Spring is in the air! I feel like that now’s a good time to work on growth strategies and focus on our next steps for the spring, especially after a year of COVID. Essentially, I’m starting from scratch and looking at all our systems, processes, technology and marketing – and doing some internal business spring cleaning, sort of speaking. I want to bring you on this journey with me in case you want to do some business spring cleaning of your own. Being in technology my whole life, I leverage technology in all areas to help grow my business, and I’m so passionate about this topic that I wanted to create a series to help Hawaii businesses thrive in this new economy. This month’s topic: Websites.
Years and years ago when I first started my own business, I began with building websites. For a multitude or reasons, I didn’t like that line of work and started to pivot towards consulting and managed services. The experience from that first business, and the ones following, helped me to develop many opinions about websites that I want to share.
When you’re first starting out your company, I do NOT recommend blowing your whole budget on a website. There are a multitude of inexpensive templates that you can use or that your website company can provide you. You will need to design and add your own images and you will need to write the content yourself. Work with a company that can provide you a WordPress template and a company that knows how to keep your site safe from hackers.
As you grow and rely more heavily on online marketing and have larger budgets, you will need another strategy to attract and convert more customers. This is the stage that we’re at. We have a website that we threw together (the bare minimum) to have an online presence. Now we have to refine our message, add all of our services, add and update our content for SEO, our branding and work on better conversion rates. Do we have the talent to do this in house? Yes, probably. Should we do this in house? Our answer is no. It takes time to get up to speed on best practices and strategies for online marketing. You do what you do best, and choose to work with people that do this best.
I have so much more to share, so continue on to page 3 for a more in-depth guide to websites. I look forward to sharing new insight to a new topic next month! – Anne-Marie Lerch