Take a minute and think about your current website, keeping in mind these 3 key characteristics:
- Design
- Functionality
- Flexibility
The third point may have stood out to you. We are not referring to responsiveness, which is a function of design, but rather 1) how much control/access you have to make changes, and 2) how easily can you adjust pages and content to flow with your marketing efforts.
The Danger of Not Having Control
When we begin creating a marketing plan for our clients, we stress the importance of how multiple platforms are interconnected and work together to grow your business.
We have seen far too many marketing campaigns hit a brick wall in strategy due to the inaccessibility of their website and lack of control to make necessary changes. And when you get stuck, you lose more than time…you lose momentum.
Picture for a moment having to crank a large gear with a handle. The force needed at the beginning is significantly more than is required to keep it spinning once momentum comes in to play. As soon as that gear gets stuck, it requires that much more work to get it going again.
For example, one of our clients came to us with their new website, which was both beautiful and functional. However, as we started to strategize on marketing tactics, such as Google Ads, Facebook/Instagram Ads, and conversion tracking, we immediately noticed a red flag.
Their website had been completely hard-coded on the back end, which we did not have access to. So what would we need to change on the back end that would affect our other marketing efforts?
What You Need Access To
Analytics
In my last post, Focus on What Matters, I talked about the importance of tracking conversions in order to achieve your marketing goals. If you are not able to implement the necessary tracking codes, such as your Google pixel, Facebook pixel, and Google tag manager, you will never really know how well your campaigns are performing. If you do not have access to the areas of your site to add this code, you should make it a priority!
Content
This one almost goes without saying. If you or your marketing team do not have access to quickly and easily change pictures, text, headings, and links, you will end up wasting valuable time trying to make a lot of changes when things become too outdated. Your website should be nimble enough to keep your site up to date on the fly.
Layout & Design
Adjusting the actual layout and design of your site will happen less often, but it is equally important. Let’s say you have an event coming up and would like to design a landing page to get people to signup, or simply would like to add content about the event to the top of your homepage. On certain web platforms, the design is not so simple to manipulate and you may end up paying a developer a hefty sum to tackle a simple task that would only be temporary anyway.
Optimization
Let’s say that you are tracking conversions and have complete control over your website. How do you know when you should make changes?
Significant adjustments on your website regarding content and layout should be backed up by data whenever possible. For example, you are testing 3 versions of a Google Display ad in order to drive sales of your latest e-book, and after a month you notice that 2 of the 3 have a much higher CTR (click-through-rate) than the other. You analyze the common denominator to find that 2 of the ads highlight one benefit of the e-book, while the lower performing ad focuses on another.
That should lead you to make adjustments on your landing page to highlight the benefit and related design that was receiving the higher CTR. By collecting this data and acting on it, you are learning more about your target audience, which will help you optimize your marketing tactics in order to increase conversions.
If you are not, however, able to act on your analysis in a timely manner, you are most likely limiting your ROI.
This is why it is so important at this time for all of your marketing and advertising efforts to work together seamlessly, with the ability to make adjustments quickly and often.
I don’t even know where to begin…
If you are telling yourself this, don’t panic. Most websites in this age have the necessary functionality to make these types of changes. You may just need someone to help you navigate it.
Over the years, we have helped clients either make changes on their current platform, or migrate to an updated platform to make their marketing more profitable. If you would like to talk about your website possibilities, give me call at (225) 341-4147 or email [email protected]!
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