How Your Website and Marketing can work together

Today, we're going to take a look at a few things that you can quickly and easily do to align your website and your brand's marketing strategy!

creating a sales funnel

If you're in the sales business, which basically all of us are in one way or another, your website is more than just a page on the internet to be glanced at and disregarded. You and your marketing partners should view your website as an opportunity.

An opportunity for what though?

Well, while its easy to think of a website just being a conglomeration of all of the "necessities", what it can be is much much greater. Your website can serve as prime real estate to drive customers to that next step in the process, whatever that might look like for that situation. In other words, you could be moving your customers along through your sales funnel just by them visiting your website.

What is a sales funnel?

A sales funnel is made of four primary parts or steps. Awareness, interest, decision, and action. The great news is that if someone is on your website either organically or through advertisements, they're already through step one of the funnel (awareness). At the point that they've visited your website, they're aware of your brand. So, how do we get them through the next three steps? That's where your website can come into play and play a huge role.

After they're aware of your business, they need to form interest. Not just general interest, but interest to the point at which they heavily consider you. Your home page and services pages can help with this step. View them as advertisements in which you're trying to put your best foot forward and really showcase your quality and value proposition. If successful, then you've accomplished step 2.

Next, you'll need to sweeten the deal because step three is the decision making process. While you may be a top contender ten out of ten times, that doesn't matter if you're never the last brand standing. So how do we sweeten the deal?

General promotions, automated follow up emails, or just any incentive you can think of. That's all that it could take to be the difference between being a finalist and a champion in the sales funnel.

Lastly, assuming your potential customer has gotten this far in the process, you can even help them along with the last step through your website. The last step is action, or more specifically your customer taking action to purchase your product or service. Having a way for your customers to take that next step without having to call, email, or talk to anyone by being able to purchase from you directly from your website can eliminate wasted time in the process.

Eliminating wasted time is crucial to a sales funnel and sales in general. Not just being "time is money" or whatever else the caricature of an 80s wall street trader would say, but also because it lessens the amount of time that someone may second guess their decision or be swayed by another business.

lead capture forms

Lead capture forms or contact forms are another great way for your marketing team and web design/web dev team to shake hands. These are often worked into the process of sales funnels, and can be a crucial step in the buying process for any business.

Any web designer, developer, or platform to create websites will have contact forms ready to go. Your marketing team may even have a contact form through your CRM that can be exported as code and incorporated into your site.

The two most important parts of a capture form are 1. incentivizing your visitors to use them and 2. following up, which we'll get to in the next section.

basic marketing automations

Basic marketing automations are typically available on any web design platform or customer relationship management software. It doesn't really matter which the automations originate from - what matters is that they're working for you.

The most basic and perhaps most important marketing automation that you can implement is the quick followup email. When a customer submits a lead capture form, the last thing you want to ever happen is for them to not get a reply in a timely manner, or at all. That's why with a followup email notification you can let them know that their message has gone through, and approximately how long it will take to respond. Extra points if you give them an email address or phone number that they can use to follow up if you don't.

Once you have your automated follow up email in place, you can then automate notifications to remind you to reply, or move their spot in your sales funnel (if you have a visual one or one built into your CRM). This will help make sure that whoever is responsible for contacting them doesn't forget.

integrations

This last one is a bit more general, but needs to be stated. Your marketing and web team will have integrations available for your website and other platforms, and 9/10 times its worth integrating even if you rarely use it.

Integrations can help you track your site visitors activities and interpret how effective your site is. They can make your life ten times easier by carrying out simple automations. Overall, integrations will greatly improve the effectiveness of your site and processes.

If you're interested learning about how your website and marketing strategies can work harmoniously - don't hesitate to reach out to us. We'd love to assist you and your business align your website and marketing strategy.

Futurist Horizons is a website design and marketing company that specializes in creating effective and accessible websites and marketing content for businesses.