How to Start an Online Business: A Comprehensive Guide for Entrepreneurs
If you are one of the many people who have decided to leap into entrepreneurship in the last few years, congratulations 🎉
This guide will walk you through everything from learning how to communicate what you do, designing a website that sells, showing up in search engines, establishing your audience, picking the proper marketing channels, and more. Let’s get started.
Messaging Matters - what do you do exactly?
Before you can start promoting what you offer effectively, you need to know how to convincingly and succinctly define what it is you offer. This may seem like a pretty straightforward first step, but it is one that organizations, no matter the size, have a hard time getting right.
Before we can get into the nitty-gritty, take a moment to state what you do, why you exist, and why people should choose you. Let’s reflect on the questions below.
What does your small business do?
What is your purpose?
What makes you unique?
If you need a few minutes to jot these answers down, or you are the type of person who prefers to read through everything to get a better understanding before starting an exercise, feel free to download the worksheet below for later.
Defining what your business does
Why is this step so important? When you start promoting your business online, you only have a tiny window of time to catch someone’s attention - research shows you only have a few seconds. In fact, there is a common test called the 5 second test or blink test that helps measure what information users take away after visiting a website.
Additionally, when you can describe what you do, you will better understand the keywords people type into search engines like Google to find your business. Understanding search intent is a huge part of successfully showing up in organic (non-paid) search results and is also vital in crafting effective paid search campaigns.
Defining your product/service worksheet
Now that we’ve talked about what you do, we can establish your value proposition.
Defining your value proposition
Your value proposition summarizes what you do, states your benefits and why someone should choose you over your competitors.
Making a laundry list of what you do better may be tempting, but the value prop isn't about you. Instead, it's about your customer and how you can best solve their problem.
Nailing a concise and clear value prop (or a variation of it) is challenging but is so worthwhile as it is something you will likely use at nearly every other touchpoint on your marketing journey.
If you want to take a few minutes to reflect now, you can go ahead and answer the questions below. Or, if you prefer to read through and answer these questions later, download the attached worksheet for later.
Once you have solidified your value prop, you’ll find it is not only used on your website but also across your digital marketing efforts. It is best practice to create continuity between your website landing pages (conversion-focused pages that you send paid traffic to) and your ad copy. Why is this so important? Consistent messaging will help with brand recognition and impact the efficacy of your paid ad efforts.
Defining your audience: Who are you marketing to anyway?
If you can't quite define your audience, you'll want to create buyer personas.
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer and involve demographic and psychometric data.
When building campaigns, posting across social or building and optimizing your website, you'll want to refer back to your buyer personas.
You want to know who you are marketing to so you can effectively speak their language, alleviate their pain points, create the kind of content they find valuable, and meet them on the digital channels they frequent.
Here are a few key questions you’ll want to ask yourself about your audience.
For already established businesses, you can look into your website and in app analytics. This will help you gather information around keywords people use to find you, what blog content is gaining traction, or what service pages your audience visits the most, along with demographic and psychometric data that can help shape your target market.
Speaking with customer care teams, conducting surveys, or speaking directly with clients is another option for gathering information.
If, however, you are a band new business, there is no need to worry. You can use the worksheets provided below to help establish more information about your audience.
Buyer persona example
buyer persona worksheet
It is important to remember you will likely have a few different buyer personas. When you create your buyer personas you’ll want to think about how different personas will interact with your website and impact your business goals.
So for example, if you are creating a website that sells online fitness classes you may have a few different personas such as:
The fitness enthusiast : This person is passionate about fitness, and they know exactly what kind of fitness programming they are after. They might go straight to the products page, ready to make a purchase. However, before they purchase, they want to ensure your product page lists the critical information they are looking for to ensure your classes meet their expectations.
The recreation buddy: This person really enjoys fitness, prefers working out in nature, and being outside is a big part of their lifestyle. They would like to find indoor workouts that balance their days snowboarding during the winter or trail running during the spring. They are a bit more flexible and relaxed when it comes to trying new workouts. In addition, they have enough base knowledge to know the kind of programming they like. This person might dig around your website a bit and read Q & A’s or reviews before deciding what class they would like to try.
The fitness newcomer: This person finds fitness intimidating, but they want to make it part of their lifestyle. They don’t want to feel discouraged and need to see inviting content. They are committed to making fitness part of their day-to-day life but have no idea where to start. Video previews might help reassure them they are on the right track, and a free trial could be just what they need to give your classes a try.
The worksheet above allows you to look into their hobbies, interest and affiliated brands. When you start considering how you will drive traffic, this information can be very helpful. Using tools like Google Ads, you can create campaigns and specify that you want your ads to show to people based on interests, age, gender, and brand affinities.
Your fitness enthusiast may be interested in Under Armour, Vega, and so on.
Your recreation buddy may have an interest in hiking, Class Pass, Veja shoes, and Girlfriend collective.
From the two examples above, you can see how you can use digital marketing tools to target different buyer personas. The messaging you use and the URL to which you send different buyer personas will likely also vary.
Buyer personas can be limiting - people are complicated and can’t be summed up in one worksheet. That said, they are a decent place to start. For an excellent article on building buyer personas that start with empathy, visit this article from Webflow.
Designing a Squarespace website that sells: Conversion focused web design
Now that we've covered two fundamental marketing pieces - your messaging and your audience let's turn our attention to your website design.
Your website is one of your most powerful marketing tools. When building or optimizing your website, you'll want to consider your website goals, visitor needs, how people will find you, and how you will drive traffic.
Effective digital marketing and web design remove friction. Whether you are ready to revise your current website or are about to take the plunge into building a new one, your focus should be creating a website that addresses both visitor needs and business goals.
If you aren't familiar just yet, a conversion, simply put, is when someone completes a desired action - this could be subscribing to a newsletter, purchasing a product, signing up for a trial, filling out a form, or contacting you via email/phone. Now that we have that covered, let’s dive into your website goals.
What are your Squarespace website goals?
There are a lot of excellent website builder options out there that provide beautiful, mobile-friendly templates.
While there is a lot to love, even the best templates can't guarantee "out of the box" success.
Before you set out to build a webpage or rework your current one, you'll want to consider the phrases someone might use to find you, the purpose of the page, the value of the content, and the action you want someone to take.
Website goals
Web design worksheet
Here are seven website practices that can help drive conversion for your small business:
1) Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
This sounds like a given, but it can't be stressed enough. A good chunk of website traffic will come from mobile, and your website needs to be designed to provide a solid mobile user experience. This doesn’t just mean making sure your text isn’t overflowing off the page. This is about really considering your mobile experience. Is your site easy to navigate? Are people left scrolling forever to find what they want, or is your content concise with a clear call to action? A poor mobile experience can hurt you in search rankings and will prohibit website visitors from taking desired actions.
2) Clearly define & communicate your value proposition & services
People should understand what your business offers within the blink of an eye. You have a tiny window of time to convey what you do and why someone should consider doing business with you. Visual design aside, a great way to do this is through an informative headline. This headline should be both clear and concise. As we covered above nailing your value proposition and communicating your core services is a great place to start.
3) Create valuable content
Creating valuable content is critically important for potential website visitors because it not only captures their attention but also establishes credibility, builds trust, and drives traffic that can ultimately be converted into meaningful actions.
Google is focusing on the individual making a search query. They want to help them solve their problem as quickly and accurately as possible.
Your company's lengthy and long-winded history may feel like a necessary story to share, but is it valuable to someone trying to solve a problem or decide if we can assist them? If your story will help someone decide to work with or purchase you, by all means share it, but really evaluate if the content is more about you or your potential customer. People can often fall into the trap of creating a lot of thin content - content with little value. Take a moment to consider your potential customers and how you can expand on and improve your content to provide valuable information. Would they benefit from something like a video tutorial, infographic, or detailed blog post?
Next up, you need to optimize your content.
4) Use headings to organize your content
Headings can help improve user experience - people skim content, and headings allow them to find the information they are trying to access more efficiently. Additionally, heading tags can provide some hierarchical information to Google around the importance of your website content.
Using headings doesn't simply mean creating bold titles. Headings tags (h1, h2, h3, and so on) help Google spiders better understand your page's purpose. It is important to note headings should be used to improve user experience and not as a black hat SEO technique.
Google doesn’t see a website the way humans do. Google is pretty brilliant, but it needs some helpful hints. The best way to provide those hints is to utilize on page SEO.
What we see:
What Google sees:
Google spiders are responsible for crawling your website and using the information we provide them when we build a website to return a search result when someone makes a google search.
Google wants to know the subject matter of your website. One fundamental way you tell it is by using H1 and H2 tags.
H1 and H2 tags are simple HTML tags that tell Google, “Hey Google, of all the content on this page, prioritize this - this is what my website is about. “
For example, people often fall into the trap of ignoring heading tags and relying on imagery. If you own a website selling baked goods with a heading (h1 tag) that reads, “you’ll love it here,” Google will likely have a hard time understanding what your business provides and consequently won’t serve it up in search results.
You want to provide emotional, appealing headings that appeal to humans while also providing keywords and HTML that help Google understand your website is an excellent fit to serve up when someone makes a search query.
Moz provides an excellent guide on all things on-page SEO.
5) Write clearly, research keywords, & avoid jargon
Often we know so much about a topic or subject that we write for other experts. If your customer base is other experts, this makes a lot of sense. If they aren't, it can leave you and potential clients feeling lost.
When people make a search query, they may not have the technical vocabulary to explain your precise service. Ensure the words you use to describe your services are something a prospective client would use to make a search query. In doing so, you are more likely to show up in search engines, and secondly, you can provide a better user experience.
Recall our exercise on buyer personas - take a moment to think about how the kind of language your buyer personas may use to find a solution to their problem.
6) Embrace landing pages
Landing pages are action-oriented pages with a single goal. Often websites can get bloated with a lot of information. Landing pages help create a clear path to conversion. Rather than trying to solve a bunch of problems, they guide the website visitor to one solution.
Landing pages pair well with paid ad campaigns because they allow you to create a singular focus, remove distraction, and are more likely to meet a website visitor's expectations. When a web page is more tightly linked to a visitor's search intent, your chance of conversion (form fill, quote request, telephone call) is higher.
Let’s think back to our fitness personas from earlier. Based on your offerings and personas, it will likely make sense to send paid ads to different pages. The fitness newcomer is likely looking for something different than the fitness enthusiast.
Landing pages have a few key elements - take a look at the worksheet below. The example focuses on a bakery offering custom cakes, for any occasion, delivered to your door.
Landing page components
When we talk about promoting your website a little later, we will discuss landing pages in greater detail.
7) Consider the look & feel of your Squarespace website
While this is last, it is certainly not the least. You only have a limited amount of time to make a great first impression on a potential customer.
Your website is part of your brand ethos, and it deserves that same attention. It is often the first point of contact a potential client or customer will have with your brand, and you'll want to take this opportunity to shine. Potential clients and customers need to see you as a trusted and competent service provider. A modern and well-designed website is a necessary part of conveying that message.
Today there are so many amazing no code tools to choose from to help bring a beautiful and dynamic website to life. Squarespace, for example, has released Fluid Engine, a drag and drop editor with lots of felixbility, making it a great choice.
There is no shortage of places for web design inspiration. Remember, you can find inspiration across industries. Just because you offer a professional service doesn't mean you can't say you love the look and feel of the Tesla website, for example.
See my top ten 2022 web design trends and predictions.
Here are some of my favourite places to find design inspiration:
Promoting your Squarespace website: Digital marketing channels
We are making some good ground! Now that we’ve covered messaging, audience, and website fundamentals we can dig into promoting your website.
Your website is a place to gain trust, introduce people to your products and services, get potential leads, and often where people contact you or complete a purchase. As such, it's critical to think about how you'll drive traffic to your website.
Here are four popular buckets used to drive website traffic:
Social media (paid & organic)
Email
Google Ads (search, display & shopping)
The right solution for one business may not be a good fit for the next. It's essential to think about your goals, budget, and audience when deciding on the right marketing channels for you.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
On-Page SEO: Potential customers want to achieve something like learning more about a topic, securing a service, or purchasing a product.
Google wants to provide the most helpful result for someone making a search query. Paying to drive traffic to your website can add up, so businesses often feel pretty motivated to improve their search engine ranking to gain more organic website traffic.
On-page SEO refers to optimizing your web pages for search engines and potential visitors to improve website visibility. On-page SEO includes content, keywords, heading tags, alt tags on photos, appropriate title tags, etc.
For an excellent article covering on-page SEO ranking factors, visit this article from Moz.
Off-Page SEO: When other websites promote you and link back to your website, be it due to great content you've created, sponsored content, or press releases, you gain backlinks. Backlinks, depending on the source, can suggest increased trustworthiness and quality of your content to Google.
However, ranking in search engines isn't about stuffing your website full of keywords or headings or gaining spammy links. It is about empathizing with a potential customer and considering how you can best solve their problem.
To learn more about making your website more visible in search engines, visit this article.
Social media (paid & organic)
Social media offers a great way to drive traffic to your website. Several social media platforms offer both organic and paid social media options.
You can create content to share with your community and use paid ad targeting to reach more people you think will be interested in your products and services.
Picking the right channels for you will depend on your business, success on current platforms, and customer demographics. For example, if you're a realtor targeting a professional audience, you may find yourself driving traffic from LinkedIn to a white-paper with email opt-in on your website.
On the other hand, if you're a gym with a millennial audience promoting a free virtual fitness class, you might use Instagram stories and encourage people to swipe up to visit your website and register.
A quick Google search will give you greater insight into these channels and how they might make sense for reaching and growing your audience.
Email campaigns
Email is a powerful channel for growing your audience and engaging with your community and previous customers.
Email allows you to segment your messaging to ensure you provide personalized and meaningful content to a given audience.
For example, someone running a sporting goods store may want to send an email about their new winter running gear to people who bought running shoes in the last six months. This message may resonate with people more than a laundry list of updates such as a discount on golf balls.
Email is also a fantastic way to grow your audience and collect potential leads. For example, the sporting goods store could create a free guide about the best running trails in the area and have someone subscribe to their email list to download it.
Google search & display ads
Google search and display ads are powerful tools for promoting your business online. Search ads allow you to appear at the top of Google search results, putting your brand in front of potential customers actively looking for your products or services.
Display ads, on the other hand, reach a wider audience by appearing on relevant websites across the Google Display Network, increasing your brand visibility and driving traffic to your website.
With their precise targeting options and measurable results, leveraging Google search and display ads can significantly enhance your online presence and attract valuable leads for your business.
Search Ads: You know when you make a website search, and the first part of the page displays results with a little "ad" symbol next to them in the corner?
Those are Google Search Ads. Search ads are often used for people who want to capture a searcher's intent. Many people use search ads because they don't appear high enough on organic search results. With search ads, people bid on keywords or phrases related to their business. When people click on the ad associated with the keyword(s) you bid on, you pay Google.
Google search campaigns can be an effective advertising method, but you must think carefully about the budget. You want to think about what you are selling and how much you need to spend before someone makes a purchase.
Display Ads: Display ads are visual-based ads you have no doubt seen while visiting a blog, watching a YouTube video, or reading the news. While search ads are more related to intent, display ads will surface while you are busy doing other things.
Display ads can reach a large number of people across the Google Display network, and as such, are useful for expanding reach, brand, and staying top of mind.
Below are a series of popular display banner ad sizes you have likely seen floating around. For a full list of display ad sizes, here is a great resource from lineardesign.com
Popular Google display banner ad sizes
Google Shopping Ads
Open a tab in Google and search for a product like "trail running shoes" or "organic coffee." You'll most likely see a list of images come up with vendor information and a small "ads" text in the top left corner. These are Google shopping ads. Shopping ads are the product ads that appear in Google search results.
Shopping ads require a Google Merchant Center account where you provide details about your products, and a Google Ads account to run your campaigns (budgets, bidding, etc.). Your Merchant Center feed provides Google with the information it needs to display your products in results.
Shopping, or product, ads work differently from search ads with regards to how Google decides to show them in a search query. Rather than bidding on keywords, Google will crawl your Merchant Center feed and your website to determine your product's relevancy in a search result.
Because of the highly visual nature of shopping ads, they can be an excellent choice for retailers. There are both paid and free shopping options available that are worth exploring.
Below I provide a list of excellent sources for getting started with organic and paid efforts of promoting your website.
Promoting your website
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Digital marketing SWOT: Deciding where to dedicate your time and resources
Now that you have a good understanding of the popular marketing tools available to you for promoting your business online, it is time to dig a little deeper and think about the best use of your time and resources. Getting a new business off the ground is a lot of hard work! The practice below helps you uncover opportunities and create a roadmap for growth regarding tactics and strategies you'll want to prioritize.
If you don't have a good idea of where to start, it can be valuable to do a SWOT. I've provided a worksheet below to help you evaluate your digital ecosystem and see opportunities for you to grow your business. By conducting a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), you may learn you don't rank well in search engines and that you have an excellent following on LinkedIn or TikTok that you can capitalize on while you slowly grow your organic search ranking.
Alternatively, you might want to start an online course in a niche topic with very little organic search competition and decide your best use of resources is to start putting your efforts into building a community over social media.
Digital Marketing SWOT example
Digital Marketing SWOT worksheet
If you have just started a brand new business and haven’t had the opportunity to build out social media channels or work on your SEO yet, a SWOT is still a valuable practice. If you left a job with a great network, you might want to connect with people over LinkedIn or Instagram and ask them to share your business on their timelines or in their stories to help drive awareness and help you gain some of your first clients. You may also be exploring something entirely novel that is newsworthy and may have an opportunity to gain some coverage through press releases.
This exercise helps you determine where you can have a few immediate wins and where you may need to start planting the seeds for future successes. SEO, for example, is a long game but pays off repeatedly. So while you may need to rely on paid ads to get your business off the ground, you will likely want to work on your SEO to help bring down acquisition costs.
When it comes to how much you should be spending on your paid ad efforts, you’ll want to think carefully about how much a conversion is worth to you. You may offer a free trial but have an idea in mind of lifetime customer value for someone who subscribes to your classes. You may be selling a product and need to consider your margins. If you use a tool like Google Ads, are you still making money once you’ve paid to acquire the customer and accounted for your margins? An architect or realtor may be willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a lead because the project will pay off many times over. Someone selling a product for $30 will need to pay much less to acquire a customer.
Digital marketing strategy
I believe digital marketing and web design require a holistic approach, and for that reason, we went through fundamental aspects of marketing before hopping into campaign planning.
At this point, we have a deeper understanding of our product and how to communicate our value across various touchpoints. We have identified our different buyer personas and detailed their motivations and the challenges they may experience when interacting with our website. We also dove into conversion-focused web design and the importance of creating a good experience once someone arrives on our website.
And, most recently, we covered exercises to establish our marketing priorities. Now that we’ve covered these key pieces let’s build out our digital marketing strategy.
Starting with strategy
A digital marketing strategy requires deciding on the approach you will take to meet specific goals.
Your strategy should describe how you will reach your goal without getting detailed enough to outline your specific tactics. You are simply stating the approach you plan to take without listing out all the actions involved.
Before you set out on campaign planning, you want to think about where you are currently, where you’d like to be (your goal), and how you will reach your goal (your overarching strategy). Once you decide on your strategy, you can plug in tactics that will help you get there.
Now let’s take a look at how the above example might work in a marketing specific example:
Take a moment to think about where you are currently and the goals you’d like to meet. What strategy and actions might help you get there?
Digital marketing strategy worksheet
When we pick strategies that don't feed into our goals, we often deploy tactics that don't move the needle in a meaningful way. Let's take a look at a real-world example. I set a goal to run a half marathon six months from now. From there, I decide my strategy is to go to the gym. So far, so good. Not so quick. Because I've decided I'll go to the gym, I start lifting weights and get really into sit-ups. While these are undoubtedly healthy behavior, they will leave me short of reaching my goal.
However, if my strategy was to gradually increase my cardio over the next six months, I might pick better tactics. For example, I might join a running group, or sign up for various cardio-based workouts, etc. Because my strategy was better this time around, my chosen tactics gave me a better chance of reaching my goal.
Now that we have addressed the strategy component, we can start thinking more about campaign planning and all the moving parts and details required to promote your business.
Squarespace campaign planning and content promotion
Once you've addressed your business goals and overarching strategy, you can get more granular and start thinking about marketing efforts and campaign goals. So while you may have a lofty goal to increase sales by x amount in the next six months, each of your marketing efforts and campaigns may have different goals and KPIs (key performance indicators) tied to them. You might, for example, have a campaign that focuses on free trial sign-ups.
The example below looks at the buyer's journey and corresponding content types that are valuable at each stage. When you think about your different buyer personas, can you think about what kind of content they may need to move further along the buyers journey?
The buyer’s journey
Stages of the buyers journey
Often campaign goals are fuzzy, like "create brand awareness" or "make more sales". We want to get more specific. Instead, try to clarify your goals, like "50 email addresses over the next three months". You won't always reach your campaign goal but be sure to set parameters to measure your success and improve future campaigns.
SMART goals worksheet
SMART Goals Worksheet
Picking the right channels to promote your Squarespace website
Now that we know our campaign goals, we can look through our digital marketing toolbox. Let’s take a look at some of most popular digital marketing channels below.
Below, we will take a look at a hypothetical campaign for Dennis, a realtor who is looking to get more clients.
Digital marketing campaign example
Reaching your digital marketing goals with landing pages
We talked about landing pages a bit earlier, and this is a great place to circle back to how landing pages are a big part of your marketing mix.
If you offer more than one product or service or you're trying to reach different customer segments, a landing page is a solution for you.
People want you to answer their questions with as little friction as possible. Therefore, your landing page should guide people to take an intended action tied to your goal (such as acquiring an email address, downloading a white paper, or filling out a form).
When people arrive on the page, what you offer should be obvious and that they have arrived in the correct location. It is best to make sure your campaign messaging, and creative assets mirror your landing page.
Creating content that resonates
Before you invest time and money into promoting your content, you’ll want to think about the kind of content and messaging that would resonate with your audience. The worksheet below can help you decide the creative assets (imagery, graphics, video) and content you choose. To determine where to invest further, you may also want to run A/B testing with different messaging and creative (imagery, graphics, video, etc.) to identify what is performing best.
When you think about the questions below, you’ll want to think about your buyer personas. You likely have a few different buyer personas who will require additional messaging and content to address their concerns once you have established the kind of content that resonates.
Creating content for your ad campaigns
Consistent ad creative & messaging
Let's pretend you own a bakery serving all sorts of cakes, pastries, and specialty desserts.
If someone is looking for a birthday cake with home delivery, it isn't the best use of their time to land on your homepage and sort through your scones, muffins, and lattes.
If they are googling birthday cake delivery, they probably want to get this cake ordered and check it off their list. Wouldn't it be ideal if there was a way you could send them to a page specifically tailored to birthday cakes and highlight your delivery service? Good news, you can! That is the magic of the landing page. ✨
It is essential people can understand what you offer within the blink of an eye. To mitigate any confusion and increase the likelihood of conversion, you want to make it very clear a potential customer has arrived in the right place.
To do this, you will want to create a cohesive experience - both the ad messaging/creative and landing page messaging/creative should be very similar.
Google search ad and landing page example
Instagram ad and google search campaign examples
Landing pages, paid search traffic & quality score
When using tools such as Google search ads, price and likelihood of your ad showing are tied to quality score.
Quality score is a component of Google Ads Campaigns and is related to the quality of your keywords, your ads, and your landing pages. Google wants to give people the best possible search results. You can't simply throw more money at Google than your competitor.
You need to create a holistic experience that shows Google your services or product best meet the search query's intent.
Your landing page should be relevant to the keywords you are bidding on. As a general rule, you don’t want to send paid search traffic to a homepage. Instead, you want to send paid search traffic to a page with a goal and narrow focus - a landing page.
You can learn more about quality score and best practice here.
Landing page best practice
Earlier we talked about landing page best practice. The example focuses on a bakery offering custom cakes, for any occasion, delivered to your door.
Landing page worksheet example
Taking a look at the worksheet below, let’s think about your product or services, and your buyer personas and how a landing page paired with google ad or social campaigns could help remove friction and drive conversions.
Landing page worksheet
Campaign checklist
Now that you have established your strategy, your goals, and messaging, and your destination landing page, you are ready to start promoting your business.
The checklist below will help keep you on track with creating a holistic campaign. Before you spend time and money paying for ads, you want to consider your URL destination. You also want to make sure your landing page is designed to meet to the goal of your campaign.
Campaign checklist
Measure your marketing
Measurement is a key component of digital marketing. Without it, you are spaghetti marketing - throwing something out there and seeing if it sticks. Tracking results through services like Google Analytics allows you to see what's working and what efforts may no longer be the best use of your time and resources.
Before you start any marketing efforts, always make sure you have in-app analytics or, better yet, Google Analytics on your website properties.
Google analytics provides a snippet of tracking code you add to your website. Once installed, you can learn where your search traffic is coming from, pages where engagement is strong, and pages that need a little help. You also get a sense of how people move through your website.
Several tools you may choose to use also come with built-in analytics and data. Remember you want to access and examine in-app analytics and website/landing page analytics. For example, while it's valuable to know how many people clicked on an ad, you also want access to how long they stayed on your website and how those ads contributed to your business success (such as a download, phone call, or sale).
Measuring website metrics
You need to know what's working and what's not. The following data points will give you a good idea of where you can make adjustments to up your marketing game.
Popular metrics you’ll want to look at include: Traffic source, visitors, conversion rate, bounce rate & time on site.
Traffic source: Where are your visitors coming from? Traffic source helps you determine what channels drive traffic and which channels have the best conversion rates.
Visitors: How many people visit your website? are they new visitors? Repeat visitors? Visitor metrics help you determine your conversion rate and inform you how to drive more conversions. For example, if you have a great conversion rate but minimal traffic, it is a good indication that you need to drive more (quality)traffic. If, however, you have a lot of traffic but a weak conversion rate, you likely need to dig down to where the disconnect is coming from. Visitors may be confused by your messaging, have trouble navigating your website, and so on. So, again, digging into your analytics can help you determine where you can improve. You can learn more about conversion-focused web design here.
Conversion rate: Simply put, a conversion is when someone completes a desired action - this could be subscribing to a newsletter, purchasing a product, filling out a form, or contacting you via email/phone. Your conversion rate is how many people convert based on your website traffic (visitors). To find your conversion rate, divide conversions by your number of website visitors (you can also calculate this for conversion rate for each channel and so on).
For example, 100 people visit your website, and 20 of them make a purchase, your conversion rate is 20 divided by 100 = 20%
Bounce rate: Bounce rate can be a confusing metric. It is not always a bad thing, but it takes some context to determine if it is troublesome. If you have a high bounce rate, it can indicate poor usability or confusion on behalf of the visitor. Bounce rate looks at the number of visitors who only visit a single page without visiting a second page. For example, did they click on a search result, land on your website, and quickly leave to see if another search result is better suited to their inquiry? Ideally, people will be motivated to click around your website because they are impressed, or their initial interaction with your website piques their interest. This article from Search Engine Journal provides a breakdown of what an excellent bounce rate looks like and why a website might have a high bounce rate.
Time on site: This is just as it sounds - how long do people spend on your website? What is the average session duration? Are people engaging with your content or leaving after a few seconds. Again, this requires context. If you have a checkout flow that takes A LOT of time, and people are spending several minutes and often abandoning their carts, it is an indication you want to help minimize the time on site. You likely want to remove form fields or do user testing or heat mapping to see where people are getting frustrated. On the other hand, if people are landing on your site and leaving pretty quickly, you’ll want to make improvements so people stay longer.
Website marketing metrics
Measuring content & campaign efforts
How are people engaging with your content? Are they clicking through to learn more? Measuring your social media efforts and your website performance will give you a good idea of what channels and creative/messaging contribute to business goals.
The diagram below outlines some standard metrics you’ll want to look at. These include impressions, click-through rate, comments, shares, and reach.
It is important to note that different campaigns have different goals, and while impressions and click-through rate are something you’ll find using Google Ads, things like shares, comments, and reach will be unique to different platforms. Like the factors we looked at for website visitors above, these metrics help determine if you are achieving your KPIs (key performance indicators).
Digital marketing campaign metrics
Embracing No Code Tools like Squarespace
No code is a transformative approach that's going to change how we think about web design.
No code tools like Squarespace are empowering creators to swiftly build and grow businesses, fostering a culture of efficiency and agility in the digital landscape.
With no code, you can create websites without writing code. No Code offers an alternative approach for building websites that allows teams to focus on user experience rather than technical aspects of their projects from start to finish—from ideation through testing—in order to build better products faster than ever before possible with traditional web development processes alone.
You may have heard of no code platforms, or WYSIWYG builders such as Squarespace, Caard, Shopify and Webflow. If you're not quite sure what they are, here's the gist: these tools allow you to build websites visually, without writing any code at all.
Are no code tools only for web design?
No-code tools go beyond website applications, and include tools to build apps and other digital experiences without writing code. From marketing to app development and collaboration, no code tools are helping business of all sizes everyday. Here’s a look at some popular tools across worth exploring.
App Design:
For example, bubble.io is a tool that allows you to create and publish an app without code. Bubble offers a powerful point-and-click web editor and cloud hosting platform that allows users to build fully customizable web applications and workflows, ranging from simple prototypes to complex marketplaces, SaaS products, and more. Bubble has become wildly popular as of late - Over 500,000 users are currently building and launching businesses on Bubble.
Workspace & Collaboration:
Notion is a powerful tool for planning, brainstorming, and organizing your projects. You can use Notion to take notes, create to-dos, keep databases, build a wiki and brainstorm. It even has integrations with Slack so you can share ideas in real time with your team.
Or you can use it as a personal workspace - create multiple notebooks that stay separate from each other (like one for work and one for home). Notion also comes complete with ready made templates to save you time.
Newsletters:
Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing platforms. It's easy to use, has great templates and analytics, and integrates with other services like Google Analytics. If you're looking for an easy way to send out newsletters or other mass emails. Gone are the days of having to hand code your newsletter templates. The MailChimp editor is easy to use and allows you to add images and text with a few clicks of the mouse, and customize your template with pre-designed elements or create your own layout in the drag-and-drop editor.
Forms & Surveys:
Typeform is a great way to create some very professional looking forms and surveys. It's free to use for up to 100 responses per month, and it has a great mobile app. Typeform has a lot of features:
Dynamic dropdown menus
Conditional logic
The ability to add text fields, checkboxes, date pickers, audio recordings and more.
Design:
Canva is a design tool that allows you to create stunning visuals for social media, presentations and more. It has over 1 million users and is rated 4.7/5 stars on Google Play.
You can create beautiful designs with minimal effort using Canva's drag-and-drop editor. Select from hundreds of templates or upload your own image for a custom look.
Visit nocode.tech to get a deeper dive into hundreds of no code tools.
To learn more about how no code is a key enabler of digital transformation, visit this article.
NFTs & Web3 and the future of marketing
The internet of things changes swiftly. In the last few years, we have seen a huge growth in NFTs and talk of Web3. More recently I wrote an article outlining the use of collectibles in marketing and dug a bit deeper into the emergence of NFTs and the future of marketing. What I find most fascinating is how NFTs are being tied alongside tangible products to provide some sort of exclusivity. If you have heard of NFTs but aren’t quite familiar, let’s start with a definition.
What is an NFT exactly?
NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. OK -what does that mean? Thanks to a great article from the Verge, there is a succinct explanation for all of this.
If you prefer an audio description, here’s a great 3-minute explainer from NPR.
What do NFTs have to do with marketing?
Recently I came across an article from Andrea Hernandez from Snaxshot, which expertly outlined the evolution of Web3 in the food and beverage space. In the article, Alex discusses a number of emerging trends and companies. I’ll cover one below, but definitely suggest you read their article - it is fascinating.
One such example was from Leisure Project, a “hydration” product aimed at Gen Z. To me the most interesting part of Leisure Project was not so much the product itself and its claimed benefits (calm, balance and clarity), but the fact that you could mint your own “leisure creature” - an NFT that also appears to be a major part of the Leisure Project brand ethos. Beyond food and beverage, NFTs are showing up a lot in the eCommerce and fashion space.
According to Vogue Business, an NFT from Gucci, called Gucci Grail is releasing later this month. Further, Gucci is launching an experience for Gen Z in the Metaverse. Again, the promise here is “exclusivity.”
This article from Shopify outlines a number of applications for NFTs - one that stood out to me was how NFTs might be used to gain brand loyalty. If you are interested in learning more, it is well worth the read.
Marketing applications aside, NFTs and Web3, cryptocurrencies and new technologies are certainly part of a larger aesthetic that is influencing web design trends.
As we move towards a cookieless web marketers, entrepreneurs and business founders will be looking for innovative and creative ways to connect with their audience and build community. While NFT related tactics won’t be a great fit for all brands, it is a space to keep an eye on as it continues to evolve.
Free marketing resources
We covered a lot here. If you are looking for more information, worksheets and resources, please feel free to check out my free online course. I’ve also created a digital marketing toolkit full of resources to help you grow your business online, you can find below. Happy marketing!
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