How to Align Your Website with Your Digital Marketing Goals
When it comes to business success, alignment is key. Goals need to be aligned to strategy, which needs to be aligned to activity. If one of these things are out of whack, then success could be just a distant dream.
The same goes for your website. And that’s because websites in this day and age are more than just the face of your business online. Whether you’re after more sales, traffic, increase brand awareness, or any other business goal that’s dear to you, your website can play a big part in achieving them
But first it has to align with your digital marketing goals. So, let’s look at the most effective ways you can go about doing that below.
What makes a ‘good’ website?
While there isn’t really a one-size-fits-all answer to what makes a ‘good’ website – every business and website is unique, after all – there are still specific elements that can create some huge benefits for you.
User Experience
Users won’t stay on a poorly designed site for long. If the site is easy to navigate, uses logical and visual cues for functionality, and most importantly, just works, then you’re off to a strong start. Making sure its optimised for mobile is pretty much vital in this day and age, too.
Brand Identity
A consistent look across your site not only puts your brand in the best light, but it also lets the messaging of your brand – and its products and services – pop too. Just remember to make sure your design choices follow optimised for accessibility requirements.
CTAs and Conversion
Even if your site isn’t focused on e-commerce, you still want users to take action. And to do that, you need to point them in the way of something, whether that’s reading articles, downloading useful resources or signing up to a newsletter. Make sure you have clear calls to action that ask users to carry out actions like these.
Speed and Performance
Site speed is a key part of getting your website to rank in Google. But from a functionality perspective, it’ll keep users on your site for far longer, too. Slow, broken or poorly built pages make for a frustrating experience – and if that’s their first impression, users will most likely leave your site in droves.
Content
Clear, relevant and user-centred content (that’s free from mistakes and typos) will keep your audience coming back for more. Get to know what makes your audience tick, and then invest in creating content which appeals to them that you can regularly update your site with.
Purpose
One of the less tangible aspects of a site, but a super important one all the same. What is the purpose of your site, and is that purpose clear to people on there?
Need a new website? You’ll find more info on why one might be a great idea for you here as well as how the BANC team can create it for you here.
Understanding your website’s purpose
So, how do you go about understanding your website’s purpose? A good starting point is to view as more than simply a place where transactions take place.
Look towards the wider digital marketing goals of your business – and think about how you can feed them into your website’s structure, design and function. These elements should work to serve broader business goals, whatever those are. We’ll look at how you can do this in more detail in the next section.
How to align your website with your digital marketing goals
Purpose
A large part of understanding purpose of a website is getting to know your audience more. Investigating who they are, what they want and how you can give them that, and what their end goals are can give you a ton of information to give your website a reason to exist.
From here, everything we mentioned above on what makes a good website can then be aligned with the core purpose of the site that you’ve identified.
Integration
Next, you should integrate your website with analytical and back office tools so you can monitor performance with regards to things like CRM, ERP and email marketing.
Performance
With these tools, you can monitor website performance and the key metrics that relate to your digital marketing goals on a regular basis. Whether your goals are focused on lead generation, brand awareness, improving traffic or SEO rankings, you should heed the performance and then act upon your findings by making the relevant changes to your strategy. This way you’ll be able to achieve your goals more effectively.
Continuous Improvement
Even if performance is steady, there’s always room for improvement. Along with continuous website performance tracking, be sure to schedule in continuous improvements to the site itself. Doing so helps with improving metrics and getting you closer to your goals, which is great obviously.
But it also lets you recognise the parts of your site that aren’t serving your audience’s needs anymore – and so you aren’t wasting time and resources chasing goals your strategy could do without.
Upgrade your digital marketing maturity
Before you move ahead with digital activity – including improving your website – it’s important to know what level of maturity your digital marketing is currently at.
Graduating to higher levels of activity before you’re mature enough can be costly. We’ll help you avoid that. By taking our Digital Marketing Maturity Quiz, you’ll be able to pinpoint your current level, and then plot the approaches and activity you need to do to start growing. See where you rank right now by heading here.
Need some help with making sure your site and goals stay in sync? See what we can do for you here, or get in touch with us at 0345 459 0558 for more information.
