When it comes to website design, you need to think from your audience’s perspective.
As an IT company, you’re probably pretty proud of your website. But it can be hard to view your website from a marketing standpoint. Because of that, your website design could have too much jargon, be too complicated to navigate, or even miss your target demographic.
Here’s an easy checklist for managed service provider marketing, so you can find out if your website design is optimal.
1. Does your Website Design Make a Great First Impression?
From the first click onto your link you have between 50 milliseconds and 6 seconds to create a positive first impression. Clearly, that’s not a whole lot of time. How are you going to impress a potential customer in that short time span?
Here’s how:
- Aesthetic design
- Brand consistency
- Simplicity
The aesthetics of your website contribute a lot to your first impression. Bad pictures or a bad color scheme equal a bad first impression.
Your customers will notice if your website is taken up with cheesy stock photos or low quality images. The best way to improve your photo quality is to be selective with your photos. Use high-quality renderings or, even better, original photos of your equipment, office space and staff. Original photos taken by a professional photographer are best.
Not only does creating a web design with brand consistency in mind help create a great first impression, but it boosts your aesthetic appeal as well. Chances are that your company already has a logo design for your brand. When creating a new website there’s no need to throw it out.
You should be able to use the colors in your logo as the theme for your website.
The colors should already be visually appealing and create a large part of the feel for your company. Using your logo’s colors in your website design helps to keep that consistent feel in your brand.
Don’t waste the time you’ve just spent developing your visual appeal and brand consistency with a hard-to-navigate website. The world of managed service providers is complicated enough; your website doesn’t have to be complicated as well.
Make sure your website is simple and easy to navigate to someone outside your industry. Don’t use jargon in the title of your links that could confuse your audience. One way to ensure you haven’t missed the mark is by having friends and family attempt to navigate the website. Feedback is a great way to make sure your website design is on the right track.
2. Is Your Website Design Appealing to Your Audience?
Many managed service providers work with large companies with critical IT systems. Because of this, clients can include manufacturers and office managers.
Your potential clients work in a busy and important role ensuring that everything goes smoothly for their company. They’re looking for reliability and dedication from their managed service providers. Make this reliability and dedication a key aspect of your website. Those keywords, or similar ones, should be a major theme of your home page.
Your services should be highlighted, too. Managers don’t have too much time to spend looking through your website for a hidden link. Make it clear and obvious.
Remember, these potential clients are busy. Make sure you have an easy-to-access way to schedule an appointment.
3. Does your Website Design Generate High-Fit Leads?
Targeting potential clients is done best with a variety of types of lead generation. For example, older managers may be on email while younger clients find themselves on Twitter.
Don’t underestimate social media as a way to generate leads for your company. Many managers do use social media, even if it may not be the first thing on their busy to do list.
Directing traffic from social media to your website can boost your SEO and mobile compatibility, while giving you another outlet to generate leads.
Email newsletters are a great way to reach an older demographic. Besides that, your clients are looking for reliability and dedication. A newsletter is a great way to show that your expertise will get the job done right the first time.
4. Are You Using the Best Technology?
SEO and a mobile-capable website are crucial in excellent website design. As a managed service provider, you are probably aware of search engine optimization and mobile capabilities for websites. But are you using it most effectively?
People are more likely to connect to social media through their phone or tablet than their desktop computer, especially the on-the-go managers that are typically clients of managed service providers. Mobile capability can boost lead generation and add to the simplicity of your website. Most importantly, if your website is not mobile capable, or too complicated to navigate on mobile, you have a large chance of losing leads.
Most people do a preliminary search for managed service providers through search engines like Google. Because of this, having your name appear first can be a huge asset to your organization. Search engine optimization is a great way to generate leads and direct more traffic to your website. A great way to tell if you need to boost your SEO is if your company does not appear when you search for your company’s name and location.
Website Design Can Be Complicated.
As a managed service provider, you need a targeted website that will use the points above to generate potential clients.
New North is here to help.
Our website design specialists are experienced and able to produce websites utilizing these crucial aspects to boost your managed service provider business. Schedule a free review of your managed services website with one of our expert consultants today.