This article will explain how web design can help your business grow a strong online presence.
I will also go over what “business web design” is and how it can make or break the chances of having long-term success. Especially now since consumers report that they will be spending more time on the internet post-pandemic.
But in order to create an online presence, it is imperative to understand the significance of having a professional business website. So that’s where I will start.
Here are the main sections of this article in case you want to jump ahead.
Let’s being with…
What Is A Business Website?
Unlike a regular site, a business website is a set of internet web pages that provide information about an entity or brand with the sole purpose of engaging and converting visitors into customers or clients.
Business websites are built for performance and designed to:
- Attracts Consumers
- Provides Information
- Implements Trust & Authority
- Showcases Customer Testimonials
- Presents Your Products and/or Services
- Shows Proof Of Expertise
- Connects Visitors With The Business
- Accepts Monetary Transactions
But a business site is also engineered to connect with:
- Social Media Platforms
- Other Websites and Software Platforms
(I’ll discuss these connections below)
If your website doesn’t provide all of the above qualities, then you don’t have a true business website.
The ability to connect with other platforms is what makes a business website an integral part of your entire marketing and sales plan.
What Makes A Business Website So Important?
As you probably already know, a website is the online storefront of your business. It’s like having a store inside a shopping mall. People will come from different directions and entrances, but eventually, they will walk through your front door and expect to be served.
So it is imperative that your store can provide what each visitor wants or needs. It must load quickly, be easy to navigate and be equipped with the tools necessary to deliver. It should provide a great user experience (UX) and modern user interface (UI). B2C users stated that the experience with a brand is as important as the quality of its offer.
A business website can also help guide the user closer to conversion by capturing their information and optimizing actions such as call-to-action buttons, contact forms, online booking, or a shopping cart.
But unlike a store in a mall with consumers walking everywhere, your new website will NOT be easily found and will be stuck in the internet abyss. It’s like having a website in the middle of nowhere.
For your website to be found by potential customers, it must be optimized for an online presence. Meaning that your business identity must live on various platforms across the internet, i.e., social media, online directories, advertising platforms, etc.
Now that you understand the significance of having a business website, it’s time to extend the identity across multiple platforms.
That’s were business web design comes in.
What is Business Web Design?
The method of designing, conceptualizing, and organizing online content to engage with consumers, brand development, marketing, and sales is known as business web design.
Web design includes the creative performance and visual aspects of UX and UI for various platforms, including:
- Website Design
- App Design
- Software Design
- Social Channel Design
- Logo Design
- Graphic Design
- Landing Page Design
- Sales Funnel Design
- Advertising Design
- Content Design, and more.
Business web design covers all types of online platforms, not just websites.
Business web development is the technical development and creative implementation of these platforms and how they connect with your site (more on this below).
Business web design is what ties platforms together to:
- Extends Your Online Presence
- Spreads Your Message
- Connects With Consumers
- Receives User Feedback
- Analyzes Web Traffic
- Search Engine Ranking
- Tracks Visitors
- Collects Data
- Optimizes For Conversions & more
A web design company specializing in business web marketing provides incredible value for business owners. Why? Because it can create and develop a complete online presence strategy for your business and make sure that your business website is built to accommodate it.
But for your web design to be effective, it requires the right digital marketing strategy.
Business Web Design Strategies
When you think about it, the term “web design” is a bit misleading. It’s not just about pretty pictures on websites but about the strategy behind it all, which often involves more than just the design.
A successful web design incorporates a plan and strategy to create a marketing and sales campaign across an entire online platform network.
When businesses decide to redesign their website, they are often working to achieve one of two goals:
Increase Online Conversions
A business website is optimized for conversions and performance by doing A/B testing. This includes the homepage, call-to-action buttons, and even the color scheme.
To ensure that the site reaches its target audience, analytics is used to track visitors’ behavior and see which parts of the site they click on the most.
This is accomplished by connecting your website with analytic and heat map tools.
There are many types of analytic and heatmap options on the market, including:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Hotjar
- TruConversion
- Microsoft Clarity and many more!
Reduce Time Spent On Marketing Tasks
Automation can make a big difference to any business that wants to save time. Imagine having a website that works harder for you – without you having to do anything.
Well, this is what a business website design can provide for your business by connecting with lead generation and email marketing software such as:
- Active Campaign
- Mailchimp
- Constant Contact
- Drip and many others
These off-site platforms will help you capture and nurture leads and interact with potential customers through automated drip emails, sequences, and workflows to help you close more deals. They provide a way to enhance your email communication to improve sales.
At 2DaMax Marketing, we prefer to work with more advanced automation software that offers multiple communication methods, including email, SMS, voice mail drops, review automation, campaign building, and more. These lead response management tools include:
- Go High Level
- ClickFunnles
- Funnelbolt
- Kartra
- Lead Convert Pro
These SAAS companies allow you to create a complete marketing and sales campaign for your business to attract more customers and close more deals while you focus on your customers/clients.
Some of these platforms have a high learning curve and require advanced knowledge in marketing and sales strategies. So I recommend using a digital marketing company to assist you with setting up and managing your business.
But the automation and tools that these software companies offer can boost your business to new heights.
For example:
Lead Convert Pro allows you to connect your website and social media channels to their platform through contact forms, webhooks, Zapier, and more. You can build SMS and email nurture campaigns, sales funnels, membership sites, review campaigns, and much more.
So how does a business website connect or link with other platforms?
Business Network Connections
There are many ways to connect your business site to other platforms. These methods include:
- Contact Forms
- Code Scripts
- APIs and Webhooks
There are also integrations tools such as:
These connections are the bridges or highways that connect your website to your social media marketing channels, payment gateways, calendars, email marketing campaigns, and other platforms to create your online network.
Creating an online network is what makes or breaks brand new startups. A network allows you to create a strong online presence, build your brand, provide valuable content and connect with potential customers and even rank your website on search engines like Google.
That’s right, having a strong online presence will help your website rank.
Let me explain how.
How To Rank A Business Website?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website online presence to create trust and authority with both users and search engines.
SEO no longer refers to the optimization of your website alone. It involves the optimization of your entire network. Your brand must be consistent across every platform so that anyone can instantly recognize it.
A perfect example of this is ranking a local website on Google Maps. To rank locally, a business needs to create a strong local identity on Google My Business, social media, and online directories. Or it will be challenging to rank on the local map pack (unless you live in a tiny town and have no competition).
Your business identity needs to live and breathe everywhere on the internet, especially where your potential clients hang out. Our social media management team specializes in brand-building strategies to create trust and authority for our clients.
Back in the day, I would help my clients by placing their business in front of as many people as possible with the budget that they gave me. I would do this with newspapers, radio, tv commercials, phone books, and even the Penny Saver (young people are like, what is that?).
But as you probably know, all of those methods are very costly for small business owners.
Today, there are hundreds of online platforms where a business can claim and create its web presence for free. But it does require technical knowledge and design creativity to maintain a professional look across the internet.
This is what a digital marketing agency that specializes in “business” will provide for your organization.
Next, I want to show you what a web presence looks like and the most common network connections that every business should have.
Creating An Online Presence
Instead of thinking of your website as an overpriced online digital business card, think of it as an information sales hub that connects multiple platforms.
We often find that many startups and small businesses fail to incorporate a professional web design for their business. And they often wonder why their website doesn’t convert visitors into customers/clients.
If you’re one of these business owners, don’t worry. Keep on reading, and you will understand why it’s important to have a professional web design strategy and what it takes to accomplish it.
So what does a business website look like? I’m glad you asked.
First, let’s take an overview look at what a digital information hub (business website) looks like.
A digital hub is a device that connects multiples platforms in a network. The “network” includes:
- Other Websites
- Social Media Channels
- Online Advertising Platforms
- Lead Response Management (LRM)
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Analytics Software
- Help Desk Center
- Payment Processors
- Online Booking Calendars & more
The sole process of building a marketing network is to attract consumers to your products or services.
The consumption of these products/services will provide a solution for people while creating revenue for your business.
The marketing strategy is the layout of all of the components required to create an effective marketing and sales network.
Building An Online Business Network
A web design business should have the design skills necessary to set up your business website to connect with multiple platforms and online tools; if they can’t or won’t, then run!
Here are a few examples of the connections that your business website needs to have.
CMS – A content management system (CMS) is a system used to manage the interactive content of a website or a similar application. A CMS enables a website owner or administrator to update and maintain their website easily.
Social Media – Social media ready is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days, but many people don’t really know what it means. The phrase is used to describe any website, article, blog post, or other digital content designed to make it suitable for social media engagement.
It also includes social media share buttons and the ability to capture leads by allowing users to sign up with their social media accounts.
SEO – On-page SEO is the process of optimizing a website’s content, design, and structure so that it is easy for search engines to crawl and index the site and so that its pages show up on relevant search ranking results.
It also involves technical SEO, which improves a website’s relevance in search results using code and other technical design elements on the site. For example, the implementation of schema added to a web page.
LRM – A lead response management (LRM) system is a software platform that collects, organizes, and tracks leads for a company as they move through the sales process. Essentially, it is the tool that turns leads into sales.
CRM – A customer relationship management system (CRM) manages a company’s interactions with current and potential customers. It is an important part of a company’s customer management strategy.
A CRM provides the ability to send proposals, invoices and collect payment online.
Analytics – Website analytics software is used to determine the effectiveness of websites. It shows how visitors interact with a site by measuring how many people visit a site, where, how long they stayed, what pages they visited, and what they clicked on. This information is vital for website managers and website designers who have to decide how to improve the site by figuring out what relevant content marketing and features are most popular and which are not.
Google Analytics is the most popular of these website analytics packages. It is free and easy to set up, and it provides good information for beginners. Our digital marketing agency provides our web design clients with more advanced analytics tools to track both paid and organic traffic.
Tracking – A Tracking Pixel is a small piece of code used to collect information about your site for marketing purposes. These tracking pixels are installed on a website to measure and record marketing data, such as the number of views, the viewership source, and the readership demographics.
The most common tracking pixels are obtained from Google Analytics, Google Adwords, and Facebook.
Conversion Optimization – Conversion optimization is the process of increasing visitors’ percentage to your site that takes the desired action. Most often, this means increasing the percentage of visitors who buy something, but it can also mean getting visitors to subscribe to your blog or to sign up for your email list.
Conversion optimization is a subset of conversion rate optimization (CRO), improving website usability. Conversion tools can assist a CRO expert in deciding which changes are required to increase conversions.
Blog – Business blogs are used by companies to present a new product launch, provide information about their services, answer frequently asked questions, provide quality content and keep existing customers updated about new projects and promotions.
A blog will allow you to create fresh content with professional images shared with your business network to provide information and create your community’s authority and expertise.
Help Desk – When you need support for your business, you will need the knowledge and support of a help desk software program. This type of software is used to manage your customer support and service department through a ticket-based process.
If you have a new business and set up a marketing and sales network for an affordable monthly plan, check out our business starter package.
Final Thoughts On Creating A Strong Online Presence
When looking at web design firms, you should look at more than just their design services or portfolio. You should ask yourself—if they truly understand web marketing and how it affects your overall online presence.
There’s no point in having a pretty site if no one can find it and/or it cannot convert visitors into customers. A business website is like a marketing and sales machine that connects, responds, and communicates with other tools, software, and platforms. All to grow your business, save you time, provide a great user experience, and make you money.
And a strong web design strategy will extend your brand and identity across multiple platforms to create a strong online presence that will help you grow your business in no time.
