As the year draws to an end, your mind might start to think more about the holidays. The food. The festivities. The parties. But during this time of the year, there’s one other thing you’re probably thinking about: your goals for your business.
New year, new you, right? Well, it’s time to apply that your business, and why not start with a website? It’s the first place where potential leads will find out, and it’s one of the best places to convert those potential leads into paying customers.
2020 is just around the corner, and your website is stuck on GeoCities getting ready to party like it’s 1999. Maybe you’re like me, and when someone says 2012, I think it was just a couple of years ago. It hasn’t been that long, right? Well, if you haven’t updated your website since 2012, it’s 8 years behind. Yikes.
Whether you are long overdue for a new website or just ready to refresh your current one to get more out of it as the new year approaches, here are 6 simple ways you can create a stunning website that converts leads.
1. Establishing A Branded Visual Style
To have a good website, you need a few things. A computer. A vision. Maybe half a gallon of coffee. But before you do anything, you need the most important thing of all: a cohesive and holistic brand style.
Your brand style is a visual blueprint for who your business is. From the way your logo is used to the colors, fonts, imagery and even spacing, you should be consistent in how you make your site look. What would you think if you went to Amazon one day and the font throughout the site was suddenly Comic Sans? Or the colors had been changed to purple and green? You’d think you went to the wrong place...or that Amazon’s dev team had a little too much eggnog. Consistency creates a feeling of professionalism. It’s an easy way to make your brand look twice as big as it really is. (Just don’t involve Comic Sans in your consistency. Ever.)
Creating brand guidelines is one way to ensure you remain consistent with the things you create. You can include everything that I mentioned above and more. With those brand guidelines at your disposal, you will be able to pass along your company’s visual blueprint to other members of your team and even 3rd party contractors who may be helping you out.
2. Clean Up & Embrace Your Company's Messaging
One of the biggest things we help our clients with is clarifying their message. There’s a good reason for that. Your messaging needs to be crystal clear, easy to understand from your customers’ perspective. As Donald Miller says, “If you confuse, you lose.”
A lot of companies sink so much money into a website that looks sharp and has all the neat bells and whistles. But when it comes down to it, customers click the back button as soon as they end up on their home page. Why? Because the messaging is confusing and misleading. They have no idea what you do, and no fancy graphics or eye-catching animation is going to change that.
Don’t be like these companies. Make sure you know what you do, make sure your team knows what you do, and most importantly make sure your customers know what you do. And the best way to do that is to have clear messaging.
READ: 5 Ways StoryBrand Changed My Perspective About Marketing
3. Plan Out Strategic Campaigns and Goals
To prevent your website from being just another turd in the water, you need to have a plan. It’s great to want to establish your web presence, but your website can do so much more than just share your story.
Your website is not just an online brochure anymore! It’s a working machine that can help you capture leads, educate others about what you do, and transform them into customers. And it does this through campaigns: a strategic plan that includes downloadable offers, email series, and more.
Do you want to grow your contact base? Do you want to have more sales calls? Maybe you just want your leads to close. Plan out the growth you want to see and start pushing toward it with campaigns. You will find that creating a plan with real goals will help you the results you want!
4. Focus On Your Customer's Emotions
A good user experience goes beyond the way things look. It’s more about what customers feel. Of course, if you don’t understand how your customers are feeling, you won’t be able to help them.
Where are they at in the buyer’s journey? What pain points are they experiencing that you can help alleviate? The words we write, the images we use, and even the way we structure the sections matters so much.
The story we are telling users has to resonate with them. I think back to my reference of a brochure website. Go beyond talking about your services and showing what you do. Instead, show them that you understand how they feel and you have a plan to help them.
5. Use Marketing and Sales Technology
With the four steps above, you’re on track to set up your new amazing website. You’ve got a plan, you understand your customer, you have cleared up your messaging, and you have made the most cohesive brand you can. It’s time to flip the switch and turn your site on. After you capture these leads, you have to have somewhere to store them—somewhere to automate your marketing and sales efforts to make them easier.
You need to develop your Marketing Technology Stack. Think about what you will use to capture those leads that come in and how you will keep them interested to the point of becoming more than just a lead. This comes in the form of your strategic campaign as well.
Make sure you are planning out what you will do with this new contact. Make note of what touchpoints will you focus on to make it easier for them to come to you with the intent to buy, and record these somewhere in your system.
Make Your Website The Right Way With ROI Online
If you start off with these 5 tips when redoing your website, you will already be a step above all the other guys. Each of these pieces plays an important part in helping your website connect with customers. 
It’s all about having a holistic system. With the right look, the right feel, the right story, and the right technology pieces, you can connect with customers on a deeper level. And that, in turn, leads to more sales.
If you aren’t sure you can do all of this, don’t worry. At ROI Online, we help business owners and entrepreneurs like yourself implement a holistic system so they can grow their businesses. We’ll do the hard work. All you have to do is focus on what you do best: creating a product or service that truly makes an impact on your customers’ lives.
Schedule a free strategy session today and find out if we could be a good fit for your team!
