At this point in the digital age, most business owners have realized that they need a website. However, what you may not realize is that your website should be more than just a website. It has the potential to deliver powerful results that can help you meet goals. This post will help you analyze whether or not you’re getting the most out of your business website.

What Your Website Could Be Doing for Your Business

Whether your business offers an online store or not, your website should be driving lead generation. You should already be providing some great content (a blog), have landing pages for your radio and PPC campaigns, and include CTAs that help potential customers find what they need. This helps make your site valuable and engaging. However, that will only go so far to drive leads.

You need to leverage your business website for collecting information. Specifically, you should be capturing emails. For instance, you could provide either a web form or a pop-up that lets visitors sign up for your newsletter. Information they provide when they register can help with segmentation and personalization. Your newsletter needs to provide valuable content before you provide offers.

Why This Is Valuable to You

Current and prospective customers respond to business transparency. A newsletter can provide the perfect platform to talk to them regularly and be real. The newsletters should contain free, valuable content, and customers ought to be receiving multiple emails with content before you send an offer. This allows you to establish a relationship with them, and then build trust and lift brand perception and favorability. In turn, this puts your business top of mind when they’re ready to make a purchase, increasing the likelihood that they’ll choose you for a solution. By capturing consumer information when they visit your website, you can establish that line of communication to encourage action,  engagement, and sales.

Assess Your Business Website

You should have your website ready to drive action and generate leads before you start advertising, but there’s also something you should be sure to do before designing (or redesigning) your site — branding. Your site is the digital face of your company, so its design, message, and creative should all reflect your branding for consistency.

Previously, we’ve discussed ways to ensure your site runs at its full potential, but here’s a quick overview of what a successful website offers:

• Ways to collect visitor information. (We can’t emphasize this enough!)
• A modern and professional design.
• A responsive design (i.e., it will adjust to suit any device, especially mobile).
• Fast page, image, and video load times (as applicable).
• No broken links.
• Easy navigation throughout the site.
• Easy to find contact information that’s up to date.
• Clear CTAs.

Like other aspects of your branding and marketing, you also need to have a strategy for your website. Ensure your SEO is on point, and that content is updated regularly. Put processes in place to analyze your site’s traffic and activity (e.g., unique visitors, what pages were visited, what actions were taken). This will help ensure your website is effectively engaging your audience.

You should be able to see why you don’t just need a business website, you need a website that’s going to drive engagement and business for you. Use the list above to assess whether or not you need to update your site, and ensure that you’ve got ways to collect information for driving leads.