12 Marketing Features You Should Build Into Your New Website

Your website can, and should, be a valuable member of your sales team. With the right features, your site can bring quality leads and future clients to your business. There are certain features that separate the efficient, useful sites from the ones that are mostly ignored. Here are a dozen marketing features that can help your site work for you:

Blog

The best part about including a blog on your website is that it's an excellent way to increase your site visibility. The most challenging part of having a blog is finding the time to keep it up. That being said, if you can find a way to work it into your creative marketing schedule, it is completely worthwhile. Not only can you cover topics that clients frequently ask about, but you can optimize for each of those topics, too.

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Effective design

Flashy graphics and award-winning design are great, but if your visitors can't easily navigate your site, they're going to leave. Focus your attention on creating a user-friendly experience first and look to the more complicated design elements later.

Easy-to-find contact info

It might sound obvious, but some websites make this more difficult than necessary. You don't want your potential clients to have to dig for your contact information. Make sure it's clear and simple to find a phone number, email or contact form.

Relevant images

The images you choose to use on your site, especially on your homepage, should be relevant to your business and high-quality. Low-quality images are a quick way to cheapen your site's appearance, so put a little extra time and effort in selecting the main images on your site.

Video

Video is a fantastic way to connect with your audience. Focus on behind-the-scenes videos that show the human side of your process, or interviews that help showcase your team.

Polls

Inviting feedback from your guests is a great way to build engagement and make improvements. Polls are a quick, easy way to interact with site visitors, and they tend to be simple to update or change.

Useful content for email list

Building an email list is an important way to keep up with your leads and clients. Offering up infographics, short e-books and articles can be exchanged for emails and contact information.

Call to action

As you're designing your site or adding something new, always have a call to action in mind. What are the top three things you want people to do or accomplish from visiting your site? Make those the focus of your homepage, and choose secondary calls to action for additional pages.

Reviews and references

Credibility is key, so having a page to highlight your work and reviews from happy customers is important. Consumers are going to do their research, so reviews are an important marketing tool.

Functionality

Again, see "effective design." A beautiful design and amazing images are basically useless if you have a site that stalls, lags or doesn't load properly. That will cost you visitors.

Social Media

Finally, your social media presence can be a boon for your site and business. The goal is to be found, so a collaborative effort between your website and social media outlets can really boost your marketing goals.

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