Positioning Your Website for Business

If you are starting out with a new business, or reviewing status on the one you have, you will need to look carefully at how you set up or retune your online presence. These days, whatever your business, a website and what you say online on different social media networks are a major shop window and pitching opportunity for your products or services.

The best way to start the process of positioning your website for business is to ask yourself, or have someone ask you, a lot of questions about your business and activities, ensuring the ‘real-life’ business is accurately reflected or represented online.

Here are five questions you might start with:

• What is your business and your marketplace? Do you know your customers, your competitors, how do you sell your goods and what is so special about you compared to other offerings in the market?


• What are you trying to do with your business and how will the website or social media presence you want to set up support this? It’s no longer enough just to ‘be there’ with a site or a Twitter account – you need to make them work very hard for you in return for the investment in time this will take on your part


• What do your customers want from your website? You need to ensure your website development is user-driven, rather than company-focused, or it will fail you and your site objectives.


• How will you integrate your website into your ongoing business processes? Who will ‘own’ the site, love it and develop it?


• How can you document and communicate all of this information to an appropriate agency for them to help you realise your website vision?
  

It might seem easier to jump straight in with a web agency and focus on branding and colours. But unless you are able to articulate and position your website as an essential building block in your business strategy, you are doing little more than playing at website design, rather than embedding the website, along with any other online activity, as a critical support tool and key business enabler.

Not sure where to start? I have helped small to medium-sized companies to establish what they need their website to do for them and how to establish their online activity as a critical and successful business tool. If it sounds like I could help you too, get in touch and let’s start talking.