Happy New Financial Year!

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Last week was about tidying up, this week is about opportunity. You don’t have to wait for the end of the calendar year to reflect & revise your business strategy. Take today, take 30 minutes, 3 hours, whatever it takes to assess the best of what you have achieved so far this year and what you want to improve on.

We are pretty sure your sales and marketing plan will come up in the things to improve on, who doesn’t strive for more customers? We believe an effective online marketing strategy centred around your own professional website is the most cost-effective place to put your money and energy.

Most of you have a website already, but if you don’t its kind of like having a phone number for your business that is not public. Websites come in all shapes, sizes & prices but there are three important things to consider for an existing or a new website.

Does your site get traffic?

Google provides an incredibly simple tool to add to your site to tell you all sorts of great information about your business website, who is coming, how long they stay, if they convert to being customers and its FREE!

How are people getting to you?

Has someone been bothering you about getting an app for all those users that don’t like looking at your site on their mobile phone? Maybe you need an app and maybe you don’t, but you need that Google traffic tool to figure that out. Did we mention that Google tool is FREE?

Are you making money from your website?

Lead generation is an important reason for having a website but we are equally passionate about the opportunities for making money with online ordering. If you want to extend your reach to customers inside or outside your local area then you should strongly consider a website where people can purchase your products or services directly without the need to pick up the phone.

These three things are a great place to start evaluating how to best use your own website as a launch pad for an informed online marketing plan. So start today, grab some time, just for you and your team to think about the future, dream big and start the second half of the year the way you have always intended.

Interested in our newly revamped WebPOS online ordering solution? Click here for more details.

Three Steps to Feeling Less Intimidated by Website Design

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We all need a little care and contemplation every once in a while to get the best out of ourselves and website design is no different. In a website build or revamp project it really is the most important part of the process and most people feel intimidated from the start. Never fear – these 3 easy steps will help you feel a whole lot more in control and confident in what you can achieve.

Step One – What You Want to Feature?

There are those normal things like About Us, Products and/Services Lists and Contact Forms that all sites generally have and they are important too. But when your customers (current and future) load your website what are the couple of things that you really want to impress upon them? What is your unique sales proposition, what makes you stand out? Is it your extensive product range or maybe your expert skill in your particular area. Whatever it is, it matters when it comes to the site design.

Step Two – What Do You Want People to Do?

If we use the storefront comparison, if customers have physically entered your store and are showing signs of interest, what would you want them to do? This is easy to track when you are looking at someone face to face, and its easy to track online too with Google Analytics by figuring out how long people are spending on your website and what pages they are looking at, but I digress.

What do you want them to do? Buy straight away, call you to discuss how you can help, send an email to request an appointment or reservation? What you can encourage your customers to do on your website is virtually unlimited, but keep it simple and know what you want to them to do so that the site design encourages that.

Step Three – Find Existing Websites That Do These Things Well

Ultimately you can’t go wrong by putting yourself in your customer’s shoes, so find the sites they like, and the ones you do too and then share all of this information with your designer. And be specific about those things because no site is going to do everything exactly like you would so don’t be afraid to mention likes and dislikes about those examples.

The Internet is framed around being able to gain information and engage in transactions quickly, therefore following the above three steps with this principle in mind means you will be in the driver’s seat of your website build. Empowered and dare we say it, feeling a little excited too!

Interested in sharing your design dreams with us? Give us a call or click here for more information.

Online Ordering & Online Shopping – is that what eCommerce is?

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We get that question a lot, and for techies yes seems like an easy & obvious answer. But for our customers, who just want their customers to buy online, eCommerce sounds complicated. It sounds silly to get stuck on a word but the idea that tech jargon makes people decide against it before they even know what it is, its why we got into online solutions for business in the first place.

This amazing thing called the Internet should be (and for the most part is) a great leveller. You don’t need lots of money to extend your bricks and mortar store into online to build your profits and keep your customers loyal. But in our experience, you need some expertise to get out there.

We talk a lot about what to expect when you build a new online ordering website, but if you strip away the word “web” than what you want is something that is an extension of your business in a space that is open 24/7. Firstly and lastly, it should be easy to use and be pretty obvious in its intent as soon as the homepage displays.

We’ve spent a lot of time helping our customers build their online ordering & online shopping sites since 2008. Things have changed a lot in that time, it was time we made good on our own site’s ease of use and intent. We are days away from re-launching our new WebPOS Online Ordering software website and we are excited to share it as a view into how your online space can look, feel and function.

Stay tuned for more details on how we can help serve you in your goal to get online and grow with WebPOS.