The Benefits of a Custom Branded Website
Last month, we explored the reasons entrepreneurs may want to focus more on building a social media presence than a custom website.
Long story short, social media is easier and cheaper to establish for new businesses. It provides a way to engage with your audience as you learn to hone your brand voice. But without a custom, branded website to direct them to, you’ll always be playing on someone else’s playground and at the mercy of how they run their platform, which is never ideal. While it’s a good start, social media can only get you so far, and that’s why we’re focusing on branding your website today. You can read more about the benefits of a branded social media presence here.
Of course, in an ideal world, you would work hard to brand both your social media and website presence. But in reality, there just isn’t always enough time or money to make that happen all at once.
Today we’re going to focus on who benefits the most from building a custom, branded website and how it will become the home base for your brand.
Your well-designed, well-written, functional website builds credibility and trust.
A professional website is the first indication to any potential client that you are a legit business that they can trust. Because social media is free, super quick, and easy to start, having lots of followers or an extensive feed doesn’t instill the confidence that a website does. Potential clients know you have some skin in the game and have been around the block at least a few times if you have a professional website rather than just a free feed anyone can put up. Your website provides you with the ability to answer their questions, direct them on a customer journey so they learn more about you. It also provides them with more cohesive and complete information than your Instagram feed with haphazard snippets of information here and there.
Your website is your best tool to get found online.
A professional website, built with the best SEO practices in mind is the optimal way for someone to find you online. While it is possible for people to stumble upon your posts in their social media feed, the content on your website can be written to specifically target the people who are looking to find you. Good backend practices like alt tags, title tags, meta descriptions, use of internal linking and more, all contribute to your SEO ranking. Your website gives you the ability to tailor how your site is found rather than relying on a pretty picture making someone stop their scroll.
Your website will provide you with tons of data to understand your clients better.
One of the most powerful tools your website gives you is the ability to see information about who is visiting your website. With a quick, easy install of Google Analytics, you can see who is visiting your website, what geographic location they are from, what pages they are clicking on, how long they are staying on each page, and even smaller things like what browser they are using, and whether they’re visiting from a mobile device or desktop, among a million other things. You can then leverage Google Analytics to create more content similar to what your website visitors are engaging with or edit current content so it gains more traffic.
You own and control everything on your website and aren’t at the mercy of another platform.
Ok guys, this might not seem like much, but it’s a biggie! When you create a custom WordPress website, you pay for hosting separately, and everything you put there is yours. (Big side note — this is not true if you decide to create a templated site on some of the popular drag and drop platforms like Squarespace or Wix). WordPress sites allow you free reign when it comes to design, copy, functionality, and integration of third-party services. Remember recently when Facebook and Instagram were down for a whole day? If your entire brand presence relied on people finding you there, well, that was probably a really bad day for you. When the entirety of your brand is built on a platform you don’t own, you are at risk of losing everything you’ve worked so hard for. What would you do one day if Facebook or Instagram just went away? What would you do if you posted something wrong and landed up in Facebook jail unable to market to your customers? Did you know that you have limited design options with the drag and drop e-commerce functions on social media sites? Your business shouldn’t rely solely on social media to grow. Establishing your own website allows you to make the decisions that are best for your business and is one of the best ways you can invest in your business’s long-term growth.
Your website encourages exploration, instead of mindless scrolling and shiny object syndrome.
You want people to lose track of time on your website because they are so interested in reading your content and looking at your beautiful project images. It’s hard to command someone’s attention on social media since there are so many shiny objects quickly coming at them from every direction. But once you get them on your website, you have their attention, and your only job is to keep it. Having a website provides you the opportunity to put your best foot forward, pre-educate them on what it’s like to work with you, and lead them exactly where you want them to go. That pre-education also helps to make sure that the people that do make it to your contact form are good fits and qualified leads to work with you. So instead of hoping they go from a post to your profile, then from your profile to your website then to your scheduling link, you create an obvious easy to follow journey right on your website — no platform hopping required!
A successful brand is a result of both your website and social media working together. But if you have to choose, your website should be your main focus. Your website serves as the hub of your business, and social media is a marketing tool to get people there. If you are ready to take your brand to the next level, you can start with my interior design magnetic website checklist freebie, or schedule a call with me today!
