.png)
Digital Marketing Article by Chris Olson
Digital marketing never sits still and 2024 has been one of the most exciting times for businesses to expand using state-of-the-art technologies and methods. Whilst the rise of AI and tools to automate your business are exciting, they can also be incredibly confusing. With so many options to explore, many of which are still in the learning phase, we are seeing rising anxiety for London business owners not knowing where to focus their energies in order to grow.
Can Social Media Outperform Websites in Business ROI?
Whilst Social Media Marketing is a powerful tool for business growth, the results for many businesses are still massively unbalanced. By which I mean the amount of time and resources business owners and their staff spend putting out constant content to their online communities rarely matches the actual revenue generated by such marketing.
Some businesses are aiming to post multiple times a day (timeline, reels, stories etc) across multiple social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok etc) in order to keep up with the ever-hungry algorithms at play. Ironically, this "over-posting" may actually be limiting your reach rather than expanding it, but that's a digital marketing topic for another day (makes a note).
When we compared the number of customers or clients a business took in over a typical month, far and away for almost all of them was Organic Search as their top source. This meant the enquiry came from someone looking on a search engine, primarily Google. In some cases, Social as a source made up less than 5% of the business's revenue for that month, which caused some distress when the client admitted they had focussed pretty much 100% of their marketing efforts on social platforms!
A Professional Website Design Builds Trust
One of the main reasons customers turn to Google is to feel more confident about the choice of service or product they plan to buy. Social Media has long been a place of shadowy antics and scams, with fake profiles being prolific and incessant DMs asking for money to "grow your followers".
When legitimate businesses fail to invest in a professional website design, they are kissing goodbye to a significant percentage of their potential customer base.
A bold claim but I can give you a real-life example that happened just the other night...
My wife and I have two young children and as any parent will tell you, we will spend money to keep them occupied! Whether that's in bulk orders of craft materials or soft play centres. As it's Easter holidays, my wife was planning out her week to ensure her insanity was kept to a minimum by having something to do each day. There was a class in the area that has an Instagram page that looked good. However, as the class didn't have an official website, and a Google search didn't bring up a business listing or anything else resembling an official presence, she chose to forego using that in her Easter itinerary.
How often are customers choosing to forego using your services simply because they aren't sure if you can be trusted?
A Professional London Website Design Lets You Compete
Many new and smaller businesses pop up from an initial burst of energy. It's an exciting time! You want to follow your passion, work for yourself, and do what you love for a living. Sadly, as the cliche suggest, most small/new businesses fail in the first year. The reason for that is they don't have a sustainable source of customers.
An example would be a business that gets off the ground with the support of family, friends and the local community. However, there's only so many times you can ask your nan to buy your homemade perfumes. Once that pocket of people has been saturated, you might lack the visibility to keep the momentum.
One of the biggest strengths of a brilliant website with strong SEO, is that you get in front of the people looking for what you do or what you provide. And once they transact with you, it's important to keep them in your community if you can offer them further products or services, which you can do using your social media profiles and email marketing (always, always keep customer emails - using consent)..
If you are an industry where you have a lot of competition, you need to be on (to quote a popular recent film title) Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. When it comes to digital marketing, it's like making a sandwich, and your website is the bread and butter. You can keep yourself fed with that alone, but try and make a sandwich without it and it all falls apart eventually. To compete with them, you must have your own individual space where you can make it about you, otherwise there will always be someone out there with more followers, more engagement, or one of those blue ticks.
What Should a Professionally Designed Business Website Include?
Promoting your business on your own website has the benefit of being completely unique. It's your space to showcase your brand how you want, without the restrictions of other platforms and templates.
All business websites, however, do have things in common so here's a checklist of what you will want to include in a professionally designed websit:
Clear branding: a consistent logo (the same one on all your other profiles) with a matching colour scheme is essential.
Contact details: as per my wife's example, your website needs to match up with your business details put out elsewhere to build trust and legitimacy.
Profiling: the website should appeal (and even feature) the customers who buy from you. Showcase them using video reviews, testimonials, and imagery.
Contact / Purchase Methods: make it easy for customers to get in touch or make a purchase. The fewer the clicks away the best but make sure you take all the details and info you need to scale your business well.
Services: whatever you are selling or offering, it needs to have a dedicated page on your website. Customers will want more information and your official website is the source.
About: pretty much every business needs to tell its story. Stories are emotional and help customers connect with you, an essential part of long-term growth.
Analytics: make sure you have a way of tracking your website's performance over time. This will help you grow and also identify reasons for "quiet periods".
If you are interested in London website design with Olson Digital Marketing, tell us more about your business using the contact form below.