How to Create Successful Business Websites?

Did you ever wonder how some business website become a success and how other get lost on the internet. Here is a page with a success methodology for business websites. It might not guarantee become one of the top site, but it will certainly help you to get better. At Siems Production we are here to help because we want make your dreams come true. This page includes only a summary of the process. However, if you are interested in further details please don’t hesitate to subscribe to our blog feed or simply contact us directly, and it will be a pleasure for us to help you out.

Here is the questions you need to ask to create Successful Business Websites. There are often no single answer, therefore it is likely that those will be constantly evolving over time

• What are the Key Success factors?
• What is your Marketing Mix
• Development Process (lifecycle)
• What is your Strategy?
• What is your Business Plan?
• How good is your content?

What are the Key Success factors?

As with any business or a any business plan, it is crucial to define from the beginning what are the key success factor. At Siems Production we believe that your commercial websites success relies on primarily those two factors:

1. Visits – also called your traffic including visits, page views and page/visit
2. Conversion rate – which is the percentage of the visitors that turned into a sale

It is important that those answers be as precise and realistic as possible. Once your have define those, you may continue will the development of the website, but is crucial to start with the end in mind. Your objective should be to have a high number of visitors, but most importantly that you have a high conversion rate, meaning that lot of those users end up buying your solutions.

What is your Marketing Mix (4Ps’)?

In classical marketing books, the authors constantly talk about the Marketing 4P’s which includes the product, price, place and promotion. Although some of those are still important,

1. Product? What product or services are you offfering. What are the USP?
2. Price? Hoe much will you be charging for your product, service or solutions?
3. Promotion? How will your advertise your page? How easy is it to find your page on the web? Your Promotion Methods will directly impact your Page visits.
4. Persuasion? How will you convince the end users to make a purchase? Those Persuasion Methods will directly impact your conversion rate.

Development Process to build a successful website

1. Business Analysis and Strategy Development – What are your objectives? How do you monitor them? What are the feature and benefits of your solutions?
2. Planning and Information Architecture – How will it be implemented technically? How will the content bet fit on your page?
3. Design and Development – Who will be in charge of it? Will it reflect your strategy and your business?
4. Content Creation
5. Testing, Analysis and Internet Marketing – Are you producing the plan results? Does your page require any tuning?

Business Analysis and Strategy Development

What are your objectives? How do you monitor them? What are the features and benefits of your solutions?

Objective Identification – What is your business Model?

There might be different objectives an online business might have, but here is a list of the most popular web business model:

1. Generate Sales – the most direct and simple model to follow
2. Generate Inquiries – this is mostly relevant for a service company
3. Generate advertising Revenue – this is mostly relevant for a content provider/ blog type of business with the most popular are Google Adsense and YPN
4. Generate referral revenue – advertising other people products on your site is a simple way to earn extra revenue

Customer Analysis – Who is your target user?

The more information and the more specific you are about your users, the closer you might be able to get to him by providing the information and the things that will make him tick. Some of the attribute worth knowing about your end user are : gender, location, age, occupation, income, specific skills/experience or interest, likes/dislikes. Other technical information that you might easily obtain (without actually asking are) : browser used, resolution screen used, type of internet access, what platform (web, mobile). The latest information will easily help you target your audience. For example, if the majority of you user are based in a specific country it might be worth having more relevant content on this region.

Solutions Analysis – Features and benefits of your product or solutions?

Once you have a good understanding of your customer, it is now time to look if it actually fulfil their needs and requirements. From a classical marketing definition -delivering customer satisfaction a profit, the first question to be asked is does what you deliver actually does make sense from the user perspective. What’s in it for them? I believe that too many online business focus is more on the features of their product, instead of the benefits (like it will increase your sales).

• Features – what a product is or has , this is where your focus (but shouldn’t)
• Benefits -what a product does from them, this is where your customers focus is

Always remember, it is nice to have different options, features and flashy stuff, but what really matters is how it will benefit your user (especially in the era of the user generated web)

USP – Unique Selling proposition

What are the things the your offer that are unique and that will make the user switch to your product. Are your better? Simpler? Cheaper? At Siems Production, we wouldn’t suggest to go on the price root, as on the long term, it will be really hard to compete with bigger or more cost efficient businesses. A good approach is to think of something that will resolve your problem and eventually other users as well. A good example is the Basecamp product, which was originally developed to answer the collaboration need of a design agency, and is now the most popular and effective project management software on the web. It is not better or worse then MS project, it is another product, fulfilling different needs and with clearly a separate USP.

Competitor Analysis and thinking outside the box

In all Business school, they will teach you about the SWOT analysis, which stands for the strength, weaknessess, opportunity and threats. We believe it might still be interesting to know about the market and your competition, but it shouldn’t actually drive your business. It is important to have an overview of the competition business model and market share, but it might become an negative impact if you only think based on your competitive move. Instead of being better or quicker or faster or whatever, it would be better to have a solution that is in league of its own. To do this you however need to have a clear mind, and be able to think outside the box.

Strategy Development

Once you have made those analysis, it will be easier to create a winning strategy. But bare in mind, nowadays any strategy can be easily duplicated in matters of months, therefore your strategy should be constantly changing and evolving, making sure that you are always at the top of your game.

Planning and Information Architecture

This more technical phase should come after you have clearly identified your strategy and objectives. It is important to understand that you businness is not technology as technology is just another tool. Having the latest widgets and animations will not make your site successful if you don’t a clear path of where you want to be heading.
Having said that, technology can really have a major impact in the user experience, therefore a specific plan and information architecture should be in place.
How will it be implemented technically? How will the content best fit on your page?

Sitemap

In order to have a good overview of your websites, it is good practice to have a sitmap (a diagram that outlines your site structure).
Some of the page types that you might consider:

• Homepage – it is normally the most viewed page, therefore the first impression counts a lot. It is important that you have a glimpse of your most interesting content and that it is easy to navigate to the specific content or to the product page
• Landing page – might be really useful for specific campaigns such as Christmas or Valentines
• Pre-sales page – are all about establishing trust and credibility, therefore the more quality information you can provide the better (and eventually less returns)
• Direct Sales page – should be as user friendly as possible in order to complete the final transaction
• Lead generation page – will the be through enquiry form or contact page or where you give free information such as e-books
• Information page – give more information on a specific page including agreements, return policies, copyrights, and a FAQ section that will save you some valuable time
• Category page – lists your product and services. Should be made easy to find a specific product or suggest related offers
• Shopping Cart page – consist of a summary of your selected products and the final total
• Chek-outs – manage the actual payment process
• Order Form – for product not readily available this would be a good alternative

Design and Development

You have site strategy and your planned, now comes the build part. The questions you might ask is who will be in charge of it and how will it reflect your strategy and your business needs?
Some of the elements you might need to consider in order to have a successful working site are professionalism (if you are thinking to make a sale online you are better be), usability, accessibility, and loading time (please forget the loading flash introduction as it is more likely that your page will never be seen) and trust building elements including guarantees, testimonials, references, partners, affiliates, certifications, awards, case studies, company profile and history, contact details, privacy policy and client list.

There are loads of different design and marketing agencies out there, not to mention your personal contacts (including friend and family) that will usually deliver something at a great price, but more often then not, will give you little value. At Siems Production, we don’t develop websites, we collaborate with our client to meet their business and marketing requirements in order to make their dreams come true.

Content Creation

As having quality content is one of the most important element to bring organic traffic to your site, do you have the relevant copy?

Do you have the right copywright success formula?

Without getting into the specific copyrighting techniques it is important to have an overall idea of how to make the biggest impact with your words. One Such technique is the AIDA formula which stands for attention, interest, desire and action. Let’s go over those key steps:

1. Attention – you need to get the user focus by having something catchy or remarkable
2. Interest – need to pick the user curiosity by having a story or anecdote
3. Desire – creating desire by listing the key benefits and the USP
4. Action – next step to get the specific result (usually with BUY NOW button)

Do you have the best sale copy based on the AIDA formula?

Sticking to the AIDA formula mentioned above, it is now time for copywriter Action. Here is a list of the key elements that you should have:

• Headline
• Opening Hook
• Greeting
• Introduction
• Body
• Offer
• Bonuses
• Gurantee
• Call to Action
• Sign Off
• PS

Testing, Analysis and Internet Marketing

Are you producing the planned results? Does your page require any tuning?
The only way to really find out, is through careful testing and analysis. Most probably it won’t be perfect the first or after the subsequent iteration as the web is in constant evolution, but what really matter is that you get closer to your key objectives every day, by having a continual improvement process. Most of your success will depend on the careful analysis of your data and your user interaction, in order to subsequently offer not only better copy and navigation but better product and services that best fits the need and requirement of your target audience.