Digital agency • 10 tips for creating your website

By Konbi
April 26, 2017

Do you wish to set up (or rethink) your digital strategy, create a new website? Are your looking to identify digital marketing levers that will help you expand the influence of your brand and conquer new markets? Konbi offers you 10 tips to enhance and optimize your presence on the web.

1. What's the interest of my company to be more visible on the Internet?

A stronger presence on the web allows you to develop both brand awareness (showcase website) and strengthen your sales force (e-commerce website). Depending on the specificities of your activity and the degree of maturity it has with Internet users, you can whatsoever set up your strategy in two successive stages:

- Strengthen brand awareness:

When you're looking to expand your brand on new media (website, mobile application, social networking), you can fully realize the importance of having a logo and visual identity created by a design professional. Thanks to its apparent simplicity, a high-quality logo allows for a flexible handling that allows your brand to distinguish itself from your competitors, while maintaining a clear discourse with your consumers, both in the physical world and on the web.

The creation of a "showcase" website, which presents your activity, your services, the means to contact you, is an essential first step, as is the creation of a Facebook page, Linkedin and Google+ profiles.

- Business Development:

Whether the services you offer are dematerialized or physical, you can decide to sell your products directly on the Internet, developing an e-commerce site. Among the many platforms available (WooCommerce / Wordpress, Amazon, Etsy, Squarespace ...), Konbi's role as a digital agency is to guide you to the technical solution that best suits your needs, which will allow you to be the most competitive, and lets to maintain as much flexibility and freedom as possible in the day-to-day management of your business platform.

It's also often pertinent to opt for a multiple online presence of your products, for example on your own e-commerce site and on Amazon and Etsy, in order to avoid any dependency with an e-merchant, as well as leverage your online sales opportunities.

2. How do I identify the digital strategy that suits me?

Several factors should be taken into consideration before defining your online and digital marketing strategy. Let us highlight 3 points which seem essential to us:

- Analyze the presence of your competitors on the Internet: the "competitive benchmark" allows both to identify the good practices to set up, as well as the points of differentiation that will make you more attractive to Internet users.

- Adapt your strategy to your budget: if the budget you can dedicate to your web strategy is punctual, and you can't plan an operating budget (internal or external) following the creation and development of your website and the global online presence of your brand online, it's better to focus on the fundamentals, that is to say the image of your brand (visual identity and speech) via the quality of your showcase site. It would be counterproductive for your company to invest in new communication tools and then leave them aside. Think that a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube, Instagram, and others is a direct doorway to dialogue with Internet users, and that you need to be reactive so that it's effective and beneficial for your brand in the long term. This is called community management.

- Develop your community: whether it's for brand awareness or commercial development, having the most traffic on the platforms (website, youtube, social networks) where your company is present is the main objective of any digital marketing strategy you want to set up. Converting a lead can represent between 0.1% and 1% of the total traffic that you will be able to generate. This is why you need both to find the levers to generate traffic, but also make sure you can transform this traffic into a faithful community. It's the members of your community who are most likely to consume your products and spread your messages to the greatest number.

3. How to choose the platform (CMS) of my website?

Depending on the typology of website you want to create, from the showcase site with a strong visual or textual emphasis, via the e-commerce site or the blog or the vlog (video blog), there are many CMS platforms (Content Management System) that allow you to implement the functionalities you need, while respecting your visual identity. It's one of the roles of Konbi to guide you in choosing your CMS, offering you the most suitable platform.

The interactive agency Konbi is a Squarespace expert, which we prefer to more "classic" solutions such as Wordpress to name only the best known. We will analyze in a future post the advantages (and disadvantages) of Squarespace, which Konbi uses as a platform for integration and web development for the majority of its customers since 2013.

4. How to identify the features needed on my website?

Your professional activity in the physical world, when it can be transposed on the Internet, assumes the creation of a specific user experience. For example, online payment is a feature whose steps are always the same (order summary, choice of payment method, validation, issue of an invoice sent by email etc.). The maturity of the web in 2017 allows companies to have a very wide choice of features already developed, by activating them via the use of a suitable CMS platform.

A CMS platform brings together a catalog of features, which you can then activate according to your needs. If one of your needs is so unique that no pre-developed functionality exists on the market, or the user experience you want to offer to your customers is also unique, then you need to consider a specific budget for web development.

5. Multi-language translation

Thanks to the Internet, you can access markets around the world without the need to open offices in each of the countries where you want to establish a presence. The translation of your website, as well as the capacity you have to communicate in several languages, will allow you to multiply your traffic and to appeal to consumers whose attraction to your brand you would never have suspected before.

Konbi offers its clients quality translations from English to French, Spanish, Turkish and Portuguese.

6. Presence on social networks

Beware of the totally artificial side of the traffic that you can generate on your site by carrying out advertising campaigns via social networks. If you find yourself in a situation where you have to spend a significant monthly budget with Facebook and Adwords to drive traffic to your website, not to mention the cost of community management, you have a problem. The objective of investing a significant portion of your turnover in your internet communication is to be profitable, not just to get in your expenses.

To do this, do not lure yourself: only a long-term strategy can pay off, which could be summed up in three points:

- production of quality content (articles, videos, podcasts)
- SEO optimization strategy
- Social networks: brand's presence / content relay / digital marketing (event or institutional advertising campaigns)

7. Regular publication of articles and videos

Even if you wish to create a website that is limited to the basic functionalities of a showcase site (who we are, our business, our achievements, our customers, contact us), you will never get the visibility you deserve without making the complementary effort to add a News section (blog), composed of articles, videos, interviews. It is by positioning yourself as a media, doubled by an expert in your field of activity, that you will generate interest and traffic on your site, youtube and the social networks where your company is present.

8. Google SEO Optimization

Without the regular publication of articles and videos, there is no serious SEO strategy that can be put in place. Google's optimization of your website, ie your position on the first page of Google results following keyword queries concerning your activity (Hong Kong bookshop, Hong Kong chocolate maker, Hong Kong take-away restaurant , Hong Kong pizzeria, Hong Kong bank, Hong Kong apartment rental ...) is unlikely to succeed without the support of original contents. Google's algorithms favor the regular production of original content, which doesn't mean that it should not be associated with a netlinking strategy. Konbi has a team of copywriters and SEO specialists who can bring you visibility on Google, which will allow you in parallel to grow your community on social networks.

Doing an advertising campaign through Google AdWords is not an SEO technique. Rather, it's a digital marketing technique that must be considered on an ad hoc basis, for an short period of time of specific events. Paying Google to appear regularly at the top of the results of the keyword queries that matter to you is the best way to overlook the background work you should perform in SEO. The visual difference between a sponsored result and a natural result is sufficiently clear so that the qualitative perception influence the resulting clicks from people.

9. Daily management of my website and social networks

As we have just seen, only the SEO makes it possible to have a constructive and long-term approach to your traffic. Relying only on social networks to generate traffic is a short-term approach, which doesn't allow for building or consolidating your community. SEO allows you to not imprison your speech and your products within a proprietary platform. As such, betting on Facebook for example, and thinking that you can mainly count on a Facebook page rather than your website to grow your business, makes you very vulnerable to all types of changes that Facebook decides to apply to its platform.

However, social networks are great levers for your brand, provided you respect a few simple rules, including:

- publishing from website to social platform: any publication (text, image) must be made from your website to social networks. If you publish a video, you will get more traffic from Facebook if your video is uploaded directly to Facebook than if you share it from Youtube. However, it's better to favor the Youtube video player when you publish an article dedicated to your video on your website, because the SEO of a Youtube video (which belongs to Google), will always be better than a Facebook video.

- Community management: when your presence becomes appreciable enough on social networks (at least 10000 followers on Twitter, 10000 on Facebook, etc ...) and your community begins to react regularly, a community manager (half-time to begin with) becomes essential. Beyond the direct contact with your community, a community manager ensures the regular flow of publications (and therefore the presence and dynamism) of your company on social networks.

- Digital marketing: a tool like Facebook gives you the ability to touch your targets in a very localized way, at a cost that seems low in appearance (between 0.05 € and 0.5 € per click on average). It's also necessary that the budget spent is balanced by the turnover generated in counterpart, if for example you advertise your e-commerce shop. The web agency Konbi rarely recommends to its customers other social networks than Facebook for their digital marketing campaigns (for example Linkedin, too expensive, or Twitter, unsuitable). Facebook seems to us to be the best in this field in 2017.

10. Let's go

Do you feel ready for the adventure?

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