How does your company’s website stack up against your competitors?
In today’s B2B marketplace, prospective customers initially look at your website to gain an understanding and confidence about your company. Your website is often the first impression your company makes. At the same time, your prospective customers—as well as your current customers—are also forming impressions about your competitors based on visits to their websites.
What impression does your company’s website make?
Does your website communicate the right story about your company, quickly and compellingly, in a way that truly differentiates? What does the look of your website communicate about your company?
Is your website easy to use? Does it have content and functionality that enables prospects and customers to achieve what they expect to achieve on your website? And, importantly, does your website listing come up on the first page or two of Google search results?
Has your website aged?
Across industries, B2B companies are accelerating the frequency in which they overhaul their websites in order to stand apart from competitors. If your website is aging, it’s losing ground every day to your competitors who are leveraging the advantages of strong branding on the modern-day web.
How will your company gain competitive advantage with its web presence?
You may already have a sense that your website doesn’t stack up well against your competition.
However, creating a winning website is a significant investment—cheap won’t get you there—and you’ll want to ensure your investment is well spent.
The very first step in creating a strong web presence is to devise a brand strategy that truly differentiates your company. It involves critical thinking and creativity that is unique and appropriate to your individual company and its audiences. It’s the all-important step that leads to your website driving significantly more revenue and relationships. It’s also the step that companies sometimes skip “to save money”—penny-wise and pound-foolishly.
A well-defined and executed brand strategy considers all aspects of your business and the competitive environment and is directly connected to your audiences’ needs and emotions.
Branding embeds your company in the hearts and minds of your audiences. It communicates your story of unique value. It sways choice.
However, to be effective and efficient, your branding and your website must be managed by design, not by default.
Hufcor, Vizance, and Pieper Electric are good examples of companies that have taken control of their brand image online—verbally, visually and experientially—to jump ahead of their competition. Our team at THIEL is delighted to have helped them achieve that advantage.
Come back August 3rd to read our next installment in this blog series.
We’ll be discussing the essential building blocks to developing, implementing and managing brand strategy on your company’s website—for a strong, differentiating web presence.
