What's more effective? Website or Social Media? | Part 1
What’s more effective? Websites or Social Media? This is a question that comes up every single time a marketing team thinks about sales and business development. Most of the time the grabbing question is where do we spend the marketing budget? Do we spend it on further developing the website? Or do we focus it on Social media and campaigns etc.? So let’s look at the fundamentals of websites versus social media, and understand if one of them is a clear winner or do we need both in amalgamation.?
In our view, we at Earltech think that both need to be given equal preference as they are not too competing puzzle pieces but pieces of the puzzle that fit together if worked on efficiently. As such there is a lot to dive into when discussing how social media and websites generate viable leads for a business. When debating website vs social media, there are ten key things to consider:
Websites should be good for :-
This is the easiest way to make sure you are seen online. Many people would use google search to get answers to their daily questions or search for things they need, hence if you have a website, it will definitely help your brand get found online. Furthermore, According to Nielson, nearly 90 percent of people use the internet to find local businesses. If you don’t have a website and properly maintain it, you’re missing out on critical opportunities to be found. Having a website means your business can utilize search engine optimization and a SEO strategy will help to grow the website's online presence. Through thorough research we have found that in accordance to statistics, 60 percent of all website traffic comes from organic search from search engines like google search, Microsoft Bing etc. so if businesses double down on their SEO and organic search strategy, they can see incredible growth in their lead generation efforts. However, here are some strategies you can use.?
Strategies you can utilize for organic growth include:?
Hence, if you focus on these things and build a website that is good, fast, clean, valuable and is easily seen and found you will have a lot of traffic, sometimes even traffic that you can't handle!
The digital space is basically the internet and a website will officially enable you to be available on the internet. This sometimes is a prerequisite for a brand and most audiences don't jell well with a brand that doesn't have a website. As such, Fundera reports that 1.79 billion people shopped online last year, which means there were 1.79 billion people who could have found your website and looked at your services.?
Hence, the internet and the world wide web is a really powerful enabler and tool for generating leads and sales. Thus, having a website to promote your services and products is crucial and it has to be done properly. You can promote your services in multiple ways, but one of the most productive ways is to have a targeted landing page just for whatever your selling or the service you are rendering. At Earltech we have so many landing pages, you can look at a one of our landing pages form this link - https://calleeapp.com/ to understand what we are talking about.
Let’s take a look at what a landing page is - A landing page is what your customer or potential client will see after they click on an ad from a marketing campaign or they organically search for it. However, a landing page only consists of what the user wants to see, no navigation or searching for the service or product shown, everything the customer needs to make that purchasing decision is laid out on the landing page.
Furthermore, you can create landing pages that target specific locations as well, in case your business has several locations spread out across the country. Landing pages are really versatile and give you a good chance in making a conversion, a sale or even retaining a customer. However, in the concept of lead generation, landing pages come in handy. In the current era, companies and people use landing pages to get potential client emails or details so that they can approach them separately or through email marketing etc. Thus, most product landing pages offer huge discounts on the first sale or options like getting a free demo or a 30 day trial free if you sign up or getting a free complimentary product with the first sale. Either way the landing page will want you to register yourself first or subscribe to a newsletter After which, you will be bombarded with emails or promotional content. But what this goes to show is that landing pages are a good tool to make sales, get leads and secure potential clients. Thus, the more effective your landing page is, the more conversions you’ll see. The more conversions you see, the better your chances of gaining new customers.
Websites in this generation come with a lot of technical and technological advances that allow companies to go in depth with their sales funnel. Different software's and plugins allow the sales funnel to be better integrated to their website. On the other hand the website is also a good tool to have working under your sales funnel as well. So, let’s look at a few ways a website aids in the efficiency of the sales funnel.?
Moreover, your website can serve as a great sales automation tool as well because the website is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 52 weeks per year and this will allow your potential lead to learn about your services and get convinced in time, which is a huge bonus for you. And these below features and processors can help you do this better.
Hence, your website or landing page is a sales machine that you need to capitalize on, be sure to use the above and many more tips and tricks to help you take your sales to the next level.
As mentioned before, most target audiences will not consider a brand to be a professional one if the brand does not run a good website. This circumstance is known to be directly related to how popular the brand will be and the sense of credibility a brand has in the community. Therefore it is safe to say that credibility means a lot to consumers in today’s digital-first landscape. Hence, if? your business looks credible online through your website or your landing page, your visitors and potential clients will be more likely to trust them and turn into customers in the long run. So let’s look at some good ways to work on that and establish trust and credibility with your audience,
As such, you can also increase your SEO and your site's overall performance if you just enable giving some extra details and information to your customers and potential clients. Furthermore, we want to highlight the last point mentioned above as this is one of the best ways to establish your company’s credibility. Hence, showcasing your testimonials and reviews from customers is crucial as positive reviews of your products and services shows that other people have done business with you and were happy with the results. This tactic can validate your services and show that your brand can be trusted. The effort you may have to put in order to get your reviews may be high, but your reward from them is unparalleled.
Another important area is data, data enables businesses to make decisions based on metrics and allows businesses to improve themselves in order to serve the customer better. So, it is always good to remember that a website provides important data that’s important for your business’ web, sales, and marketing teams and basically your website can give you a heap of data that can be interpreted separately to all business functions. Hence as mentioned above, the more data you have, the more you can piece together what’s working for your business’ web presence and ultimately build your website to be a top performing web page. As such, your team can use Google analytics or any other analytics software to track the data and interpret them based on the time period. Some of the main metrics and data flows companies get and check from their websites are.?
Hence, your website can provide you with a huge amount of valuable data, data that you need and will give you the performance of your website and will enable you to take key decisions to improve your site.
As such, this is it for part one of this article. You can go ahead and read part 2 to carry on with the discussion.