Nurturing your company’s workaholic:

Every company has a team of hardworking people whose job it is to build business and promote growth. But each business has only one employee that works non-stop, around the clock, without ever needing a break: its website.

And yet some websites don’t tell a positive story about the businesses they represent. Maybe they’re beautifully designed but don’t include any of the facts a potential customer would look for as they research the product. Maybe a site has all the information a new customer would need, but is poorly organized or is so dense that a site visitor doesn’t stick around long enough to read it.

Perhaps it is visually pleasing, and provides information for the site visitor, but doesn’t help you, its “boss”, glean data on who is visiting the site. Or maybe a website just isn’t enough overall: too skimpy with information and too bland on design.

At Zenman, we are focused on mastering the balance necessary for an effective website. It is both an art and a science.  A good site is a balance of engineering and design that allows for site visitors to convert into tangible business.

Most designers and agencies have a strong desire for the work they put out to impress their peers. It makes sense; it’s a highly visual, creative industry.

But two years ago, we decided to worry less about creating work that impressed our hip web-design comrades. Instead, we started to focus on converting visitors to our site into clients.

To do that, we implemented inbound marketing on our site. We added seven different ways — traditional methods of contact like our phone number, address and email, but also our Twitter handle and a ‘Contact’ button — for a potential client to get in touch with us. 

We also started to push well-crafted, SEO-friendly content first. Much of that valuable content is behind a gate on our site, so visitors must supply their email addresses to access the content.

And it worked. Before implementing these changes to our website, our traffic-to-lead ratio was .25 percent. Today, it’s 4 percent. That’s a huge jump that has affected our business in a really positive way.

Don’t get me wrong: we still want to impress our peers, and we still want the best talent to be hungry to work here. We do still place value on doing “cool” things.

But now, in addition to aesthetics, we focus on collecting data from a website’s visitors that we can leverage for our client, because we know that ultimately, keeping a visitor on a site for longer increases the likelihood that they’ll become a customer. The data we collect about demographics of visitors — who they are, how long they’re on the website — is important.

So what can a business owner do to best equip its most workaholic employee? Several things. Edit web copy so that it’s informative and original, and not dense. Having such content means it’s worth it for a potential customer to provide their email address — it’s a fair trade off if they’re receiving useful information, straight to their inbox. Get them in the lead nurturing funnel so when they’re ready to commit, they know where to find you.

You should also aim for a website that is visually appealing so that it keeps leads on the site long enough to understand what you do. It should also have the data to help you capture email addresses and gather information about your target demographic.

Whether you need an agency to help with a total website overhaul, or whether you’re able to make some tweaks in-house, changing these few things can make a real difference for you, your business and all of your (human) employees.