As millennials and Gen Z continue to inherit an increasing amount of B2B and B2C purchasing decisions and power, it’s generally accepted that these groups are much more comfortable communicating — and even purchasing — online compared to more traditional face-to-face experiences.
With this in mind, how can your business take advantage of this digital shift that has been compounded by the increased comfort of virtual consultations, appointments, and meetings?
Here are three ways companies are improving their digital sales experiences.
Update Your Website So It Is Easier for Your Team to Update, Manage & Archive Content
As a digital agency, one of the number one requests we receive from clients is, “Can you update our website so we don’t have to rely on a developer to make changes?”
The answer is yes.
WordPress is currently the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world that powers the back-end of websites. As of June 2021, WordPress accounted for about 65% of all websites that had a CMS and is 11.5 times more common than Shopify, an e-commerce-specific CMS.
The broad appeal of WordPress is that whether you have a B2C audience, B2B audience, or a hybrid, WordPress is open-source, free to use and has numerous plug-ins that allow you or your company to customize the experience, including shopping integrations like WooCommerce.
For many companies we work with, the real benefit of using WordPress is that they can still have a highly designed and custom website; plus, the back-end can be built in a way that general marketers and other employees can easily update via new images, copy changes and edits, and even new pages — with no coding experience required.
In essence, working with the right design and development partner can ensure your site is as simple as updating a Word doc, which can help you avoid future website headaches and stale content on your site that doesn’t resonate with your audiences.
Enhance Your Website with Videos & Testimonials to Help Share Your Brand’s Story
Ready to take website engagement to the next level?
Start by thinking about how you can bring your stories and experiences to life through video. Are you a candle company that makes custom candles in-store? What if you had different touchpoints that showed online customers what happens behind the scenes when they purchase a custom candle?
Are you an insurance firm that is committed to proactively helping your clients? How can you feature stories from satisfied clients that can be your brand’s voice without making your prospective clients read pages and pages of copy? (See: video testimonials.)
Another popular area for video is around the About Us, Careers, or Culture section of your site. What better way to share a glimpse of your organization’s values and culture than by featuring a video that can weave individuals’ experiences together — from the CEO to the recent intern class.
Connect Your Website to Your Other Digital Touchpoints
The true beauty about digital marketing is that nearly everything can be tracked and, thus, is able to follow a set of predetermined steps laid out as your ideal customer’s journey.
For example, if most prospective customers are finding you for the first time via Google search, you may direct them to a specific landing page that not only addresses their search, but also directs them to all of your valuable research, knowledge sharing, and sales collateral, which is all free in exchange for their preferred email address.
From there, your website can be integrated with a marketing automation platform (our favorite is HubSpot), and once their email is collected, you can further nurture these prospects by sending them relevant articles, resources, or events.
Pro Tip: Some marketing automation tools, like HubSpot, even go so far as to let you know which pages of your website prospects are on, how long they are on those pages, and if they are engaging with content — beyond helpful information for a sales or marketing team to understand when solving pain points.
In addition to email marketing, you should ensure that your website is tagged or pixeled for any paid media campaigns you may be running. The most common digital marketing campaigns these days are running across Facebook/Instagram, Google/Youtube, or LinkedIn, depending on your audience.
Each of these vendors has specific tags or pixels that allow your website to signal them when conversions (i.e., sales, form fills, etc.) on your site occur, which allows the media platform to look for users that are most likely to convert.
Pro Tip: We like to use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to house website tags and pixels. GTM allows non-developers to add, edit, and remove tags, without having to code.
In closing, your website should be the front door of your business — not something you dread having to talk about with your developer. A website is a living, breathing piece of your sales and marketing strategy and should be treated as if it were always growing and evolving. With advancements in CMS, even a team who has never seen website code before can maintain and grow a well-built website.
