The ability to showcase your wares to the world through a website means that everyone can have a shop window with a global reach. The flipside of this is that if you can do it, everyone else can too. It is therefore essential that your branding and web design are right because the marketplace is so crowded, and it is all too easy for your web presence to be lost in the online ocean.
No matter what area of commerce you are involved in, competition for online customers will be fierce. There are entire digital industry sectors that specialize in search engine optimization (SEO) and other techniques aimed at helping you get one step ahead of the pack in the search results.
However, the basic essentials need to be in place before you have any hope of coming out anywhere near the top.
Branding and design
Some of the most popular online business sectors are the hardest to navigate when it comes to making your presence felt.
The internet revolutionized the travel industry, changing it from a closely guarded closed shop, which meant dealing with travel agents to just book a flight, to an industry where you can arrange all the details of a round-the-world trip while sitting on your sofa. Even so, a successful travel business needs to ensure its site is visible and user-friendly, otherwise customers will simply take their business elsewhere.
Brand
A brand is all about having an identity that is recognizable and trusted, thus encouraging customer loyalty and return business. This can often be achieved by the effective use of colors or graphics, a unique standout logo, or even a personality or catchphrase.
For the consumer, the best brands can become like a trusted friend, giving customers a feeling of reliability, bringing them back to the site on a regular basis.
In online terms, having a strong brand means that a website is immediately noted as belonging to your company, no matter whether it is your own website or on another platform or social media network.
Interface design
Using the Internet successfully when running a business means securing regular conversions or sales. Once you’ve used all the tricks at your disposal to get someone to visit your site, and its branding tells them they are in the right place, you need an attractive, functional and easy-to-use design to ensure conversion from visitor to customer.
Flashy sites with all the latest must-have features can look impressive, but sometimes they are counterproductive when it comes to making a sale. For one thing, your site should work on older legacy devices and not just on the latest models, and for another, sometimes people just want to make a purchase rather than be distracted by extra content.
A good example might be anyone who is searching online for London short term rentals. LondonEscape, part of the WorldEscape Group, is an American registered company with offices in London, New York, Amsterdam, and Palermo in Italy, and operates in more than 25 countries. The company’s website not only features strong branding but also makes it extremely easy to find what you want and to go on to make an enquiry.
Customer’s eye view
What every business owner needs to remember is to try to take an objective customer’s eye view. Artistic elements of design such as shape, color, and balance may all be a good sell for a corporate client, but often a customer is more interested in being able to get the information they want in a clear and concise manner, make a decision, and then make a purchase.
All these things need to be part of a simple process that makes for a great user experience. Small factors such as short loading times and well-written copy can add up to being competition killers.
Well-prioritized information, perhaps presented in a hierarchy structure that will make sense to the consumer and maybe used in conjunction with simple graphics, can all help to set a clear and easy-to-follow path.
Consistency is also important, not only in terms of branding but also so that your landing page and every other page on your website maintains the same identity and “feel.”
Clean, simple, and intuitive are the watchwords for most great online success stories, especially in sectors such as travel where the small details, such as getting the right seat assignments on a flight, can really count.
Only by putting the customer first can any business really succeed, and that is as true today in the online world as it ever was in the old bricks-and-mortar environment.
(Image credits: NewBrandMedia )
Source: CSSmania