Using Your Website As A Hub (and Why You Should Do It)

Engaging with consumers and potential customers through consistent and robust digital content is a must for any company in our increasingly digital, on-demand world. Every industry has consumers who have developed a dependency on being able to access any content they want at the touch of a finger. The catch is, with this ease of accessibility comes the expectation of efficiency and quickness. Consumers generally don’t want to spend a lot of time digging for information on a company, product, or brand. Part of being “on-demand” means they want to find it quickly, and when they do, it should be straightforward and uncomplicated.

You may be thinking this is difficult to accomplish: reaching an entire base of potential customers with thoughtful, thorough content that is easy to find and easy to absorb. After all, there’s no shortage of avenues for people to explore to find useful content, and different consumers have different preferences. You’ve got social media, of which there are many different platforms just under that category. There are, of course, blogs, which many find to be useful. Still, others prefer their content more visually, in video or infographic formats. However, through all of these developments, one constant remains. Your company or brand’s website is a representation of what they are all about. It’s a key resource that can combine all of these elements, but in a unified way–with your name, your look, and your feel. It should encompass the many facets of your brand or company and your digital marketing strategy. So, the solution here is staring you in the face: your company’s website should function as the hub, or home base, to all of your digital marketing and content efforts.

Integration, Not Separation

As websites have been around for a while now, they’ve become indicators of the quality to be expected from a company. Whether this is fair or not misses the point: to most consumers, that’s how they appear. Even if a website doesn’t directly sell products, it should be seen and considered as a storefront. A fresh, clean, easy-to-navigate site that offers information through different media to speak to different preferences stages of the buyer’s journey is much more likely to entice and retain customers than one lacking these qualities.

Because websites have become synonymous with a company’s image, they are typically the first place most consumers go to learn about the products or services offered. It makes sense. The content on a company’s website comes straight from the source and is presented how they want it to be.  It should be the first place people go, but what they do while they are there is just as important. Are there blog posts or eBooks for the more literary consumer (who maybe earlier on in the buying journey and wanting more thorough information)? Are there links to social media posts for that more interactive element? How about a place where returning customers can join an email list to get exclusives on upcoming products, events, or promotions? Having these, or any of the other digital marketing efforts you employ, in one place will reach a wider range of consumers, will make them feel more involved and engaged, will keep them on your website, and will make it as easy as ever for them to gather all the information they need to purchase with confidence.

Your Website Is Just That: Yours

With the onset of social media and the ways it has evolved to help businesses, some companies have developed a bit of a reliance on it. So much so that, for some, social media pages have taken the place of a business website. There’s no question that a strong social media presence is incredibly worthwhile and effective for business. However, how they operate, their interactive look and feel, and the policies that govern them are ever-changing and are beyond your control. If the goal is to be noticed and stand out from competitors, relying solely on social media is not the way to do it. Not only do the pages more or less look the same, but the algorithms that dictate who sees your content and ads also continue to change, and there’s no guarantee they’re reaching who they say they’re reaching.

Your company is unique, and your website is the one platform where you can flaunt this. There is a lot of value in having the freedom and control to create the user experience that you, and more importantly, your consumers, want.

Keep the Wheel In Motion

A hub is a perfect word for what your website should be. If you think of all your digital marketing efforts–email campaigns, blog posts, videos, webinars, whitepapers, press releases, social media posts, and infographics/charts–each as individual spokes of a wheel,

then you see that they’re all connected, and each spoke ultimately connects back to the hub. Share videos of product demonstrations or events on social media. Use your blog as a promotional tool to highlight your webinars or eBooks. Include infographics and links to your blog in your email blasts. Cross-promote. All of these spokes working and turning together will steer consumers to your website–the resting place and intersection where all of these spokes meet. It’s a two-way street: your website is a gateway, a portal for consumers to get the content they want, how they want it, but it also reaches out to them where they are (email, Instagram, Facebook, etc.) and guides them back to your website, where they are exposed to all of your great content and calls to action.

The best news is you don’t have to do this alone! Let Spencer Web Design help keep your wheel spinning toward success. We can help turn your website into a multi-faceted hub that will generate more visibility, more traffic, and more leads–all without compromising your creative vision for your company or brand. For more information on how Spencer Web Design can help get your website where it should be, contact us now.