Feeling like it’s time to give your website and online business strategy an overhaul? Not sure if it’s worth the effort? Confused about where to begin?
Run through this list of questions to see if there are some improvements you can make to your website and web marketing strategy.
Are you meeting your income projections?
The purpose of having a business website should be to create revenue. It’s reasonable to assume that the first year or first few years, you will not be as profitable as you may hope. Growing a business takes time. Sometimes, it takes years.
However, the general pattern in looking at a chart of your online sales is that they should be gradually increasing. Your online marketing strategy should be contributing to that growth.
The amount that you set for an income goal and the rate at which your income increases will depend on a few factors:
- The amount of work that you put into building your website and business functionality
- The amount of your financial and time investment
There are different ways for you to get necessary tasks accomplished so that your website makes you money, and becomes a reliable source of revenue.
- You can hire a digital marketing agency to handle your website maintenance and marketing tasks
- You can automate certain tasks by investing in online tools and software
- You can work harder and for longer hours to complete the tasks yourself
If you find yourself putting in a large amount of hours or dollars into your marketing, but the income that you’re generating isn’t matching the effort you’re making, it’s a good sign that you need to take a step back and reassess if there’s a different strategy you could be implementing instead. Book a call with me so we can assess your current strategy and brainstorm alternative solutions worth exploring.
What portion of your business is conducted online?
If you haven’t yet automated substantial portions of how your online business operates, you could be short changing yourself tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
How are your email marketing messages performing? Are they primarily automated auto-responder sequences?
You want your marketing to be both effective and consistent. That means sharpening your effort in a few areas:
- Where you show up
- How often you show up
- The voice of your marketing (what you say and how you say it)
- Your target audience (getting specific on who you’re talking to and attracting via your website)
- A good balance of persuasion versus educational information that your readers want and will enjoy consuming
There are many marketing channels you can use, it can seem overwhelming at first. Should you be on TikTok? Should you pay for Google Ads, or is that a complete waste these days? Do Facebook Ads still work? I get these sorts of questions often, and the answer is not to try and do everything at the same time! Focus on one marketing channel, track performance, optimize it, and make sure it is bringing you a solid return on your investment before you start to muddy the water and add on more marketing channels. If you have a bunch of campaigns across many different channels running at the same time without clear tracking and metrics, you won’t know which is working best for you.
The best thing to do is make a plan, take a strategic approach, be consistent, analyze what’s working, and make changes along the way.
Your marketing might sometimes be hit or miss, it’s true. But you’re more likely to hit when you’re focusing your efforts on a specific marketing strategy.
Have you streamlined your customer communication?
You likely have common questions that customers ask, every single day. You find yourself typing emails over and over.
In fact, there’s almost nothing you’d rather do less than spend your day buried in business-related tasks, then check your email and find a new set of people asking the same old questions.
Build templates so that your messages can be re-purposed and re-used.
For example, you could create templates for initial, up-front questions about your business offerings such as:
- Questions about how to place an order
- Questions about the order process
- Questions about how to remit payment, access whatever they purchased
- Information that you’ll need to provide customers before, during and after the purchase and delivery of their product.
- Troubleshooting questions that can help people help themselves out of common problems.
- Questions about your return policy if any
- Questions about legal disclaimers and what you provide and are responsible for
If you’re looking for help with writing and setting up these templates for your business, reach out to me and let’s chat!
