Whether it’s the interview of your dreams or the date of your dreams, here at Stormnet Media, we believe that first impressions are crucial. We cannot stress enough how important it is to have that first step polished. Whether it is your new website or you are launching a new app, it is important to make sure that it is not only ready to impress your consumers, but it is finished and launched with a cherry on top. It is that extra ‘je ne sais quoi’ that takes a mediocre pop record to a legendary hit, so with that in mind, we have put together some simple tips that will take your website from ‘one-hit-wonder’ to ‘hall-of-fame’ chart topper!
Content, content, content!
No article on our website would be complete without discussing our favourite topic, and that is… Content! We love content. However, it is no good just thinking about the initial launch and beginning processes. Even if you have the most incredible content to launch with your new site and you have your target audience hooked, it would not maintain its credibility if it was not nurtured and developed. This means making sure that you have enough ideas for new content as possible, in order to keep your consumers updated as consistently as possible. If you upload new videos, blogs or images to your website every Wednesday, stay committed. It is important that your audience sees you are passionate about growing your business by keeping them informed, and will make customers more likely to want to come back to your site or app in order to check out the new content.
Research
Before you can upload the wonderful content that you have waiting and ready to go, make sure that you have thoroughly done your research. Searching the latest trends on social media, website forums relating to your business or similar topics and keeping track of changes within your business world with email alerts will help to consistently develop your business. Keeping up to date with the latest news and social goings on surrounding the business that you are trying to launch will open your eyes to both the competition and help you to judge better on predicting what might be the next step forward for your business. It depends what type of new business you are launching, but sometimes it is even worth asking, what the savvy social world call ‘social influencers’. These are the people on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram that are known for having the most followers, simply for tapping into niche markets and turning them into trends. In the creative industries, such as fashion and music, it can be a massive leap in popularity and drive for your website if associated with these online forces.
Bold, Bright and Social
In world where now communicate through text, video and imagery, whether it is for business or pleasure, you would be correct in thinking that it is an important part of the western culture. No matter what business you are, it would be silly not to keep your website or app updated with new images and videos to catch the consumers interest. Keeping the multimedia content on your site user friendly is super important; it is simple things such as keeping the images on your website ‘pinterest-friendly’ to encourage your potential customers to do a little bit of advertising for you by ‘re-pinning’ your most recent images. It may not have to be an image either, if your company is a lot more keen on spreading a message, then attaching ‘memes’ to your site with ideas such as inspirational quotes or interesting info graph’s that link back to your website, will drive in more and more people. However, be sure to keep video content short and sweet. With the culture of social media, it is that instant gratification that people are now used too, videos on Instagram and Vine are often between 6-15 seconds long! Yet, it is these short videos that seem to go viral on the web within minutes of them being posted online.
Stay Interactive
As we have mentioned earlier on in this article, keeping your content updated is important, in order to show customers that you are developing as a business in order to tailor to their needs. This is also true with looking at, discussing and changing with feedback. There is nothing worse than feeling as though a business you have recently bought into has, not only not lived up to the customer’s expectations, but then also, not taking on their feedback positively or even at all. As long as it is appropriate for the style of business that you are creating and ensuring that you have the man power for it, it may be worth taking advantage of all the fantastic platforms within your reach in order to get in touch with your customers. People like to know that their voice is being heard, so being able to assist people and further their experience with your company, it may lead to free advertising in the form of ‘Word of Mouth’ from your most loyal customers.
SEO
Many people shy away from the, often mammoth, task of making sure that you have effective and working links to and from your website. Your site should be SEO friendly in order to optimize the amount of traffic that you could potentially be driving to your site, should you be doing it correctly. As long as you have both on-line and off-line link backs to your website with titles that incorporate the most popular search terms relating to your site, then the more people you will be attracting and help you to climb the rankings on search engines such as Google. Be careful with your link backs and ensure that the sites that are linking your audience to you website are reputable and trusted sites, because as we said, first impressions count, therefore, people won’t want to click on your site if you are linked to a dodgy or untrusted site. Simple things such as using relevant terms and phrases attached to the images on your site; using key words in the titles and headers on your page or simply creating shareable content that is of high quality using key words and interesting headings will ensure the click-count becomes higher.
There are many more things that we would love to advise you on, so if you would like more information on how to maximize the potential of your website or app then please don’t hesitate to contact us!