You have just spent a fortune on a new website and your friends and colleagues think it looks great.

Every bit of information is on there about your company, your story, your services, and your recent projects. All of it is there ready for customers to come flocking in, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone picking up the phone and giving you a call.

How could this be?

If you haven’t had a website built before you may have thought that having a beautiful site was the answer to your prayers and by investing a lot of money in an all singing and dancing platform was going to generate new customers right from the start.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen.

If we put it in building terms – your website is just the concrete foundations – critical to the rest of the build but absolutely useless unless you start to add the rest of the bricks and mortar.

It is your responsibility to have all your other tools, tactics and bigger plan in place ready for when your new website is launched.

These are the things you need to think about

Have you created your website with your client in mind?

When you worked with your website designer did you at that stage understand your ideal customer and what they would want to see on your website?

Was it designed with their needs in mind?

Most of the time a web designer will build what you have asked for – it’s not always their job (especially if you are on a tight budget) to advise you what will work in your industry….. because quite frankly most of the time they won’t know.

Before you even start talking about building a new website you should have a VERY clear understanding of your business goals and values, what the target market would want to see and how you are going to stand out from the sea of competition online.

Are the fundamentals there?

When you had your website designed did you pay for foundation level SEO? Was your sitemap submitted to Google? Sounds simple but these are the things you need to check as search engines won’t be able to find you if you are not giving them relevant information. If you haven’t been quoted for this within your website build then check that it is in place with a security and maintenance package.

Website’s go out of date very quickly with new technology being developed every day, if you are not paying your website or hosting company for maintenance of your website then you can expect an hourly charge when things go wrong.

Have you got a plan?

Would you run an event without generating interest for people to attend? No. You must think about your website in the same way.

Be armed with all the tools you need to make sure that your website is generating traffic and starts paying for the investment right away.

A great plan should include all of this:

  • Social media engagement driving traffic back to your website
  • A blog that sends out interesting and VALUABLE content to your ideal audience
  • PR that generates high-quality backlinks to your site and tells more people about how amazing your service is and how it can genuinely help them
  • A networking plan that includes you going out and meeting people that will benefit from working with you
  • A partner programme that promotes you with other great providers that serve your niche
  • A way to keep in touch with all the people who you have now generated interest in your business

Once all of this is in place you can get savvy with landing pages specifically designed to help people easily go on to your website and take the action they want to, email capture campaigns that help drive content to those in your audience that have generated interest and loyalty programmes that generate raving fans … but that is for another day.

Having a plan in place beats the overwhelm and starts to help you monitor what is working and what isn’t, so you can get really clever and focus your precious time on only the marketing of your business that works.