We recently surveyed small and medium digital business owners and these 5 simple words rose to the top of nearly everyone’s list of what they aspired to create in their business website:
Professional
Beautiful
Clear
Compelling
Valuable
Sure, these were pretty obvious qualities to aim for in a website, but then we heard something that surprised us. The number one quality the savviest and fastest growing business owners sought in their website?
To give my prospects and customers a reason to keep coming back.
This was new. Yet, as we thought about it, this desire to give prospects and customers a reason to come back to a business website seemed very smart. It certainly was new thinking to go from a beautiful, professional but static website to something much more dynamic that could drive customers and prospects to keep coming back.
The New Reality For Businesses: It’s All About Attention
“Giving people a reason to come back” reflects a new reality for businesses. It’s never been harder to capture and keep someone’s attention no matter how awesome your product or service may be. So why invest in a website if it is not working overtime to help make your existing customers more successful or grow new customers faster?
Now, if this isn’t resonating with you and you still want a professional-looking static website, check out Squarespace. It’s great.
However, if you’re intrigued by the idea of creating a dynamic website that will make your business website stickier and work harder for you, your customers, and prospects, then read on.
Create a Dynamic Website to Keep Your Customers and Prospects Coming Back
A dynamic website means that there’s always a new and compelling reason for your customers and prospects to keep coming back to visit.
There are two ways to create a more dynamic website:
Option #1: Hire an expensive team to create and publish new, high quality research, insights, stories, and training frequently, even weekly.
Option #2: Bring your customers and prospects together to meet and build relationships with each other in a community-powered website designed around achieving the results or transformation they aspire to in their careers or lives (and that obviously, your product or service serves as well).
Where option #1 requires you to write the equivalent of a term paper every week or pay a lot of money for decent but uninspiring writing optimized for search engines, option #2 will actually produce more engagement and more value because it gets more valuable to everyone with each new person who joins and shares their stories, experiences, and ideas.
Bringing Your Customers and Prospects Together on Your Website is Easier Than You Think
Wait. Isn’t building a community hard? Why would people actually want to join a community I offer on my business website?
It turns out that creating a community of your customers or prospects is actually quite simple when you do this one thing: Make it about them. Specifically, make it about their goals and priorities, not about selling your product or service.
What do your customers have in common? Do they all share the same profession? Or do they have the same goal around their spiritual practice or health? When you bring people together around what’s important to them, they’re motivated to contribute, engage, and meet people on the same path.
The benefits of this new level of engagement are significant for you as well:
- Your customers are able to delve deeper into the topic they care about with equally motivated people (which is why they come back). For any business, having motivated customers and prospects spending more time with each other exploring a topic related to your offering is gold. Once you make the mental flip, connecting your customers to each other is easy.
- Your customers are able to learn faster where and how your product or service is most relevant to their goals or aspirations. Other people’s stories are one of the best ways for someone to solidify what they believe is possible in their career, their health or wellness journey, or around their important interests.
- Your prospects are more likely to want to buy and use your product or service. In meeting other engaged customers, a prospect will get the social proof, testimonials, validation, and training they need to purchase your product or service faster and more efficiently than if you just keep investing in the status quo. Sure, you may want to feel more control over someone’s experience with your brand or business, but there’s truly no better way to grow faster with more successful customers than to introduce them to each other and your latest prospects all in the same place.
Your business becomes that much more valuable to the people you serve when they can connect with each other. And a community like this essentially runs itself.
Once you start thinking about building a business website as a way to dynamically connect your customers and prospects to the topics that matter most to them, you can’t unsee the opportunity.
You have everything you need right now to make your website a game changer to your business. You have customers. And you definitely have prospects. All you need is a business website to connect them. That’s the easy part.
The 5 Things You Need in a Dynamic Website For Your Business
Now that you’re sold on the benefits of choosing a dynamic rather than a static website for your business, you want to know your options. How do you evaluate the different website builder platforms out there on this “dynamic versus static” front? What exactly does a dynamic website need to have?
A dynamic website for your business needs 5 things to work:
- Beautiful, professional, and intuitive navigation and design made for humans. For a dynamic business website, it’s as important that it’s intuitive to navigate as it is beautiful or professional. The good news is that there’s a new crop of website builders that don’t make you choose between having something modern and professional and connecting people to each other. You can retire that WordPress forum plug-in from 2003. There are now better options.
- Reliable hosting. 99% of the modern website builders you’re going to evaluate offer hosting, so you don’t have to think about this. Except in very few cases–like if you work at a gigantic company–do you want to build a custom business website that makes you also find your own hosting service.
- The ability to publish articles and content. Bonus for online courses. This is a business website, so you’re going to want the option to publish articles (like this one!) and organize topics directly on your website. These features aren’t just for search engine optimization (although that’s important) but also to spark the conversations that your customers and prospects want to have with each other.
- The ability to connect people to each other with profiles, posting, and messaging. Here’s where your dynamic website will really stand out. Where your competitors have a static website that doesn’t give their customers or visitors a reason to come back, you’ve positioned your business to think about the whole person behind your customer. The ability to bring people together and for them to find each other via member profiles, posting, search, and direct & group messaging will be a refreshing and memorable website that they can’t find anywhere else in exactly the same way.
- Instantly available and integrated across every platform–web, iOS, and Android. While we’re talking about a business website, the reality for any brand is that their customers and prospects use their phone, tablet, and laptop in a fluid way. The businesses that think beyond the web to native mobile apps (especially for dynamically connecting people to each other and bringing them back to your brand) are winning. They are simply with their people more often than a business who was satisfied with a clunky, slow mobile website.
When you think about building a business that gives more people more reasons to offer you their full attention for longer, native mobile apps can’t be ignored. And today, there are new ways to get your own native mobile apps without the expensive, risky custom development horror stories that have kept other businesses from seizing this competitive advantage.
Seize Your Brand’s Full Potential With a Dynamic Website
You now have everything you need to take the next step and explore what it will mean to your business to connect your customers and prospects to each other and create a new, fresh, and totally differentiated way to interact with your business website.
It’s the perfect strategy to drive growth.