Success depends on understanding the problem you’re trying to solve and making a good plan. A good digital strategy provides clarity, makes implementation effortless and sets you up for budget efficiency so you spend on what matters. Understanding your goals and resources is essential for an achievable plan. With a good strategy, decisions that were previously confusing become straight forward. You’ll know what to say, when, where, to whom and how. You’ll know how to measure success and you’ll see a much better return on your digital marketing spend. A digital strategist sets the overall plan.

When your website is aligned with your goals, it has the structure needed for search visibility, a design that attracts and retains the people you want to attract, clear messaging that resonates, and strong ‘calls to action’ so they know exactly what to do next and are not confused. This results in more enquiries. All of this is based on your strategy. Your website project team generally includes a graphic designer (UI designer) and website developer / front end coder plus a copywriter and photographer/videographer for your content. This means your budget spend in each area needs to be well considered and you need a really strong brief to pull all of these skills together for a good result.  Having the right people on your team for this project is the difference between a website that brings in regular new business and one that doesn’t. Not every service provider understands how all of the website elements come together for business.

Even with great knowledge and experience, marketing is a giant experiment involving so many factors, which means measurement is essential. You need actual data feedback to gauge and measure success.  Google Analytics is the standard. Not too hard to set up the basic analytics tracking but this is a missed opportunity for many. Your data should be part of what informs decisions and you should protect and retain it as it tells the story of what worked and what didn’t over time (particularly if you change the people managing your digital assets you want to make sure you don’t lose access to historical data).

When it comes to the final results, you can generate a tonne of enquiries but if you’re not able to actually ‘close’ and turn them into new business then all the effort we put in to develop your digital assets is lost at the finish line. Business owners who foster a collaborative environment on projects during and after get better results. Your team hold a key ingredient: the ability to close the deal and also to pass back front line customer experience information that is invaluable for marketing.

Your brand created through the entire experience you deliver. It’s not visuals of course but with digital it’s essential that both during the project and after your launch that everyone understands your brand and correct implementation of the visual identity. A strong visual identity gets better results as it’s a key ingredient to building recognition and ultimately trust in the experience you deliver.

Unskilled WordPress website management over time reduces the effectiveness of your website and devalues your investment. You would be amazed to know how much impact small changes can have on your enquiry rates.  It’s a bit like compound interest really. And it works both ways! Please make sure the person managing your website has the right skills to do so. There are many elements to consider when making changes to your website that impact it’s ability to be found and convert traffic to enquiries.

What you should know:

If you want reliable and consistent enquiries from your website, leverage what you have.  Websites are activated with marketing and promotion to attract the right kind of people. A well-built website, on its own, is rarely enough (and hasn’t been since the early 2000’s). How much you need to do depends on how competitive your market it is and what you want to achieve (and of course budgets and time come into play because we do not all have limitless resources!). We have options and advice for this to suit every stage.