Business Promotion and Brand Awareness:

If used properly, a website can be an excellent tool for promoting your business and building brand awareness.

The Key to Success is Consistency

The key to successfully promoting your business and your brand is to be consistent. Make sure that your website uses the same colours and logo as the rest of your marketing materials (e.g. letterhead, business cards, brochures, etc.). Having one look for your printed materials and another for your website will simply dilute your brand. Keep your efforts focused and consistent, and your brand will be reinforced to your customers.

Use Your Site - All the Time!

If you’ve invested the time, energy and money into building a solid website that effectively communicates your objectives to its visitors, you must use it! Be sure to put your web address on all your letters, emails, faxes, business cards, brochures, t-shirts, stickers, etc.

Constantly be driving people to your website for more information!

• Information Dissemination
  Sharing important business information and documents with your customers and potential customers.
• Generating Leads, Prospects and/or Customers
  Probably the most common goal of a website, this can be very difficult to measure. It is the process of leading visitors to your website to facilitate their conversion into actual customers.

Generating Leads

All websites can function in this manner. Having a great site with some useful, relevant content will generate interest.

Content is King

This website (apis.ca) was designed to generate interest about websites and the Internet, as well as interest about Apis Design by providing useful information about websites and the Internet. We capture leads from our site all the time, and we realize that this is one of the great values of our website - but we’ve worked hard for that. We focus on quality content, and you should do the same.

How to Facilitate Lead Generation

One mistake that some websites make is not making it easy for their customers to contact them. You should have, on every single page, a link to your contact page, as well as an email address, if not phone (714-261-0903) and fax numbers as well (on our site, our phone number and email address appear in the footer of every page).

• If your website has convinced a potential customer to contact you, then be sure that they can!

• Repeat Business
  Providing a website as a tool for existing customers to find out about secondary and add-on offers.

Repeat Business

A website can be a great tool to generate repeat business. Whether you have gained a customer via your site or through more traditional means (like a phone call or a brick and mortar store), getting that customer to purchase from you again is made so much easier with a website.

How to Get Customers to Buy Again

In order to use your website to help you sell to customers repeatedly, try following these suggestions:

• Drive them to your website
  Whenever you communicate with your customers, be sure that your web address is somewhere to be found. Whether it’s email, letters, faxes, invoices or the corporate golf shirt - be sure that your website is in plain view
• Provide regularly updated content
  Nobody will come back to your site day after day if there’s no new information on it. This will also help your site to rank more favourably with search engines, as they tend to place a higher importance on sites that update themselves regularly.
• Offer Specials
  Offering limited time offers and deals on your site is a great way to get customers to buy again.
• Newsletters
  Although a newsletter (be it electronic or otherwise) is not actually a website, it can be used to drive customers to your website to get more information, or to take advantage of a special deal. You should also archive all your newsletters on your website.
• Product/Service Information
  The very content on your site can facilitate the buying process for your customers.
  For example, let’s say your customer has already purchased Product A from you. On your website you provide information about a problem that tends to plague businesses in the same industry as your customer. You also talk about how Product B helps to solve this problem. On their own, your customer has discovered a solution to a problem that you didn’t even know they had!

1. Design:
We’re talking about things like colour choice, alignments, visual interest, and meaningful metaphors.
2. Message:
Content is king. Every page in your website needs a goal. You need to understand who your target audience is and what you want them to do. Then you must provide them with the appropriate information and a meaningful call to action.
3. Architecture:
How are your pages organized? Is it intuitive? Will your target audience understand? Think about Disney.com will differ from Microsoft.com.
4. Usability & Accessibility:
HTML is still a coding language and it needs to be well formed and accessible. Not everyone who visits your site is perfectly enabled. Some people have disabilities, some have slow connections, some can’t install the Flash plug-in. Knowing your target audience and your goals certainly helps to set your usability and accessibility standards.
5. Online Marketing:
Appealing to the search engines is a game. Get it wrong and you’ll find yourself banned. Do it right and you’ll be rewarded with lots of free, targeted traffic. It’s not difficult, it just takes experience and planning.
6. Technical Stuff:
Is your domain easy to remember? Is your ISP reliable? Do they have 20,000 other websites hosted on your server? Do they support the right technologies for your website to grow?