If you are looking to get started with your brand, one of the first things that you need to do is to start building a website to create an online presence. Right now we are truly living in the golden age of eCommerce and it’s easier than ever to quickly spin up a website for your brand and start selling products.
This helpful article will walk you through the key steps in getting started and highlight a single key decision that you will need to make to ensure your new venture is successful.
10 simple steps to follow to get your brand’s website up and running quickly
These simple steps can provide you with the “big picture” of important elements you will need to tackle in order to successfully launch a website for your new brand!
- Define Your Purpose: Clearly define the purpose of your brand. Whether it’s to celebrate your community, poke fun at your favorite sport, share helpful information or inspiration, or promote your art, having a clear goal will guide the design and content of your site.
- Choose a Domain Name: Select a memorable and relevant domain name for your website. Keep it short, easy to spell, and reflective of your brand.
- Select the perfect technology partner: Decide whether you want to use a website builder like Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify, this is likely the single most important technical decision that a new brand will have to make.
- Design Your Website: Choose a template or theme that suits your brand and customize it to fit your needs. Pay attention to layout, color scheme, typography, and images to create a visually appealing and user-friendly website.
- Create Compelling Content: Develop high-quality content that engages your audience and delivers value. This may include informative articles, captivating images, engaging videos, or interactive elements. Creating a quick video about the inspiration behind your brand is a great way to engage your audience.
- Optimize for SEO: Implement search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to improve your website’s visibility in search engine results. This involves optimizing your content, meta tags, headings, and URLs for relevant keywords and ensuring your site is mobile-friendly and loads quickly. While SEO likely won’t pay off immediately, it’s a good long term investment as it can drive organic (free) traffic to your brand.
- Integrate Analytics: Set up web analytics tools like Google Analytics to track visitor behavior, traffic sources, and other key metrics. Use this data to analyze the performance of your website and make informed decisions to optimize its effectiveness.
- Ensure Accessibility: Make your website accessible to all users, including those with disabilities, by adhering to web accessibility standards. This may involve using descriptive alt text for images, providing keyboard navigation, and ensuring text is readable and resizable.
- Test and Iterate: Regularly test your website across different devices, browsers, and screen sizes to identify and fix any issues. Solicit feedback from users and make iterative improvements to enhance the user experience.
- Promote Your Website: Once your website is live, promote it through various channels such as social media, email marketing, guest blogging, and search engine marketing to attract visitors and grow your audience.
Where many brands go wrong… and how not to fall into that trap
-Groobies Apliiq CEO
“most brand owner’s believe they need a website, but what they really need is a marketing platform”
The single key decision (#4 in the list above) in picking a technology partner, is that most brand owner’s believe they need a website, but what they really need is a marketing platform. This misunderstanding of their true needs is what leads brand owners to make sub-optimal technology decisions right out of the gate. Let’s take a few minutes to cover the differences between just having a website and investing in a marketing platform.
| Website | Marketing Platform | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | A website is primarily a digital space where you can present information about your business, products, or services. It serves as an online storefront or a digital brochure where visitors can learn more about what you offer. | A marketing platform, on the other hand, is specifically designed to help you promote your business, reach your target audience, and achieve your marketing goals. It typically includes tools and features for various marketing activities such as email marketing, social media management, advertising, analytics, and more. |
| Functionality | Websites can vary widely in functionality but generally include static pages like home, about, services, contact, etc. They may also include dynamic elements like blogs, e-commerce functionality, or interactive features. | Marketing platforms focus on providing tools and features to execute marketing strategies. This can include email marketing campaigns, social media scheduling and monitoring, search engine optimization (SEO) tools, analytics dashboards, customer relationship management (CRM) integration, and more. |
| Scope & key features | A website is typically focused on presenting content and providing functionality related to the entity it represents. It can encompass a wide range of information and features but is generally centered around the entity’s brand, products, or services. | A marketing platform is specifically designed to support marketing activities. While it may integrate with a website, its focus is on managing and optimizing marketing campaigns and activities across various channels, often with features such as email marketing, social media management, advertising, analytics, and more. |
| Integration | A website can serve as a hub for various marketing activities by providing landing pages, forms, and other tools to capture leads or engage visitors. It can also integrate with marketing platforms to track user behavior, conversions, and other metrics. | Marketing platforms often integrate with websites and other systems to gather data, automate processes, and provide insights that help optimize marketing strategies. Integration with other tools such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems is common to ensure a seamless flow of data and communication. |
The key take away here is that a website is just a single essential element of what you really need from a technology stack as a new brand owner. By fully understanding that you really need an entire marketing platform, not just a website it will help you avoid the most common issue that most brand owners face immediately after launching your website; which is of course nothing, as in no website traffic.
Ensuring that you are building an entire marketing stack and not just a website will ensure that you have a set of tools that are all working together to drive marketing results for your new brand, including bringing new visitors to your website, capturing email addresses, remarketing to abandoned visitors etc.
What does Apliiq Recommend?
In working with tens of thousands of partners, Apliiq has found that Shopify not only provides the best website solution, it is also the best marketing platform for your brand. It’s simple, cost effective, easy to use, and more than anything, it delivers exceptional marketing results.
The best part about Shopify, in our humble opinion, is that it has an incredible ecosystem of apps, including the Apliiq Print On Demand app, which will automate everything you need to do to design amazing products, post them for sale, and have the produced and shipped on demand.
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