It’s your universal storefront, accessible to everyone regardless of geographic barriers. It’s where your marketing funnel leads, bringing potential new customers in from social campaigns, landing pages, and paid advertisements. As we say, “​​Your website is one of your business’s most important marketing assets.”

Once your audience has made it to your website, it is where you will continue to foster the emotional connection you are building with your potential customers. Your website establishes your brand identity in visitors’ minds. You can demonstrate that you understand their needs by personalizing your site experience for them in order to grow customer trust and loyalty. 

Your website affects your bottom line by building your brand’s reputation, driving conversion, and ensuring ongoing customer engagement. You can build a website experience that encourages each of these things. This will build your website’s value as an essential marketing asset and a major financial driver for your business.

Your website grows your brand’s audience

Your website helps grow your audience, introduce your brand to new markets, and find potential customers. Strong technical SEO, authoritative content, and well-targeted landing pages on your website will all help build an engaged audience.

Offer visitors valuable information through high-quality content

Content builds your potential customer base by strategically targeting keywords to increase your discoverability. High-ranking site pages on search engines can direct users to the valuable, quality content on your site and encourage them to stay onsite and engage with your business for even longer. Seek out a CMS that makes it easy to templatize blog posts and publish them quickly and easily to your site.

Writing high-quality content leads to more visitor engagement, fewer bounces, and higher conversion rates. Long-form content like whitepapers and thought leadership will build your overall SEO value, but they also build your credibility as a brand and your domain authority. Authoritative content encourages backlinks, which will draw customers from other sites and boost your search engine rankings.

Help potential customers find your brand with a foolproof SEO strategy

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps connect your brand to potential customers. Search engine traffic is a good driver of conversion because you’re reaching audiences who have already demonstrated interest in what you have to offer.

The keywords you target with content and landing pages are important for connecting to the right audiences. However, for search engines to find, understand, and rank your content, you have to optimize your website for search. You want to make sure your website platform allows for building a site you can easily optimize.

On-page optimizations you want to look for include:

• Title tags and meta descriptions
• Clear titles, H1s, and H2s
• Alt text to all of your images
• Custom URLs and clear slugs
• 301 redirects for any changed pages
• Canonicals, sitemaps, robots.txt files, reverse proxies, and custom code
• Site speed and uptime
• Mobile-friendly design

Run marketing campaigns to engage your target audience

Your team crafts marketing materials and campaigns for distribution across the web. Those ads are intended to provoke interest and hopefully prompt viewers to click through and engage with your website. The quality of your website then converts those leads into paying customers.

You need to be able to create targeted landing pages to speak to your different audiences and their unique interests and concerns. You want a website platform that allows marketing teams to spin up their own landing pages as they need them instead of waiting for engineering to build them. If you can easily create, test, and make changes to landing pages, you can stay on top of trends, be more responsive to your audience, and improve your conversion rates.

Your website builds customer relationships

Your website is where you build ongoing relationships with your customers. As they return to your site for information and services, you have an opportunity to draw leads further down the sales funnel. To turn existing customers into loyal, long-term brand advocates, make sure your site performs well, reflects your brand identity, and communicates your values as a company.

Develop a brand and site experience that forge emotional connections 

Consistency builds customer trust. You want your branding, navigation, and site experience to be easy, consistent, and memorable, so customers have positive associations with your brand.

Strong brand identity

Branding is built on consistency. Your brand identity should be instantly recognizable so that you can build an emotional connection to your audience.

The easiest way to ensure consistent brand identity is by using a design system. Your design system can serve as a living style guide that includes brand guidelines for how your branding should be used. It will be a single source of truth that ensures your branding stays consistent across your entire web presence.

In Webflow, reusable components and accessible design tools mean marketers can use your design system as a living resource. Designers can create a design system directly in Webflow as a stand-alone page or microsite. It shows how your branding should be used in a real-life scenario instead of just telling users what to do.

You can create a component library that stores all your branding assets, like images, logos, and fonts. It can also include the elements that are used to build pages, like reusable Symbols, classes, and other repeatable components. With those pieces pre-built and stored in a central system, teams can build landing pages quickly and keep their branding consistent.

Clear navigation

Easy-to-use navigation helps connect visitors to their needs and encourages them to engage and become customers. Anyone using your site should quickly be able to access the information they need or make purchases with no confusion or frustration. Poor navigation and confusing labels can quickly lose you customers. 

The user experience (UX) on your site should be based on user research and refined using user journey mapping. You can absolutely get creative with your navigation, but make sure it is intuitive, consistent across pages, and easy to use. For accessibility purposes, labels should be legible (not too small and with clear color contrast), and buttons should be large enough that even those with motor control challenges can click on them.

This exploration of the hamburger menu highlights a few key principles to keep in mind when you build a navigation menu for your site. Your main site menu should be clearly visible. It should be in a place that is easy to click on, especially while using it on a mobile device. Labels need to clearly communicate what content will be on the page, so visitors don’t need to waste time searching for what they need.

Build trust with a fast, accessible, and performant site

Customers need to know that they will be able to access your site when they need it, where they need it, and not have to wait ages for it to load. A fast, reliable site encourages customer loyalty and builds trust. It speaks to the quality of your services and cements a positive association with your product and brand. 

Mobile-accessible design

Your website needs to be available to potential customers on the devices they are using to browse the web, and today, that means being mobile-friendly. As of 2022, mobile web browsing accounts for around 60% of all internet traffic. A lot of your customers will primarily, or even exclusively, access your site with their mobile devices. So if your site doesn’t work well on mobile, they are likely to look elsewhere.

Focus on responsive web design to make your website accessible on whatever device — phones, tablets, or computers — your visitors use. Responsive web design works by using breakpoints that allow your site to reorganize itself so it’s easy to navigate and looks good on any device. That way, visitors can read your content and find the information they need to convert regardless of how they’re browsing.

Page load speed and reliable uptime

Your website’s loading speed will affect whether customers stick around or bounce, which means page load time has a direct impact on your bottom line. An Unbounce report showed that 45% of ecommerce visitors were less likely to purchase from a slow-loading site, and 37% were less likely to return at all. 

To optimize the performance of your website, test your site performance regularly. Use analytics tools like Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights to identify elements that might be slowing your pages down and fix them. 

You can use this page speed checklist to review your website’s performance optimizations. Make sure your images are also responsive so they are mobile-friendly, and consider using data-light image formats like WebP files. Choose reliable web hosting that has good reviews and robust security practices in place to keep your site secure and consistently online, so it’s always available to visitors.

Your website drives conversion

Conversion is the biggest site impact on your bottom line. Not just converting visitors to paying customers but also drawing visitors into a deeper level of engagement with your brand and community. That engagement will build the success of your business in the long term. 

Analyze site activity to better understand visitor needs and behaviors

Your website can be an important source of data-driven customer insights through its analytics integrations. You can use customer data to improve conversion rates and better target future marketing campaigns. Website analytics tools offer your team a deeper understanding of your audience and will help you maximize the return on your marketing efforts.

Analyze customer behavior to better understand the needs and preferences of your customer base. Your analytics will show you which pages are the most popular, which approaches get the most engagement, and which user paths result in the highest conversion rates. You can run A/B tests and iterate, adjusting your marketing approach to improve conversions and create a better customer experience.

You can use the user data from lead forms and customer submissions to better target drip campaigns. Email potential and current customers content that is related to what they’ve already demonstrated interest in. You can show your visitors that you understand what’s important to them, and you can create content that serves their needs.

Tap personalization strategies to tailor the user experience

The web is an interactive medium. You can take advantage of that interactivity by personalizing your website for each visitor with dynamic content. Personalization allows you to target your marketing approach to specific audiences and tailor their experience of your website to suit their needs better, serving a user the optimal experience at any given moment in time.

Dynamic content

Dynamic content allows your website to take the role of a skilled salesperson. In a physical shop, a salesperson will take time to understand individual customers’ needs, maintain relationships with regulars, and nurture their emotional connection to your business. Use dynamic content to personalize visitors’ experiences on your website in the same way. 

Dynamic content could look like swapping out text on your pricing page, hiding or showing a specific promotion, or changing the language of your call-to-action (CTA) based on user data about the person visiting your site. 

You can integrate your web platform with tools like Marketo or Hubspot to gather user data and gain insight into how a lead has been interacting with your site. You can then build bespoke experiences for customers based on their prior behavior in order to move that lead further into the funnel. If they show interest in a specific type of information, you can position more of that information for them to read.

Targeted calls-to-action

The way you design your call-to-action buttons has a direct impact on conversion and revenue. They should be present throughout your site, clearly visible, visually appealing, and targeted accurately to the audience you’re hoping to capture. 

Monitor your conversion rate, run A/B tests, and personalize your CTAs with dynamic content to optimize them and increase conversions on your site.

Marketing teams should actively participate in building your website 

With your website playing such a huge role in the success of your marketing efforts, you want your marketing team to be able to actively participate in building your site. Your website platform determines how easily they can do that. Visual development tools like Webflow allow anyone on your marketing team to build for the web without having to know how to code.

With Webflow, marketing campaigns can be developed faster because you don’t have to wait for tickets to go through engineering for each change or addition you want to make. Your team can be more responsive to customer feedback and jump on important trends and shifts in the market more quickly. 

With Webflow, your marketing team has more power to build landing pages, make changes to copy, and craft the end-to-end user experience. They can directly impact the bottom line of your company by generating traffic, keeping users onsite, and ultimately driving conversions. With that freedom, your website can become a driving force behind the success of your company.