Weblinx, Incorporated

Myth #7: A Great Website Attracts Its Own Audience

This web design myth is an interesting one. Unlike several of the others, you don’t really hear this one expressed out loud all that often. Few business owners go around saying, “If I just launch my next website all my problems will be solved.” Instead, they simply make the assumption that things will work that way.

It doesn’t help that some low-integrity website designers feed and encourage this type of thinking. Eager to make a sale, they’ll hint that features like on-page optimization and local search visibility will create instant and lasting demand.

website traffic

There are good reasons to use those tools (and others), of course, but a website simply won’t attract its own audience. Your job is to work with your creative team and ensure you can draw in visitors after it has gone live. To help you understand why – and hopefully break this myth once and for all – let’s get into the details.

Your Website Is Just the Start of a Bigger Process

Watch a sports documentary and you will eventually hear a famous coach or player offer some form of the following: “Talent will get you into this league, but only hard work will keep you here and make you successful.” Why bring that up on the subject of business web design? Because there are some parallels at play.

The purpose of your website is to help you grow and improve your business over the internet. You can’t reach that goal without the website, but neither can you do it simply by having a website on its own. The website is necessary but not sufficient.

Your web presence is like a digital version of an office or showroom. No one can be impressed by it until they first discover it and walk through the doors. That’s why a good creative team will help you create a strong layout, craft compelling content, and create a plan for what will happen afterward.

The goal of that plan won’t just be to draw in views or visits. Instead, it will be focused on helping you reach your most important target audience – the kinds of buyers who won’t just respond to the offers you make, but stay with you for years and years to come.

This is an important detail for a couple of reasons. First, it can affect the design and development decisions you make at the front end of the process. Sometimes, business owners rush through certain steps in the web development cycle because they aren’t fully appreciating the bigger picture. Because they fail to understand the investment of time, effort, and money that it will take to make their online marketing plan a success, they are in a rush to “get something online.”

We don’t want you to make that mistake. As we’ve already noted, your website isn’t ever finished in the sense that it won’t need more work. You should always be adding content, tweaking things like headlines and images, or looking for new conversion strategies. In the same way, you should know that it will take quite a bit of consistent work to attract visitors and then turn them into buyers. However, if you can see the process through to the end, all of that work is going to pay off.

The second reason you need to know about the need for ongoing marketing is that it can help you frame your perspectives and expectations. While launching a new website can lead to some nearly instant improvements in your business, the biggest payoffs will come over time. In other words, you should be measuring progress by months and quarters, not hours and days.

That might sound discouraging, but it shouldn’t be. That’s because the effects compound with every bit of forward movement.

Digital Marketing Is an Ongoing Activity

So, you’ve already gotten the bad news: it’s going to take some work to draw an audience to your new website. Even worse, that work isn’t necessarily going to be over quickly. To earn a positive ROI on your investment, you’ll probably want to make the most of search engine optimization, social media marketing, and perhaps even digital ads. It’s also possible you’ll want to keep an eye on reviews, upgrade your web hosting, and maintain an email marketing list.

All of those campaigns take time to put together, and might require you to spend more from your budget if you get help from professionals to put them together. It can feel a bit pointless in the beginning, particularly when you’ve just launched your new website and no one seems to know or care.

However, if you can stick with online marketing as a regular activity – the same way healthy people stick with smart eating and exercise – things will gradually begin to change. Not only will more potential customers start showing up to your website, but they’ll keep coming back. Eventually, over the course of a few months, you’ll start to become more efficient. You might even begin to separate yourself from the competition.

Every market and industry are different, but it usually takes a few months to get from the point where it feels like nothing is happening to seeing progress. And then, a few months later, something magical happens: your website begins to take off. All the content, social posts, and ads come together in a way that draws in a bigger audience. Not just a bigger audience than you had before, but possibly a bigger one than you ever expected.

There are a lot of terms for this point in the online marketing cycle, but I like to think of it as “critical mass.” It’s when everything begins to take on a life of its own. You can usually tell when you’ve reached this point because one or more things are happening:

• Your web traffic explodes, growing exponentially in just a few months.
• The leads or sales you are generating are better quality, meaning higher customer values.
• More and more customers are finding you and leaving positive reviews.
• Other buyers are coming back and doing business with you more frequently (and for bigger amounts).
• Your business feels healthier than it has in years… or maybe ever.

Obviously, these results all have wonderful effects on your profitability. But, if you look a bit deeper, there are also some other amazing benefits to this explosion in sales and attention.

First, it becomes easier to pay for improved online marketing campaigns going forward because you have more money to spend. The more customers there are coming in, the easier it is to pay professionals to help you find others like them.

Second, you gain a better understanding of what your market wants from you. Because you can track data through web analytics, you can see which messages, offers, and content types are resonating with your audience. That makes you more efficient in the future.

And finally, you gain something that very few business owners and executives have: the confidence to know that you can execute or oversee a successful digital marketing campaign. You become brave enough to branch out and try new things that your competitors wouldn’t.

Does all of this sound amazing? That’s great. It’s all achievable. However, the bad news is that you can’t get to that point without committing to the process of marketing your new website to the buying public. Just putting your new pages online isn’t going to accomplish much on its own.

Do You Have the Right Web Design Mindset?

Although we’ve already made this point in other articles, it bears repeating again: even though things can move quickly on the internet, it still takes a bit of time and effort to be successful. If you’re looking for a quick fix with your new website, the chances are good you’re going to be disappointed with the results you get in the end. You might get a small bump when your pages first go live, but you’re going to have to keep pushing and promoting to generate the kinds of leads or sales it really takes to transform your company.

Knowing that, ask yourself whether you have the right mindset going into your web design project. Are you willing to be patient and persistent? Can you follow guidance from your creative team? Does achieving the right outcome truly matter to you?

If you have doubts about any of these, then you should be speaking with your creative team to get their input. Ask them to assess your market and give you realistic estimates for what it will take to succeed. Then, factor in any unexpected setbacks or issues that might pop up along the way.

When you have a website that isn’t performing the way you would like it to, it’s almost always worth it to make an upgrade. However, you can’t expect the results to be instant, or for your new site to deliver if you don’t put any time or effort into marketing.

Even the best website won’t generate its own audience. That’s good news, though. It means that the smart work you do to find and attract customers will eventually give you a huge advantage over all the other entrepreneurs who want to compete in your space.

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