Category Archives: Website

Website design and production, website management

Capturing Customer Loyalty Through Social Media

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A majority of both B2C and B2B businesses and organizations are using social media marketing. To be successful, however, requires an investment of your resources and time. You want to make strong and real connections, which take time, effort and planning.

The ultimate success of any company is tied to its ability and effectiveness to capture and keep its customers. Your social media networking has the potential for driving more traffic to your company and providing major support in communicating information about your company to gain brand recognition.

Statistics show that about 75 percent of people are likely to share content they find valuable online with their friends, co-workers and family, at least weekly. And, this should include your company and its social media content.

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Is Your Website Secure?

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Is your website secure?With the recent GoDaddy outage in the news, it seems like a good time to think about website security. Although hackers, as initially reported, did not cause GoDaddy’s outage, news stories of computer-related crimes are becoming a daily occurrence.

Whether for business or personal use, computers have become a part of our daily lives. A company’s website has become its most important marketing and communication tool. Given a website’s importance, you may be surprised how often little or no thought is put into site security. Recent research shows businesses just don’t take website security seriously enough.

There are many ways in which a website can be hacked and for a number of different purposes. Sometimes hackers just want to deface your site. Sometimes they want to disable it, take it down or redirect the traffic from your site. Other times they attempt to lurk undetected, trying to capture personal or financial information from your customers.

No matter what the purpose, an attack can result in lost sales, costs associated with the restoration of your website, data loss, and a blow to your business’s reputation.

The following are a few tips you can use to thwart the efforts of hackers. While not a complete website security plan, these tips can help make you less vulnerable to exploit.

1. Update your software. This is one of the easiest ways to protect yourself. Keep your software up to date. Your website’s content management system, your computer’s operating system and your internet browser all play an important part in the security of your website.
2. Use strong passwords. We’ve all seen the unbelievably insecure list of the most used passwords. Ones like passw0rd, 123456, letmein, monkey, football, etc. If this is you – change your passwords right now. A strong password should be random, include upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols.
3. Don’t share login credentials. Each user should have their own login credentials that can be deleted when no longer needed.
4. Encrypt your login pages. So often the pages after the login are encrypted (protected by an SSL certificate). However, it’s the login form itself that is often most vulnerable.
5. Consider upgrading your shared hosting account. Even if you are careful and have adopted good security on your website, don’t count on all the website owners on your shared server having done the same. A VPS, or virtual private server, is inherently more secure due to the separation from the other sites. If you have a business critical website, it belongs on a VPS or dedicated server.
6. Back up. Back up. Back up. The only thing worse than being hacked is not having any clean website files to go back to. If you don’t have a current backup of your website, it will significantly add to the cost of restoring it after being exploited.

Your Website: Center of Your Marketing Strategy

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Your website belongs at the center of your marketing strategy. It’s about connecting with customers, an activity that’s the core of every marketing effort.

Designing a website can be a real challenge. Design it well. Write less with informative content. Test it on a variety of platforms. Maintain it. Keep the content current.

A company that wants to develop a customer-centric website must develop a website strategy and development plan that takes into account your brand, customers, objectives and strategy.

Questions to Address

You need to know and understand your brand. What is compelling, attractive and unique that you are offering? What is your company’s image and reputation among its important stakeholders? How can these strengths be leveraged? What goals do you want to accomplish? How do you want your customer relationships to change?

What do you want your site to do? Be Informational, sales-based or lead-generating?
Or, a combination of these. You need to know your site’s purpose in order to structure it.

If you have to answer the above questions, it will assure that your web strategy is on target. Then and only then, you’ll be on the road to having the website that you envision and an effective marketing tool for building your brand and awareness.

Organization to Use

You need to organize your website so that it will be easy for your customers to accomplish their goals. Don’t confuse them by organizing it by what you like.

Consider your website like you do your office building, such as its location, frontage and interior. To ensure you reach your customers, you need a website that has curb appeal and is easy to navigate. Maximize your layout. You only have a few seconds to hold your customers interest or they’ll leave and not return.

What about the copy? Your website must have powerful words to keep your customers reading it. Address their problems, interests and the type of service that they will receive. And, take action; a call to action is a crucial to have. You need it to motivate a customer and to convert them into buying your product or service.

Be smart about your web design and navigation. Consider the pros and cons of elements and features that make it harder for search engines to index your site.

Other Considerations

There are many other questions to consider. Where will the site be hosted? Are there any technology limitations that need to be considered? How many pages? What types of content is needed? Do you need any forms? Contact, request information or request a quote? Do forms need to be dynamic or an email forms? Does your site need to interact with an ordering or fulfillment? Once a form is filled out, does it need to automatically send an e-mail notification? Does the site need content management? Who will write the copy? Will you use in-house or stock photography? What about search engine optimization? SEO is important for ranking well on searches and to keep ahead of your competitors?

An Investment in Your Brand

Think of your website as an investment in brand marketing, creating customer awareness. Know your strategy. Create good content. Lay out your site’s organization based on your target audience. Develop simple and intuitive navigation.

Ultimately having a great site is only half the building. You must drive traffic to your site. Optimize your site to boost your traffic and have a lead-capturing mechanism.
Concentrate on getting motivated prospects and valuable customers to visit your website.

A few simple informative key messages can increase your clicks and conversions. What about keywords? Are you using the right ones? If you do, you’ll attract visitors who will convert and not just thousands of random visitors.

What about updating your site and maintaining it? Your website can get old very fast. You must regularly put fresh content on your site. Take down old products and services, keep press releases current, and provide fresh and relevant information.

The key to developing a winning website is to clearly identify your goals and know what you want to accomplish. You should also consider working with a website firm that understands both the front end (what people see – the design and content) and the back end (what makes it work – building and development). And, if the firm is well grounded in brand marketing, even better!