What Do You Need Your Website to Do for You?
You’ve decided your business needs a website.
What do you need that website to do for you?
It’s worth clarifying this before getting too far down the rabbit hole of designing it (especially if you’re hiring someone to do it with/for you).
Let’s revisit the three rough stages of the marketing-to-sales bridge:
Discover — Can your customer find you?
Discern — Do they have what they need to discern if you’re right for them?
Decide — Is there a way to buy your product/service?
With that in mind, what stages are you hoping a website will help you with?
“I think a website will help with discovery. It will make my business easier to find.”
“I want information about my services I can point people to. This will make referrals easier and intro calls will be more productive because people will already know what I offer.”
“I want people to see examples of my photography before hiring me. I want them to understand my style and what I do and do not do, so there are fewer mismatched expectations.”
“I want people to be able to buy directly from my website rather than having to visit a wholesaler.”
Write down your thesis. What do you hope your website will do for you/your business?
Treat your website as an experiment aimed to prove that thesis.
Having this level of strategic clarity will help you tune out the noise. You’ll be a more focused creator and a more productive collaborator with any web designer, developer, or copywriter.
A few other questions worth exploring:
How is someone landing on your website? (Google Search, social media, email, a friend texted them the link, etc.) How much—or how little—are they likely to know about you before getting to your website? This will influence your website’s content and structure.
Are you in a high or low-volume business? Do you need to sell a lot of something for your business model to work (common with physical/digital products) or are you a service provider who only needs a handful of clients a year? This will clarify how a website fits into your marketing strategy.
Do you sell something easily understood? If you’re one of those front-edge-of-the-curve types offering something new or in a new way, you’ll need to establish shared language/understanding between yourself and your customer. This will impact your website messaging and content.
P.S. Creative expression is another great reason to have a website. You may have a business that’s largely run offline (i.e. through relationship marketing) but a website/blog could be a meaningful way to express your ideas. Maybe writing makes you a better thinker. Perhaps you’re hoping to compile all your articles into a book someday.
There are many reasons to have a website.
Being strategic is simply choosing what that reason is.
