Hi friends! We are welcoming back Emily of Emily Foster Creative for the second episode of her mini-series with The Render Podcast. We are jumping into today’s episode with the details and the why of what website platforms or services you may or may not need for your business or service-providing type. 

Be sure to join us on this episode as we take a deeper look into how you can continue to drive success for your business. Having your business plan is great, but not always good enough, and learning how you can continue to set your brand apart from the crowd is so good to know!

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Platform Types For Your Business To Drive Success

So depending on your business or service type, you should select the website type based on what best serves your business. A great example of this could be Showit — this site is great for stunning customizations and displaying various ways of customizing your website. There are also sites such as Wix, WordPress, Squarespace, Shopify, and we are sure others!

Don’t worry too much about SEO for any of these sites as it is more of a myth that the SEO does not work as well for certain ones. As long as your copy is clear and concise with your brand, you will appear in search engines and ensure you are still getting traffic to your online site. You can think of your website as the “assistant” to your business. Maybe you’re at a networking event and someone wants to see your site for what you do, you want your website to do the work for you in creating interest and establishing that trust with your audience or the viewer.

The Importance of Having a Website

On the flip side of having a beautiful website, it is important to even just have a website. We know this sounds so silly, but we have had students in the past say to us that they get their clients from social media…which is great, but what about the people not on social media? Think about the limit you are having with the reach of just social media. You need a website that is doing the work for you to help sell your product or service.

How do you help your client understand who you are through storytelling? Make sure that your social media and website showcase that. You want your online presence to help do the work for you. What is the clear next step when it comes to working with you? Your website should do that work for you! Having personalized questions on your website is nice to get to know your customer base but don’t make it too long-winded where they don’t want to submit the form back to you. Save those nitty-gritty questions for a call or Zoom chat so that you don’t drive away your customer. We suggest having a few prompting questions, but not too many so this influences them to hop on a call with you. 

Optimizing Your Website For The User Experience

You have done all of this work for your website but now you need to make sure that your website is appearing in the appropriate searches where you want to be found. If you have not done so already, once your site is up, set up your Google Analytics account so you can track your ROI and know the specifics. It helps you understand how long people are staying on your website, the engagement levels, what pages are performing well, and which ones are not.

Also, take the time to look at your SEO and keep a track of that to make sure that it is continuously aligning with your business goals and doing the work for you. As performance rates and trends shift, it is important to also make sure that your website is performing how it should and being your “assistant” like we all want! Hire the right person or team to stay on top of this for you to ensure that you are keeping up with the everchanging online presence of your business and brand identity.

The Five Pillars To Your Brand

We are leaving you with the a piece of information and some tools to help build your brand with great pillars to stand on. You may have heard of pillars for maintaining a healthy and stable business, but your brand is equally as important. 

1. Look at your brand and work on a strategy that will consistently show up and work for you.
2. The psychology of your branding design is what is going to narrate who you are and what you do to your clients and ideal audience.
3. Copywriting is going to play a huge role in how you speak to your clients and what they get from your presentation. The language is key in allowing them to gather who you are, what your values are, and how you can serve them. 
4. Your content and design that shows your branding is going to be a sales point to closing the deal, the flow of how your users will navigate through the site, and how they experience your brand.
5. Last but not least the SEO that is implemented into your website and how it connects with Google Analytics is going to be a factor in how you show up and appear in online searches.

It is so important to focus on these as these are going to be the pillars of creating a cohesive experience for your brand and how your client uses your website to book your services or purchase your products. When you are building your business and want to continue booking clients, it is so important to take the time to do all of these steps to create a healthy and strong foundation to support you as you continue to grow!

Thank you so much for joining us on today’s episode of The Render Podcast and listening to our guest Emily chat about her specialty and learn more about what you can do to optimize your online presence. To wrap up her guest appearance on the podcast, the last episode of this mini-series with Emily Foster will air next week and we can’t wait to have you back!

Joyfully,

Raven Scott | Marketing & Podcast Coordinator