In the past month, Internet usage has skyrocketed by 70% with more people working from home and spending more time on their computers.
That means there is a very good chance more prospective clients are visiting your company’s website right now.
How should your business respond?
We’ve put together a list of practical, small steps that we recommend for your website and marketing, during this difficult time.
7 Website Resources During COVID-19
1. Do a Quick Audit of Your Website
This sounds obvious, but almost every time we start a new website project, we do a quick review of an existing site and inevitably find small things that should be fixed – typos, outdated information, broken links, etc.
With more people looking at your website, you want to make sure it’s presenting your business well.
Here are a few steps when auditing your site:
- Click through all the main pages in the top navigation and do a quick review
- Look at the website on a mobile device
- Watch for any security warnings, such as SSL notifications in the browser
- Review all of the forms and make sure all of the contact information is correct
2. Improve Your Website UX with Small Tweaks
The goal of every website is to engage and convert web visitors. While some websites may require a redesign to upgrade the user experience, you can typically improve the conversion rate of a site with some small tweaks.
Here are some small changes that can help increase conversions:
- Look at your site from the perspective of your visitors. Imagine that you are one of your potential clients and try to view their site through their eyes. What are they looking for and wanting to accomplish on your site? What is an effective site visit as far as they are concerned?
- Place your phone number in a prominent place in the navigation (if you are encouraging phone calls)
- Include clear call to actions on key web pages to guide the visitor to the right page
- Add live chat as another option for visitors to start a conversation with your team
3. Review Your Website Analytics
You may be considering how to allocate your marketing budget and the best channels to invest to deliver results for your business.
Try to make strategic marketing decisions based on data and focus on the best marketing channels. Your Google analytics is the best place to assess what’s happening on your website and different digital marketing channels.
If you’ve never set up analytics on your website, set it up as soon as possible so you can start gathering that data.
Here are a few resources on Google Analytics:
- How to Get Started with Google Analytics (reach out to our team if you need help adding the tracking code)
- How to Use Goals in Analytics for Tracking
- Use Thank You Pages for Conversion Tracking
4. Improve Your Landing Pages
You can get the best “bang for your buck” by focusing and improving website pages that receive the most traffic or that you are driving traffic to.
This can often be the home page, which is why clients tend to invest in a homepage redesign. But it may also be specific landing pages for Google Ad campaigns or Facebook campaigns.
Your landing pages or key pages should not be a basic designed page with a bunch of text and a few images. These pages should have a high-end custom look and feel and should engage visitors visually and emotionally. Here is a link to an article on the benefits of key custom web pages: https://tinyfrog.com/custom-page-template
If you are utilizing any landing pages and you aren’t happy with the results, consider:
- Upgrading the design with a custom page design template that can be repurposed for multiple landing pages
- Rewriting the copy and calls to action
- Performing an A/B test to experiment with different layouts and content
5. Ramp Up Your Content Marketing
A strong content marketing plan and process is the key to SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, building online credibility in your industry, and turning your website into a resource for your clients and prospective clients.
We speak to clients all of the time, who have intentions to start an active content marketing process, but fall short due to lack of time and resources. If you or anyone on your team has some extra time now, this could be the best time to start.
You may consider hiring a freelance writer. There are tons of writers available and you can typically negotiate a reasonable rate for the work. You may also want to consider video content as well. Most website visitors are more apt to watch a video vs. read an article.
Here are a few tips from our video blogging process:
- Film a batch of videos with different team members at one time. Each team member can speak about a topic for 1-2 minutes.
- Hire a videographer to film or at least edit the videos. You can reduce your costs by doing as many videos as possible at one time
- Upload the video to YouTube and create a blog post on your site with the video. You can embed the YouTube video and then make sure to provide a text transcript in the post. Search engines can’t crawl a video, so the transcript is important for SEO.
- Share the video blog posts in newsletters and social media
You can learn more about our video blog process here: https://tinyfrog.com/benefits-of-video-blogs/
6. Focus on Getting Online Reviews
A lot of outside sales teams are shifting from in-person meetings to video/phone calls and will need to rely on the website as a closing tool.
Adding case studies or a portfolio to your website can be a great option. But online reviews, in particular, can make a big difference in the sales process.
Here are few tips when requesting reviews from customers:
- Select the top 3 places that you’d like to get online reviews
- Ask a client to provide a review on a specific site and provide instructions on how to post the review
- Try to get at least 2-3 reviews each month and make sure your team all helps towards that goal by requesting a review after an exciting milestone or customer success
Online reviews are also much better than testimonials in terms of showing unbiased social proof. Once you have a number of reviews, you can add links to those review sites on your own website.
In addition, you can add these links to potential clients during the sales process to demonstrate some of the benefits that your other clients have received in working with your company.
7. Build Internal Marketing Resources
While outside marketing providers are critical for certain campaigns and competitive industries, you can also use this time to build up your internal marketing resources.
If you have a team member who may be a good fit to help with marketing, invest in that individual and encourage them to learn as much as possible.
A marketing assistant or specialist can help oversee any projects by a third-party and also perform all the day-to-day steps, such as blog posts, social media, and getting online reviews.
Here are some great free marketing resources as a starting point:
- Google Analytics Academy
- QuickSprout for Digital Marketing
- HubSpot Content Marketing course
- Hootsuite Social Media courses
Use This Time to Build
While this is a challenging time for all business owners, it won’t last and making strategic decisions now can impact your business for the next few years. This new focus could also inspire many team members and inspiration leads to a positive outlook and can spread to other areas of the business.
If you’d like to discuss your website and the coronavirus situation, plus how to navigate the items above, feel free to contact us.
