How To Make Your Site Work Harder For Your Business (Part 2) – Images & Video!

Making your site work harder for you is something that should be automatic in your business. Your website doesn’t sleep. It’s there for you 24/7 delivering information, gathering prospects and educating leads about how you can solve their problems. If you think about the relative cost, your site is capable of doing a serious amount of work at a fantastically cheap hourly rate.

The internet is the single most underused and unacknowledged marketing tool for many businesses worldwide, so a bit of extra effort here can easily push you well past your competition.
In addition to high quality writing, what opportunities are you missing out on by not working your web presence harder..?

Words Aren’t Everything

Writing and design are the building blocks of a successful website, so never overlook them. These 2 things have more influence over your audience than everything else combined.  Don’t believe us? Decide for yourself. Find the worst looking website you can, and take out all the words and then decide how useful you think it is as a selling tool. Another less extreme option is to look at competitors in your market and see how your message is compared to theirs. If your site feels less than impressive, it’s really time for you to take some action.
Re-writing and re-design reviews shouldn’t be left for more than 2 years at the most. Even if you finally decide not to change anything, question everything on your site. The world of marketing on the web changes fast with new tools and techniques being created even month.
You don’t want to be the last to implement that killer change and find yourself playing catch up with your competitors. If you don’t keep up with web trends yourself, get advice from someone who does.

On the other hand, you still need some bells and whistles to smarten things up – pictures, video and infographics are your main weapons of choice to maximise on hooking in your customers.

Seeing Is Believing

It’s a good idea to take a look at your site and compare it with leaders in your industry. Are you ahead, or lagging behind? If your comparison leaves you unimpressed with your own website, then it’s time to rethink your on page media and get ahead of the pack.

Images make a huge difference to engagement on a website.

You don’t need to spend a fortune on a designer, these days you can create simple graphics fairly cheaply if you take some effort on the process. The main rule of thumb here, is to keep your images consistent in style to maintain your brand image all over your site. Maintaining your brand consistency on each page should be your main focus. Don’t go throwing up any old stock image- you will more than likely look lazy and could damage your onsite continuity. In addition, Google favours original content on your site, and even images can help boost your rankings and gain favour in search engines.
Another advantage of original media-it is yours forever. Your prospects won’t accidentally see the same image on a competitors site- an obviously embarrassing sign of corner cutting, which will damage the value of your brand. In addition, you can use those images outside of your site ( events etc) and when you move to a new site or design, you have the ability to keep the originals and give them a new angle-another vote for consistency and continuity.

The Power Of Video

Video clearly has a big impression on your visitors. Remember television?
If you are running an e-commerce store for anything that requires assembly or operational procedure, then demonstration videos are super-powerful. You can go as far as to have advertisement style videos on you site, right down to explainer videos for your business process. Short videos to give your customers easy-to-consume explanations of your brand and company ethos can work wonders for building trust with new prospects. The possibilities here are truly endless.

Infographics

Infographics have become a popular part of web media in recent years. They are those images with all sorts of facts and figures linked to a soft graphic. If you’re not sure what we mean, check out this one on China’s growth.
Infographics are popular because of the way they present information. It’s a really efficient way to combine an entertaining visual with some hard facts and figures. Another great bonus with infographics is that they are the kind of media that people want to share- so they can be great for your search engine rankings as well as having your name passed around the internet, gaining you more exposure.

If you haven’t reviewed your site’s on page media for 2 years, take a couple of hours to check over how you are putting yourself across on the web. If your competitors are showing you up, it’s time for a refurb.