5 Ways to Make Your Startup Website a Daily Destination
Having a bunch of individual hits on your website is great, especially if a lot of them are turning into sales. However, the real aim of having a web presence for your business is to garner repeat hits and therefore repeat business. If your website becomes a daily destination for your customers, it means that you are creating a culture around your brand and people that are loyal to it; something that all business owners strive for. The following five tactics are the best way to turn your website into a daily destination for your customers.
Create A Community
Nothing makes people buy more than feeling that by doing so that they are becoming part of a community. This tactic is employed by some of the largest brands out there such as Apple and Microsoft, who have thriving online communities surrounding their products. In order to do this, you can enable comments on posts and content that your business puts on your website, and can have forum capabilities on your website for customer care, troubleshooting, or anything related to your business or product.
Make Sure That Your Content Is Sharable
This goes beyond having the buttons for Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and Reddit on your content. In order for content to be sharable, it has to not take a lot of time to get through and be relevant to your customer’s interests; ideally it should have something to do with your product, but content that is simply entertaining can suffice to be sharable as well, and will definitely work to draw traffic in. Having a section of your website devoted to customer driven content and content that is memetic or falls in line with popular trends will aid you in this.
Make Your Website Valuable To Your Customers
There are so many third party apps and websites that can provide discounts and news about companies that you have to make sure that these sorts of things are only available through your website if you want customers to keep coming back to check on them. Have flash sales on your website or an email newsletter that will send your customers exclusive coupons and the like in order to drive them back to your website time and time again.
Use Your Website To Communicate With Your Customers
When doing so, however, you need to make sure that you do not address your customers like you are continuing to market to them. The online community appreciates honesty and a personal touch, just like people do in person. When creating your website and using it, use the same ethos when communicating. If someone poses a question in your forums, answer them directly where your customers can see that you have done so. This will encourage further conversation and will bring them back to check on it each day.
Target Your Audience
When it comes down to it, your website is a marketing platform, even if you have to dress it up like it is not. Use the analytics from your website such as where people are visiting from and what they are looking at (and for how long) in order to propose and draft targeted content that will snag the eye of your customers based on what they have been looking at in the past.
By:Murray Newlands is a startup adviser, investor, and entrepreneur. He’s written for many major publications, such as VentureBeat and Entrepreneur.
