When it comes to promoting your brand, I can’t imagine anything better than the corporate website. Yes, social media is great too, but their algorithms recommend to the users other related pages as well. So, your competitors appear on the screen of your audience’s devices next to your profile at the same time. How beautiful!
This is what best illustrates the difference between a website and a social media platform.
When a potential customer clicks through your website, they only focus on your brand and nothing to draw their attention to a competitor’s profile.
If your website is not unappealing(!)
You’ve accomplished the most challenging step in attracting the potential customer to your website. And they leave the page within 10 seconds. Can you imagine anything more disappointing than that?
The following tips can help you make the visitors take their time on your website and turn into customers.
About us
When written well, ‘About Us’ is definitely the most important part of a website, as it informs about your history, offering, values, mission and influences the visitor.
Based on the content and impact of your message, visitors tend to be interested in your company or not.
About Us, besides being a seperate page with a more comprehensive content, should also be on the homepage to welcome the visitors and to make them sure that they are at the right place. In this way, you can give a brief information about the general activity of your business.
Clean and attractive design
Compared to boring standard templates, a professional and attractive design keeps visitors spending more time on your website and leaves a good impression on them as it makes them feel that your business cares about details, style, appearance and brand reputation.
This also gives potential customers credibility for your company.
For example, color schemes that match the colors of your brand and your message create a memorable impression on people. In this way, you not only introduce yourself correctly, but also allow them to distinguish you among your competitors.
Mobile friendly
We all know that when people want to access information on the internet, they take their mobile phones out of their pockets and search with a few clicks.
They don’t bother sitting at a desk, turning on their computers, waiting until their computers are ready to use. This is the era of mobile devices.
That being the case, having a website that doesn’t function in different devices is not an option. You absolutely lose a huge portion of the internet users.
In 2021 the global mobile traffic was 56% and it’s clearly growing as these devices are more practical to use and the UI and UX are even more important than ever.
Take yourselves, do you use your mobile phone or your computer to search for information during the day?
Navigation
In addition to a clean, responsive and mobile design, your website needs an easy navigation that allows people to navigate your website easily on every device. Otherwise, no matter how great-looking your website is, if they don’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll leave your website never to return.
As a business owner in your industry, you absolutely know what type of information your target audience is looking for. You can also easily learn popular queries using Google Analytics and tools like Semrush or Ahrefs.
Once you have the data your audience is more interested in, create a customer-centric navigation.
CTA
After all the features above, you now have a fancy website. Now what?
It’s critical to know that everything done above is for keeping the visitors on your website, but without getting the visitors into action it stays as just a good looking website that brings customers to the design agency.
Now is the time to get your customers to take action with the CTA which is an important part of design too. Place your CTAs throughout your website but make sure that they are not barely visible and difficult to find or everywhere; just be in moderation.
These could be anything that you want your audience to do:
“Contact Us” You can share the contacts of the relevant personnel such as sales, procurement, salesperson in [a foreign language].
“Email Now” is the most common CTA in every business. Especially in international trade, when the parties don’t speak the same language, it makes things easy to communicate in written.
“Ask For Price” You can build a form of the options of features and when the lead fills in the form, it becomes easy to give a more specific price. Or you can contact the interested person directly.
“Download the Catalog” In return for the email address of the prospect, you can deliver your catalog. So they check your products in detail which saves time for you both.
Social media
There are things that you can’t effectively use on your website as you do in social media like tweeting, posting videos, shorts, reels, photos, updates etc. Using social media actively you can interact with your audience and double your online presence efforts.
As such, sharing your social media accounts on your website and vice versa will increase engagement and let people connect you and know you better.
Never ignore the power of social media.
Blog
Blogging is great. It has the power to make you a thought leader in your industry, a go-to source and a credible brand. It’s the main component of SEO. By attracting strangers to your website, it can turn the strangers to leads and leads to customers.
Despite the power of blogging, it’s unbelievably one of the least preferred marketing channels by businesses.
I can understand how it’s hard to write great blog posts, but it means that there’s also a gap to fill. If you do it, your google ranking will increase. Not to mention the benefits above.
According to Optinmonster:
- Companies who blog get 97% more links to their websites.
- Blogs have been rated as the 5th most trustworthy source for gathering online information.
Security
I can’t stress enough how important it’s to have an SSL encrypted website. First of all, Google introduces the websites that are http:// as threats and gives the https:// websites a boost in the rankings.
Furthermore, http:// websites prevent trust with users. At the end of the day, the ultimate goal of businesses is to build trust and sell. Http:// doesn’t help at all.
There are websites that provide you with adding an SSL certificate to your website. You can use their free packages. The mostly preferred ones are Let’s Encrypt and SSL For Free
Useful information
Try to explain everything about your offering so when they contact you they already know what you are going to talk about. This way, you save the time introducing your products and happen to start directly talking on the specifics.
You can considering adding the following info to your website:
- Optional features
- Customizable parts and functioning
- Tailored design
- Standard and tailored packaging
- Branding availability
- Packaging options to comply with the countries’ regulations
- Quantity to fit in 20” or 40” DC containers, on a pallet or crate etc.
Video
Who wouldn’t want to watch a company’s videos showing its production, office, factory, staff and facilities? For a buyer, if testimonials come first as a persuasive factor, videos come right after.
Marketingcharts shares quite insightful statistics about B2B buyer’s journey:
According to the survey conducted by Ascend2 video is the most effective content marketing type and what’s more;
- 93% of buyers report that video is important in building trust in a brand.
- Almost all (97% of) buyers find video content and communication to be useful post-purchase.
- Video is most helpful in the post-purchase stage for learning about other products/services offered and for training/onboarding.
- About 8 in 10 (81%) prefer video over written content when learning how to use a product or service.
Events
If you are organizing or attending events, post their photos, videos, news, whatever you got.
After all, these are for promotional purposes and should be displayed wherever possible. Events such as trade shows, industry events, webinars, workshops, seminars and social responsibility projects are great for getting your brand in front of your target audience.
Languages of target markets
As an exporter, you’re appealing to the whole world even if your target markets are limited to a few countries. Namely, you can always receive emails from different countries and most probably the language will be English which is the lingua franca of international business.
So, to communicate with the prospects, an English version of your website is a must. In addition, having the languages of your target markets on your website will also give you a competitive advantage.
Showcase your products well
As for showcasing your products, besides the technical details, you’ll need optimized high resolution pictures of your products in detail. You’d better work with professionals to shoot your products.
Can you imagine how weird they will look if the products are of poor quality while the rest of your website is perfectly designed? And what will they make people think?
SEO
Last but not least, your website should be SEO friendly so that it can attract strangers by appearing in their searches. It doesn’t do any good, if nobody finds you through search engines.
In order to have an SEO friendly website, you’ll need a little extra work. Here are a few basic tips;
- Create authentic and quality content with the right keywords
- Create an XML Sitemap
- Optimize your header tags and meta descriptions
- Use internal linking to help search engines crawl and index your pages
- Improve the loading speed of pages
- Plus everything explained above