A website is an invaluable asset to your business. It’s the first point of contact for your potential customers and also serves as your storefront and a platform to reach, educate, inform, and engage your target audience.
To succeed with your website, you need to go beyond just a website. You need to make conscious efforts to build a website that effectively drives your business goals.
That’s where web strategy comes in.
This article discusses web strategy, its benefits for your small business website, and how to create one.
What is a web strategy?
A website or web strategy is a plan on how a website should be developed, managed, and used to achieve specific purposes.
These purposes can include creating awareness for a business, generating quality leads, and converting the leads into customers.
A well-designed and comprehensive website is a crucial asset for any business, as it plays a vital role in generating and nurturing leads into customers. It answers potential customers’ questions and helps them make purchasing decisions without needing clarification from a human sales representative.
With a well-designed web strategy, you ensure your website goes beyond looking aesthetically pleasing to delivering on your desired business goals.
Benefits of a web strategy for your small business website
Implementing a solid web strategy for your small business website is essential to helping it achieve all objectives and enabling your business to make the most of its online presence.
Here are some crucial benefits of implementing a web strategy for your small business website:
1. Helps establish clear objectives and focus
Creating a website without a clear understanding of what it should do and achieve is setting it up for failure. A solid web strategy ensures there are clear objectives and goals for your website that align with your overall business or marketing objectives.
With a solid web strategy, you have an idea of how to design your website, the emotions and information it should convey, and the type, quantity, and quality of leads it should generate.
2. Improves online presence
Your website is your key online representative, even if you have an active presence on all social media channels. If your site is non-existent or undiscoverable, you’re unknown or untrustworthy.
A detailed web strategy ensures your website is optimized to rank at the top of search engine result pages (SERPs). It ensures your website is visible to your target audience, ensuring increased traffic and conversions for your business.
Furthermore, a web strategy enables your website to validate your presence on other marketing platforms, such as social media, audio and video sharing channels, etc., helping you build authority and earn the trust of your target audience.
3. Reduces marketing costs
Another great importance of a well-implemented web strategy is that it significantly reduces marketing costs. This is because content marketing, pay-per-click ads, and other online marketing strategies are often more cost-effective than traditional advertising methods.
A web strategy ensures you effectively leverage content marketing, PPC ads, and other website advertising methods to generate the right visibility, engagement, and conversion for your business.
4. Increases your global reach
Going global or implementing a multilingual marketing strategy is difficult without a solid web strategy. To reach a wider global audience, your website is your easiest route; without a proper web strategy, your chances of success are low.
5. Enables you to make data-driven decisions
A well-implemented web strategy ensures you have the right tools to collect and analyze data for improved performance. The activities and interactions of your target audience and customers on your website are valuable data that, when harnessed, can help you provide a better user experience, increase conversion, and make better business decisions.
6. Enables you to build a solid brand identity
As the first point of contact for most potential customers, your website should accurately depict your brand identity. A web strategy makes this possible, as it ensures the proper implementation of all your brand elements, from your visual elements to your brand adjectives, core values, and personality.
Types of a web strategy
Here are some types of web strategies you should pay attention to when creating a web strategy for your small business website:
1. Design strategy
The web design strategy focuses on designing a visually appealing and user-friendly website, improving the user experience for different kinds of website visitors. It ensures the website is responsive, easy to navigate, visually appealing, and user-focused.
A well-implemented web design strategy ensures a website is designed to enhance engagement, reduce churn rate, and increase trust and credibility, leading to improved conversion.
2. Content strategy
The web content strategy is another vital aspect of a web strategy you shouldn’t overlook when planning a website for your small business. It focuses on how your website’s content is created, published, and promoted. It also ensures you focus on content that resonates with your audience more, from blog posts to infographics, audio, and videos.
An extensive web content strategy ensures you have detailed plans for promoting your website’s content. It enables you to create solid plans for promoting your content on social media, emails, podcasts, video-sharing platforms, or even on other people’s blogs using guest posts.
In web strategy development, content strategy receives adequate time and consideration as it determines how to attract and retain visitors and position your brand as an authority.
3. Analytics strategy
It’s difficult to tell how effectively a website performs without analyzing user data. The web analytics strategy collects, analyzes, and interprets user data to gain insights into their behaviors, needs, and preferences. It also focuses on determining the overall performance of your website, including how visitors respond to your design elements.
A detailed web analytics strategy enables you to provide a better user experience, improve your products and services, and allocate your business resources effectively.
4. Marketing strategy
The marketing web strategy is another essential part of a comprehensive web strategy. It focuses on how you’ll promote your website to gain visibility, attract potential customers, and convert them effectively.
The web marketing strategy consists of plans for paid advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and email marketing.
As part of a detailed website strategy plan, it enables you to create brand awareness, reach your target audience, and drive conversions effectively.
How to create a great web strategy for your small business website
Creating a web strategy for a small business website can be overwhelming, but these steps will guide you:
1. Define your goals and objectives
The first step toward creating a web strategy for your small business website is to determine what you intend to achieve with the website. This is a crucial web strategy development step that, if omitted, will lead to a website lacking focus.
You can have many goals and objectives for your website, including building brand awareness, increasing engagement, generating leads, and increasing sales.
If you can’t define your goals yourself, consult a website strategist to help assist you and create a strategic website design plan that generates results.
2. Identify your target audience
Once you’ve identified what you want to achieve with your website, the next step is to identify those interested in the content.
These are most likely your ideal customers, as your content will provide information that helps them solve their problems.
Research the demographics, needs, and preferences of your target audience. You can create a detailed buyer persona to help you in this regard. An excellent web strategy ensures you create a website that resonates with your target audience and provides the valuable information and answers they seek.
3. Study your competitors
Your competitors aren’t left out.
Studying your competitors’ websites will make your web strategy development easier.
You’ll get information on the different components of a good website and how to integrate them into your website for optimal productivity.
Detailed competitor research enables you to understand the strategies working for industry leaders and gives you insights on what you can do differently to stand out.
4. Determine your content strategy
After you’ve defined your goals, identified your target audience, and studied your competitors, develop a content strategy for your website. This is where you determine the type of content to publish, when to publish them, how to promote them, and how to keep them fresh and updated.
Your digital content strategy must include plans for blog posts, images, infographics, and videos, especially in their order of importance to your target audience.
5. Determine your marketing strategy
Develop a marketing strategy to make your website visible to your target audience. This strategy might include SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, guest posting, paid advertising, etc.
Ensure you have a clear plan for leveraging these marketing channels to promote your website, considering your budget, marketing goals, and target audience demographics.
6. Determine your design strategy
Once your content and marketing strategy are in place, plan for your website’s actual design. Ask important questions and consult website specialists to create an effective website for your small business.
What are the key components of a good website, and how do you factor them into your design? Should your website be responsive to mobile and desktop users? How often should your website be maintained and updated?
These are important questions you must ask to develop a good web design strategy for your small business website.
7. Determine your analytics strategy
Analytics is vital for the success of your small business website and your business in general. Therefore, you must develop a web analytics strategy that ensures the successful collection and utilization of your customer data for improved product and service delivery.
This strategy should include the best web analytics tools you can use, the processes of obtaining your customer data, and the data privacy and security measures you must implement to secure your users.
All these sum up to a detailed web strategy that enables your website to thrive in the competitive online space, attract and engage visitors, and ultimately convert them into loyal customers.
Tips for creating an exceptional web strategy for your website
Here are some vital tips you’d find helpful when creating a web strategy for your small business website:
1. Conduct thorough market research
To create an effective web strategy for your small business website, extensive market research is inevitable. You must research your target audience, industry, and competitors to structure your website effectively.
Research your target audience to get information on the type of content that resonates with them and get insights into trends that could be vital for your website’s success. Furthermore, research your competitors to identify what works for others and what they aren’t doing right.
2. Take inventory of your content
Content is the most valuable asset for your website. Without creating valuable content that resonates with your target audience, you’ll find attracting and retaining visitors to your website challenging.
Therefore, to succeed with your web strategy, inventory your available content, from blog posts to infographics, videos, podcasts, etc. Identify which ones resonate with your audience more and create more of them.
Having many unpublished content available before creating your website ensures you don’t lack content to feed your audience once your site is live.
3. Analyze your results over time
Your web strategy should include plans to review your performance periodically and make adjustments or corrections based on the information gathered. Constantly review your web strategy to know what’s working and what is not, then adjust accordingly.
4. Allocate resources effectively
An effective web strategy ensures the appropriate allocation of your resources to the different aspects of your website development process.
Determines the amount to put into the initial design of the website, the subsequent maintenance and updates, and the amount that can be used for rebranding or brand evolution processes.
Also, determine how much to set aside for content creation and promotion.
Will you have in-house content creators, including writers, editors, videographers, graphic designers, etc., or will it be cheaper to outsource the task to freelancers? Ensure you examine the pros and cons and determine the best option for your business.
5. Plan for scalability
With the massive improvement in technologies and increasing customer demand to meet specific digital experience requirements, it’s essential to factor in scalability plans in your web strategy.
Also, ensure plans are in place to consistently update your website infrastructure to accommodate any level of demand or traffic.
Web strategy template for small business websites
Example of a web strategy for a small business website
Here’s a good web strategy example for a fashion business website:
Business objectives
- Attract 20,000 monthly visitors within the next 12 months
- Gain 2,000 leads from the monthly visitors
- Convert 30% of the leads into customers
Target audience
- Female corporate workers between the ages of 18 and 50 who love to try out stylish corporate wear
Competitor analysis
- Study extensively the web strategy of Zara, COS, H&M, Simply Be, etc., to understand what they’re doing right and where they’re not doing well.
Content strategy
- Publish five corporate wear photos and videos daily and attach a story that sells the fashion wear.
- Create corporate wear designs and ask our readers to vote for the best and suggest how to improve others.
- Create a monthly fashion wear catalog and post on the website
Marketing strategy
- Publish snippets of the blog posts on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter
- Run paid ads to promote our website on Facebook and Instagram
- Invest in search engine optimization
- Write a fashion expose and publish it in magazines like Vogue, Cosmopolitan, InStyle, etc.
Design strategy
- Create a responsive website with a fast load speed
- Ensure the website adheres to web accessibility requirements
- Ensure the website features our brand identity elements
- Quarterly website maintenance and bi-yearly updates
Analytics strategy
- Use Google Analytics to track website visits, engagements, and conversions.
- Monitor key performance indicators such as sales, email newsletter signups, blog engagement, unique website visitors, average time on a page, bounce rates, etc.
- Review data every month and review strategies accordingly
Create a web strategy that drives business results
A well-implemented web strategy ensures your website attracts, retains, and converts visitors into customers, enabling you to achieve broader business goals and objectives. It helps you build a solid online presence for your brand and provide valuable and timely information to solve the problems of your target audience.
