2015 has come and gone. As Winter settles in, the wild ride slows. As the dust settles, our team is busy piecing together the lessons we’ve learned from our year of gathering data and research from the 100 plus web builds we’ve had this year. Here are three important take-aways we’ve found that will help you see more money coming through your website in the 2016 year.
- Holiday Marketing works. It really doesn’t matter what kind of website you are running for your business. Whether it’s a direct sales site, like an e-commerce site such as Amazon, or simply a nice portfolio site showcasing the work you do, like a home construction site, advertising during the holidays will be the best time of year to use up any money you have in an advertising budget. We have found that the months of November and December are by far the highest web traffic months of the year, across an array of diverse industries. And people aren’t just spending for the holidays, they are purchasing now what they will need for the new year.
- Call to Action Counts. We all have websites for specific reasons. If you have a website, take that reason in mind and say it out loud and write it down. It could be, “make more money”, “get more phone calls”, “get more social media followers”, “get more referrals”, the list of reasons is unending. But it’s important to remind ourselves of what that reason is so then we can ask, “Is my website doing this for me?” If not, then we can usually find that we don’t make it easy enough for our site visitors to follow through with what we want, this is what we call the call to action; “give us a call”, “contact us now”, “check out now”, “review us online now”, any number of things, again the list is endless. We have found that websites older than 5 years are five times as unlikely to lead the visitors to making the conversions they want. Does that mean if my website is older than 5 years that I should be looking for an entirely new site? No. Not necessarily, but it does mean you would benefit from talking to someone about how your site might do a better job of soliciting a call to action to your visitors.
- Check Metrics Monthly. Metrics is a fancy word for information. We can check the metrics of our website in increasingly fascinating ways with Google Analytics. We can find how many people visit our website per month and from where, even down to the city. This is gold if we run companies that want to increase sales in a specific local. Take for instance one of our clients who sells auto parts. After finding their sales numbers were low in the Midwest, were able to create a pointed SEO campaign for the specific localities of major cities in the state of Illinois. We also developed a sales and marketing campaign for them specifically targeting the same major cities. By the end of the year we saw site traffic drastically increasing from the region. If you have a website out there for the purposes of marketing or sales and you aren’t checking metrics monthly, you should consider yourself losing money and potential customers.
Of course creating holiday marketing campaigns, increasing Calls to Action, and navigating and analyzing metrics data, is easy to talk about, especially for us here at T324. It’s what we do every day. And we understand the hardships that some business owners have when it comes to doing their online legwork. So we always say give us a call, or send us an email, or just walk on in to our office, we are always here to help, all year long.