website goals. This should form the basis of a solid and unified brief, setting out clearly what your business is looking to achieve with the website, what success looks like, and what the site’s role will be in your wider digital ecosystem.
Putting time into agreeing this overall strategy will make the whole process much easier and will ensure you can measure its effectiveness. Whilst you must put clients and prospective client users at the heart of your site’s design, you’ll find that hard to do unless you know exactly what you want it to do for your business.
Have you considered the user’s needs and goals and made it simple and relevant?
The planning process needs to carefully consider the user’s needs and goals and make it as simple and relevant as possible for the user to achieve them. That consideration never ends. Ongoing analysis ensures that the site can change and evolve along with user needs and priorities.
While practical functionality is vital, your website shouldn’t just help users do something. It must make them feel something: your brand story, your core values and what makes your financial services business different from the competition. This should all be woven into every part of your website to resonate with clients and prospective clients rationally and emotionally.
Is your website converting visitors into enquiries and business opportunities?
If your current website isn’t attracting visitors, or if it is but you are not converting these visitors into enquiries and new business opportunities, it’s more than likely that your site content isn’t resonating with them and you’re not taking them through the logical steps of the sales funnel process.
Whether it’s your existing website or a website redesign, for the site to be successful, you ultimately need Google on your side, which means the content and engagement process is key. At Goldmine Media, we regularly hear from new clients that tell us their previous website either didn’t generate enough visitor traffic or wasn’t able to convert the traffic they did get into leads.
How are you persuading prospects to become clients and clients to become advocates?
Compliant and relevant quality content needs to reflect a deep understanding of your audience to be effective on your website. Articles, videos, blogs, photography, calculators, guides, factsheets and infographics all provide a wide range of engagement formats to inform, persuade or educate visitors. Your content needs to support the user in their journey as well as bringing tangible business benefits, persuading prospects to become clients and clients to become advocates.
Most new client journeys start on a website. In the early days of the Internet, the majority of financial adviser websites were created with the simple idea of establishing a presence on a new medium. Fast forward to 2019, and today your website should be supporting all sales, marketing and communication efforts and catering to your target audience demographics. Being able to convert your website visitors into clients, to help skyrocket your sales and the value of your business, should be a given.
Is your website supporting offline activities to achieve the desired actions you want to achieve?
As well as digital marketing channels like search engine optimisation (SEO), paid search advertising or social media, don’t forget the role that your website can also play in supporting offline activities such as direct mail, face-to-face client and prospect meetings, or any other above-the-line activities.
Aesthetically pleasing, usable, readable and consistent in visual identity and tone of voice, your current or new website should also use interactivity and motion to transition the user through their journey, offering subtle navigation cues and prompting interactions and, ultimately, leading to the desired actions you want to achieve.
Is your website accessible to all, regardless of market, region or device?
To ensure your website is built on a foundation of solid technology and on the right platform, it should be scalable, accessible and responsive, whilst integrating seamlessly with other systems. From end user and content editor points of view, it should just work – quickly, intuitively and elegantly.
The way your website moves, feels and responds to a user’s actions on every device, as well as the way it looks and sounds, plays a significant role in your brand perception and the website’s ability to persuade and inspire users to take action. This means obtaining more data, more leads, more enquiries and more profitable business.
Time to bring your website goals to life for your digital audience?
Is your website fit for purpose? When it comes to website design, we have over two decades’ financial service experience providing the right blend of creativity and technical skills to bring your website goals to life for your digital audience. For more information about how Goldmine Media can help your business, talk to a member of our Business Development Team on 0845 686 0055, or email: findoutmore@goldminemedia.co.uk.
Poppy Howard, Marketing Automation Specialist, Goldmine Media
