A website is the cornerstone of any digital marketing campaign. The objective should be to develop a website that contains all the functionality that is needed to cater for the high quality potential clients that will be attracted to the site through innovative multi-channel marketing efforts. The digital marketing plan should be based around ensuring that anyone referred to the firm will easily find the firm’s website and then receive a positive impression, perceiving it to be both professional and streamlined.

In addition, the firm's website is usually a visitor’s first port of call and there must be no possibility that you could be losing business when visitors go to check you out on-line. The following are the minimum requirements for any website today;

1. Responsive web design ensuring that the website is readable on any device including smartphones, tablets and notebooks.
2. Behaviour analysis that looks at the data behind the scenes i.e. the cookie data and highlights the users’ online behaviour and transactional data.
3. Content management system (CMS) that allows your staff to update the website on a continuous basis thereby putting you in control of the website.
4. Linking the website to the main social media platforms that are relevant to your business; Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Create lead-magnets for your website

Most businesses find it difficult to generate repeat visits which results in wasted website traffic. While many website visitors might have liked what they saw, they were never given an opportunity to build a relationship with the firm and then possibly failed to remember the website address, resulting in not returning to the website.

Best practice indicates that the way to keep these website visitors is through a lead magnet. A lead magnet is a free offer on the website in exchange for the users contact details. This usually consists of their email address and allows the firm to send them updates, links and other useful resources. Note that signing up to your newsletter is not a lead magnet as it is not specific enough and there is nothing magnetic about being added to a monthly email about the business.

An effective lead-magnet should have the following attributes;

• Valuable – it should be something that adds value and is genuinely useful to the visitor such as a cheat-sheet that aids them in their work.
• Relevant – it should be related to your core business offering. If you want to get people with an interest in your business then give away a resource that is related to that business sector.
• To the point – website visitor’s attention spans are short on-line so keep the offer short and easy for the user to digest.
• Free – the objective of the lead-magnet is to get the contact details from people that fit the firm's customer persona so ensure that it is as easy and pain-free as possible for them to engage.
• Unique – many businesses are using content marketing so try to be different and don’t just roll out the usual eBooks and videos.

Once you have decided upon and developed your lead-magnet then you should create a landing page for the campaign. The landing page should capture the contact details, explain what the lead-magnet is, why it is worth downloading and contain a prominent CTA i.e. a ‘call to action’ button. Also you need to be absolutely clear that anyone who signs up is going to be added to your email list.

All websites are not the same...

Joomla and WordPress websites are open source which results in being able to install these websites with any hosting provider such as Blacknight or GoDaddy. This means that you own / control your website and are not “building on rented land”.

Squarespace, Weeby & Wix are hosted environments allowing users to create websites without needing to know coding using drag & drop features. They are closed ecosystems because you must use their web hosting when using their site builder. This means you cannot move these websites to an independent hosting provider so you lose control of the time & money spent developing your website. Their developers maintain tight control over tools and resources because they are a closed space which means that you are limited in terms of your website’s content & functionality.