Tying Your Company’s Website Strategy to Your Revenue Goals

One of the mistakes a small business can make is poorly define what their revenue goal is. It’s not enough to formulate an idea like: “We need to get more conversions” or “We should sell more”. Think about the specific reason behind that revenue goal. Is it traffic increase, high conversion rate, satisfying the shareholders, or simply the return of investment?

Once you’ve decided, look at the actual numbers and set time frames – how many new leads/customers in how long a period, how many sales are required to meet the bottom line, how many page visits and so on. And after you’ve crunched the numbers, you can start thinking how to achieve those results via the company’s website.

Know your audience

Know who you are catering to. The products or services are aimed at a certain demographic which, in turn, pulls the strings of marketing and web design as well. The best approach to this strategy is to conduct a thorough research on who makes up your customer base.

This can be done via surveys, graphs, and simple questionnaires that people can take online. Additionally, this gesture will present you as a trustworthy company that cares about its visitors and customers. After you have acquired enough data, do an analysis to see what age, occupation and general type of people make up your current demographic, as it might be different from the one you are aiming at.

SEO

One of the factors your revenue depends on is visibility. To ensure that your website is visited frequently enough, the best way to advertise is to use SEO or search engine optimization. Through the use of keywords that directly describe your products and/or services, Google’s search engine will be able to locate your website among a whole slew of others.

Actual revenue from SEO comes is if you are at least on the first page of Google search results when users type one of those keywords. For the best outcome, you should be in the top five suggested links, and this is achieved by detailing the keywords, making them as specific to your product as possible.

Upselling and Cross-selling

Neglecting to study your regular customers, so you can focus on acquiring new ones is a mistake that costs your company a monumental increase in annual recurring revenue (ARR). To ensure the ARR increases and remains stable, you can do two things:

• Upselling– following the example of JetBlue, who offered an upgrade to their seat reservations in an initiative called "Even More", resulting in an increase of their ARR by whopping 200% per customer, offer an upgrade for your most wanted products, to cater to your customer's fluctuating needs.
• Cross-selling– this is a strategy easily achieved on e-commerce websites. On a landing page of a certain product, after the purchase has been made, the customer can see related products they might be interested in. For example, buying a pillow triggers the appearance of a bedding offer.

Let them come to you

One of the biggest problems both upcoming and established companies face is the customer acquisition costs (CAC). If you find yourself investing more and more in a hunt for leads, but the return of investment is not enough to reflect those efforts, you need to cut your losses immediately. Instead, you could focus on creating a welcoming, and even a slightly competitive environment for your users and customers.

By giving incentives for referrals, and rewarding recommendations and word-of-mouth among visitors, you can see that sometimes the hunt for leads is best done by customers themselves. The growth of your ROI may be a little slower, but it will be a more reliable strategy, as we tend to take other people's experiences and recommendations to heart.

The look

As farfetched as it may seem, your revenue goal depends on the colloquial “eye candy”. It’s vital to decide on the company’s brand, first and foremost. Depending on your products or services, decide on the impression you want to leave on your future customers. Then see if you want to go for a more professional or laid-back look.

Many web developers Sydney based emphasize the importance of having a presentable, approachable website that will also be fun to build. By knowing your target audience, you will know exactly what fonts to use, which colors match your landing pages, as well as the type of content that will be shown on the homepage. Don’t be fooled into thinking cosmetics isn’t important – first impressions are what separates visitors and leads.

To summarize

In your desire for greater revenue, the only way to get the proverbial ball rolling is to work your way bottom up. Firstly, decide on what exactly your goals are, and convert them to exact numbers. Set a time frame for each goal, and then tie in your strategies with these numbers. Improve user experience, use the website design to stand out from your competitors, invest in SEO to boost your Google visibility. There are countless strategies to choose from, and you need to find the ones best suited for your own brand and company specialty.