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Marketing your business doesn’t require a degree in marketing. There are simple time proven-strategies that can be used to help you succeed in your marketing endeavors. With enough strategizing, you can accomplish a lot without spending a fortune. And you can reduce your outsourced marketing bill if you already know what you want.

In 2023, a well-designed website will be all but mandatory for any business. Word of mouth spreads largely online, and social media is one of the best ways for new customers to learn about you and your business. Even so, eyeballs on the page aren’t helpful if they aren’t converting potential customers to your side. You need more than a well-designed, sharp-looking website.  You need a highly effective website that will convert.
How do you know if your website is effective? There are some key metrics that can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your website. Here are three you should know:

1. Overall traffic
   You should start with tracking your overall traffic when determining the effectiveness of your website. Without this metric, you don’t know how well or badly your website is doing or what content works best for you.
2. Traffic Source
   Traffic source lets you know where your viewers come from. The three traffic sources are:
   
   • Direct – Viewers type your URL directly into the browser.
   • Referral – Viewers click a link from another page that brings them to your page.
   • Organic – Viewers are brought to your page from a search engine.
   Knowing these metrics will help you determine which is the most effective method to bring traffic to your site, and you can invest accordingly.
3. Conversions
   Conversions are not just about sales. They can also be newsletter subscriptions, live chat, and online inquiry forms. When deciding what type of conversions are crucial to your business, remember that some important conversions may not directly impact your revenue but are important in establishing your brand.
   
   There are plenty of tools in the market to help you keep track of these metrics, such as Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, and Hubspot, just to name a few. There is no reason to be stuck with a less-effective website.
   

A growing business is very susceptible to falling victim to the unintentional gumming up of regular operations through the lack of proper scaling, an accumulation of repetition and wasted working hours, or simple bureaucratic bloat. Here are a few ways to automate and streamline your business to keep things running as smooth as possible:

1. First, Patience – Most businesses, especially toward the start, require personal attention, a ‘human touch’, right out of the gate. Automation isn’t going to happen by itself, right from the starting line. As such, take time to make sure your business is functioning seamlessly through a continuous personal touch as it grows. Over time, you can find ways to automate the aspects of the business that won’t have an adverse effect on the customer experience.
2. Streamline Communication – Slack, Discord, and Microsoft Teams are popular apps used to centralize company-wide communications and ensure nothing unintentionally falls through the cracks. With your communications secure, software like ScheduleOnce can be used to automate appointments and tasks through a virtual assistant. When making a system for employees, try using the two-step process of filming yourself doing the task and breaking it down into a checklist.
3. Note Repetitions – Finding opportunities for additional automation can be done any number of ways – team meetings or company-wide surveys being two commonly used tools. If a certain task stands out as especially repetitive, you can begin to look for an automated solution that can perform that task as well or better than by continuing to do it manually. Menial and time-intensive tasks like sorting and responding to customer service inquiries can be partially or fully automated at no cost to the customer experience.
4. The Simpler, The Better – Automation need not be overly complicated in order to be effective. After all, a more complicated system requires more maintenance, requires more training to fix if it breaks down, and can be overall more disastrous to business operations.
5. Machine Learning and AI Implementation – New developments in software allow for a company to take business metrics and convert them into data points which an AI engine can then optimize. Company management tools like Google Cloud or SharePoint have built-in tools for automation, and you’ll have all the latest updates as the apps are continually updated (and optimized themselves). The right implementation of software can enable your business to achieve maximum efficiency.

UX (short for user experience) is any way that a customer interfaces with a company during any part of the sales process. This term is mostly commonly applied to a company’s website or apps.

Good UX design is, generally, not overly noticeable. If you are doing it right, your customers should never have to think about how they interact with your company because its intuitive. Bad UX design is the opposite. It is anything that makes it harder to interact with you, your company, or your products.

The most common UX trap is a failure to identify your target audience. An ecommerce company that targets millennials will have different UX goals than if they were to target baby boomers. This is because the baby boomer generation has different UX requirements than the millennial generation. What feels intuitive to one group is difficult or isolating to the other and vice versa. Millennials may get frustrated with a UX design that relies heavily on phone conversations or feels to “dumbed down.”

Your product or service can only be considered successful if it is well-received by your customers. If you aren’t sure exactly who you’re selling to, you can’t know if you hit the mark when it comes to you UX.

Here are some (in)famous examples of Bad UX Design.

Apple Magic Mouse

Upon release, the Apple Magic Mouse was roundly criticized by consumers for one egregious design error: the charging port is located on the underside of the device, meaning that you cannot use it and charge it at the same time. Instead, you have to flip the device over, plug it in, and walk away until it’s ready. This is a violation of one of the most important principles of UX Design — giving control to the user. Amazingly, as of 2022, the Magic Mouse comes in a variety of colors but still charges from the bottom.

ATM Machines

This is calling out a specific feature rather than an entire device, but it’s an issue that’s common to many different kinds of ATMs, and results in a problem many of us have faced at one time or another.

Upon inserting a debit/credit card to make a cash withdrawal at an ATM, many ATMs are programmed to give out the money before returning the user’s debit/credit card. This enables users to forget their card which leads to user frustration when they discover it missing, and time and effort for the bank, when they have to cancel and replace the card.

Online Purchases

Online shopping is more popular than ever, and yet many seemingly obvious UX elements haven’t yet been figured out. A common mistake online storefronts make are long dropdown lists — for example, when stating your country of origin. If a company knows that most of their buyers come from the US, the intuitive thing to do would be to make that the first option in any dropdown list. Instead, most lists are alphabetical requiring tedious scrolling.

Companies often fall into the trap of thinking “it works = good enough” but true success comes to those who optimize. Reach out to CLS to talk about your UX design and ensure you haven’t lost business to frustrated customers.