Before Covid 19 Pandemic, Micro, Small business owners had never thought about websites playing a specific role in the business growth strategy. But, now the role of websites has changed dramatically post Covid 19 Pandemic and has given a solid push to the Digital marketing strategies. The expectations and behaviors of modern-day professional buyers have evolved, reshaping the role and functions required by the websites for SME market segments.

Adding on it, our Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s slogan ‘Vocal for Local’ encourage not only the use of domestically made products but also to promote and take them to the global arena.

Today, the website stands as the number one resource that buyers use for evaluating a company, its product, and services even before connecting with a sales representative. The website plays a key role as a brand ambassador, product/service educator, 24/7 digital sales representative, and customer caretaker – all in one.

This brief outlines the following top five ways to build a high-performing B2b and B2C website meeting these new buying behaviors. If you apply these concepts while planning to build new or revamp your existing website, you can jump-start desired results and maximize its potential.

1. Let the Website be the Destination for the modern-day Buyers: To make a high-performing website for your buyers, it should serve the purpose of the buyer’s journey cycle right from creating awareness, evaluation to conversion and beyond. This points out to understanding your buyers and their buying behavior. The design and messaging of your site and the subsequent content you offer should address the following key points.

1. Role / Title: Who are the concerned officials to approach within the company to address visitors’ queries.
2. What are the pain points or market challenges do they need to address? What are outcomes do they achieve?
3. The site should answer a variety of buyer categories coming under the buyer’s journey cycle – influencer, re-searcher, decision-maker or advisors, etc
4. The type of content, products, insights, etc to influence the buyers and enable them to make transactions or calls to action.

The answers to the above points will enable you to develop the right messages and content that aligns with your buyer’s needs. This will position you as an authoritative voice and the buyer will realize your value contribution. Once Value is created, trust and loyalty will follow automatically.

2. Design Your Website with Business Goals:

Set KPIs: Heading towards a destination without a pre-set goal cannot be thought. This applies to even for the website design too! Setting key performance indicators (KPIs) allows you to measure and track the established goals. The following KPIs can be examples for you to check the trends in website traffic.

1. Bounce rate – The percentage of site visits is limited to a single page.
2. Unique website Visitors – Apart from the regular visits, you need to know how many are unique Vs repeat visitors.
3. Pages Viewed Per session – indicates visitor’s interest level.
4. Average Time on Page – indicates the success of the page in holding the buyer’s attention effectively.
5. Goals and Event Completions – incomplete forms state the need of re-design, re-messaging or elimination altogether

Track Performance: Plenty of tools exist for tracking website performance and visitor trends along with so many insightful data. The following are the must-have tools

• Google Analytics – A free tool that helps you to uncover the trends of your site traffic, visitors’ profiles, site performance. etc.

• Google search console – A free webmaster tool that helps you with SEO, Site Positioning, Organic Search traffic, SEO Queries, Impression, clicks, and more.

• Hotjar – generates heatmaps and video capture tools based on the visitor movement on the website.

Monitor, Measure, and Optimize: This should be the mantra on your way to website optimization and your business growth journey

3. Make your Website Easy to Connect in a Crowded Market: If the buyer can’t land or find your website, your site can’t do its job. There are many factors that influence the site traffic like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the best practices like website design, content, and code, etc to enhance your results. The following quick tips can lead to better results.

• Incorporate Keywords and Phrases – A free Google tool helps you with keyword analysis.

• Update and promote Content regularly.

• Optimize your design

4. First Impression is the best impression: This proverb applies to website design too. When a prospective buyer land on your site, the site should be capable of capturing attention within 15 seconds making him stay on and explore. If done, your site can serve as the conduit that turns prospects into customers. If done improperly, it can be the reason to push your customers to your competitors. Making a website to create a lasting experience goes back to knowing your buyers very well and that understanding their needs and expectations can result in a longer navigation period. The following points help to deliver the results.

• Easy to Navigate

• Clear Messaging

• Visual design

• Insightful content & Resources

• Mobile-friendly design

5. Effective Engagement Techniques: The high-performing sites can play the role of engagement and nurture too. The following techniques can increase the onsite engagement experience and improve the offsite nurturing of buyers.

Onsite Engagement

• The chatbot functionality can take care of engagement by answering buyers’ quick and preliminary questions in real-time.

• Make it easy for visitors to connect with your sales team by implementing an appointment calendaring tool.

Offsite Engagement

• Calls-to-Action (CTA) – Enable future communication with visitors that encourage opt-ins and hook into marketing automation tools like HubSpot, Freshsales, or others.
• Triggering re-targeting ads once buyers leave your site.
• Sharing & promoting valuable content through other marketing channels like social media, email marketing to drive traffic back to your site to do business with you.

Conclusion:

Today’s professional buyers being busy with their hectic schedules are heavily relying on websites researching products and services to make their purchase decisions. This scenario is clearly indicating the strong need for Indian startups and business owners to be prepared to go far high performing websites. They cannot afford to ignore this 24/7 digital sales representative missing in action!

Have you ever sensed the need of running your business engine in a new way under the current market scenario?

Then, you must be reading through the entire article to get empowered to take action and grow your business.

The current competitive market scenario has made the organizations shift the focus from “making money” to “making difference” for their long-term sustainability. To be sustainable in the market and to cover a long journey of growth, any business concept or a business model has to run with the following three important components:

1. Vehicle         –        Product or Service
2. Engine          –        Marketing system
3. Fuel              –         Traffic (Website visitors)

While we understand the chemistry of the above three components in a business scenario, the power of the marketing system in Digital mode stands superior just like a catalyst in a chemical reaction! Digital Marketing plays a key role in the current era of the Internet that has changed the landscape of business forever.

Before we understand How and who? Let’s connect to the following two basic aspects and then understand the power of digital marketing.

1)     What is marketing and its fundamentals?

Marketing is a management process for identifying, anticipating & stimulating, and satisfying consumer requirements profitably.

1. Marketing is based on science and not on creativity
2. Marketing starts before creating the product.
3. Marketing starts with understanding the customer and customers’ needs that lead to creating a product that fits.
4. Marketing is about sending the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
5. Marketing is not just about selling; It is also about keeping an existing customer delighted by communicating with them so that they remain as a customer for life.
6. The purpose of Marketing is to build a brand and capture a position in the minds of the customers
7. Marketing is a game of perception.

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself. The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous”

–  Peter Drucker

2)    Understanding Traditional Vs Digital marketing; When to choose what w.r.t Indian market Context?

The major difference between traditional and digital marketing is the medium through which an audience encounters the marketing message. While traditional marketing uses channels like billboards, magazines & newspapers, digital marketing uses digital media like websites, Emails, and social media.

 

While it is easy to personalize the communication, have direct interaction with customers, target potential customers, and measure marketing efforts (ROI) in the case of Digital Marketing, it is not that easy with traditional marketing.

It is important to note that whenever a product is generic with very wide targeting – TV Ads can reach millions at a low cost. With an average of 4- 5 members per household, TV has a reach of about 900 Mn to One Billion population in India. The reach of Digital Marketing is nowhere close to the TV (Source: Wikipedia).

However, Digital Marketing stands as the best medium when you are required to reach the fluent English-speaking population in India with spending power – Approx. 100 Mn users.

Radio has a reach of 65% of the Indian Population (Source: Financial Express).

Trust, the above information gives you a fair idea as to which medium can be used based on the nature of your product.

Now, let us look at the important 03 aspects as to how the companies can create value for their buyers while they are able to achieve and maintain long-term profitability.

1.  The CATT Marketing Funnel: The new framework – that attracts people, convert into leads and persuade them to purchase (Transact),  I call it as CATT framework and the formula for Wealth = n^CATT

Where,

[n] Niche: Your success and wealth depend on the niche you choose.

[^] denotes power; [C] Content;    [A] Attention;  [T] Trust;           [T] Transact

Now let’s understand how it can be applied to any Business / Niche.

You cannot market each one of your target audiences, as their priority and the need may differ from what you sell. So, it is important to identify those who are genuinely in need of your product.

Let’s call them leads.

When you have such leads, you can subject them to a marketing machine to gain their trust and make them transact. If they don’t become your leads, you cannot send them a sequence of messages designed to increase their trust and persuade them to transact. That’s where the CATT framework helps you to leverage.

a)      Content: This is the first component of the framework and it is the center of all marketing. The content can be a blog post or a social media post or a podcast or a video to capture the attention of your audience. The content works here point to the lead magnet that you offer your audience in exchange for joining your email list or becoming your lead.

b)     Attention: Once you have created the lead magnet, you need to get your audience to notice it or get their attention to it. You can do this either organically or with the help of paid ads. When your audience meets your lead magnet, the magic happens. The magic transforms the visitors of an unknown entity to your leads where you know their name and email id. And that’s where their journey begins.

c)      Trust: Trust is the most crucial element of their entire sales process. People don’t buy from anyone randomly. They buy from people whom they trust. When your audience became your lead, a relationship begins. You need to make this relationship healthy and grow the trust to a level, where they start considering doing business with you. Trust is a very fragile element and it can be built over time in small doses. You can do this by creating a sequence of content that stimulates and builds trust in small doses at a regular interval.

d)     Transact: This is the final stage where the potential buyer transacts with you. But, one needs to be careful that because they trust you doesn’t mean they will buy whatever you are selling. All they care about is themselves. When your audience is ready, present your product or service packaged in an offer which they cannot resist, the next magic happens. Your lead becomes your customer. Isn’t it every organization/marketing & sales professionals want?!

2. Integrated digital Marketing: The CATT framework can be executed in an integrated format of different digital marketing channels. Please look at the self-explanatory image below.

Integrated Digital Market the blend of Email marketing, content marketing, Social Media Marketing, and SEO integrated suitably executes the CATT framework leading to strong customer engagement to wealth creation.

3.  Personal Branding – Mass trust Blueprint: One of the biggest challenges that marketers & organizations have with lead generation is engaging the leads qualitatively. Most marketers create a follow-up sequence with generic messages. Such emails do not have much traction and there is a high probability that the subscribers would usually unsubscribe from your list.

So, what is the secret to the healthy engagement of your leads so that they remain your subscribers?

The secrete to it is growing your personal brand. Personal branding in this context means that you have a strong connection with your audience and let them have a fair idea about who you are.

Conclusion:

The current era of marketing professionals and business organizations must have :

• Analytical capacity to handle an increasing amount of data.
• Creative talent to define products and develop messages for a crowded marketplace.
• Social awareness to navigate in complex global market
• Finally, a strong dose of technological knowledge & ethical sensitivity