You have decided to start a business and you’re getting all the pieces together – the location, business name, your cards, and it’s time to get a website. 
You know what you like, you seen plenty of good and bad websites, and yours will look amazing! Once you have a good looking website, then you are a “real” business. People will go online, find you and buy your products and services. Or maybe you’re not sure what you need, so you hire a company that focuses on building websites for your type of business. They must know what looks good and how to describe your service so people will call you, right? It’s what they do.
In the old days, a website was thought of as something like an online poster. It would be pretty and have some general content on what you do and how to reach you. Visitors could read it and then move on. Maybe they would never go back. Once they had a phone number or an address, if they had any questions, they would talk to you directly.
These aren’t the old days.
No one wants to talk to a vendor directly. They want to find all the answers to their questions online, and they want to find that information on their terms. They want to know why they should chose you over anyone else, and make sure they are making the right choice; that others like them have selected you before and are happy with your work. Some visitors may come to your site directly, due to your traditional advertising and networking efforts. Some may do a search, either for your brand or a generic product or service. Some people will hear about you on social media, while others may see a link or an ad on another website. Finally past prospects and customers may get an email about the latest happenings at your business. And of course, people may share what they find with others, using a totally different channel to spread their news – sharing on social media a webpage that they received as a link via an email.
So websites now feature updates all the time – maybe several a day. Today’s websites make it easy for search engines to find their content. They connect to social media, highlight user comments, invite you to subscribe to email newsletters, and regularly post blogs. All that dynamic connectivity might account for as much as two-thirds of a website’s traffic.
This new approach changes how you interact in social media, too. Fewer of us are sending a tweet that says, “Check out my website.” We realized readers skip over that because the message is not enticing. Instead, our messaging describes a new project, or answers a question that has meaning to a range of people. Everything links to the website, which now serves as a resource, not a poster. The goal of all this activity is to enrich the readers life in some way that causes them to take an action or change a viewpoint.
Creating a well-designed website without thinking about how people are going to use it and find it is like producing a beautiful brochure that you keep in the drawer. Dynamic content encourages visitors to open the drawer, and to keep coming back. If you need help coming up what to publish, revising your website to include dynamic content or converting visitors to prospects, please check out our Marketing Strategy Programs