Month: February 2021

Features That All Business Websites in Essex Should Have

Post author By andrew
Post date February 20, 2021
No Comments on Features That All Business Websites in Essex Should Have

Some years ago, the prevailing wisdom in business circles declared that any business without a website would be outcompeted and shunned by consumers by 2020. On the whole, this edict rang true as businesses were forced online due to declining trade in store.

“Only astrophysicists knew about the Internet 20 years ago. Today my cat has a website.” – Bill Clinton

Today, Bill Clinton’s cat’s website is horribly out of date – a relic of late-90s internet architecture which any web designer in Essex would be able to out-do on their lunch break. The focus for businesses serious about harnessing the power of the internet in the 2020s has to be upon impeccable website function and unbeatable web design.

Informed by the years of experience held by our web design company Essex, this article is your slow boat along the meandering river of web design, showing you which features our designers use at each important step of a user’s journey towards and through your website. These include:

How a Website is Found: None of what follows matters if no one can find your website. Digital marketing will drive the right kind of traffic to your site.
How a Website Loads: If your website takes more than a second or two to load, web users will flee like rats from a sinking ship. There are technical solutions to slow-loading websites.
How a Website Looks: Your website’s aesthetics are the single most important factor in attracting or repelling visitors to your site. Make them beautiful to keep visitors on your pages.
How a Website Speaks: This is all about branding and messaging. User Experience (UX) design is how you’ll communicate your key messages on your site.
How a Website Works: The sitemap and functionality will draw visitors from your landing page to your products and checkout pages. Optimise these pages to improve your conversion rate.
How a Website is Updated: A website is a painting on which the paint never dries. To avoid looking outdated and boring, periodic updates and maintenance are required.

Let’s not waste any time, then – here’s what you need to know about website features for Essex websites – as explained by a leading web design company in Essex.

“There’s so much great web content and design out there, but the ways in which they are being experienced are not being maximised.” – Dhani Harrison

How a Website is Found

Before a website is even experienced, it is first found. And when it’s nigh-on impossible to find your website, it may as well not exist. Our Essex web design team have long admired this piece of industry gallows humour from a few years back:

“The best place to hide a head body is Page Two of Google.” – Unknown

The message is pretty simple: no one is clicking through to page two on Google’s search results listings. It’s where websites go to die. Your website might be on page two (or worse) for one or more of the following reasons:

Too few keywords on your website to show Google who you are and what your business provides.
Poor Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) work on your website, demoting your site in favour of your competitors.
A lack of meta tags, content labels and descriptions, and on-site media. The more of this you have, the more favourable Google’s algorithm looks upon you.
Untrustworthy links on your website, suggesting to Google’s algorithm that your business might be a scam.
A difficult-to-spell brand name, or a difficult-to-remember URL. Keep this as simple as possible to attract searches for your business name on Google.

“Domain names and websites are Internet real estate.” – Marc Ostrofsky

Don’t buy digital real estate where no one will be interested in visiting – and don’t choose a domain name that’s not memorable. These are key but often overlooked fundamentals in getting found (or lost) online.

All web design companies in Essex should also be able to perform basic marketing functions for you and your website. Our team of Essex SEO experts and Essex digital marketing specialists, meanwhile, are trained to perform the full spectrum of marketing duties for your website: from content creation to back-end code rewriting to enhance your SEO.

“You can’t expect to just write and have visitors come to you. That’s too passive.” – Anita Campbell

Last century, building a store on a busy street was enough to guarantee custom. Do the same in the digital world, and billions of web users can still pass you by as if you simply do not exist. Only a digital marketing agency Essex can begin drawing a portion of those billions of consumers towards your site.

And ideally, you want those to be the right kind of consumer. The average conversion rate for websites sits between 1% and 3% – a horrifying stat for those with low traffic to begin with. Using Essex SEO wisely should be able to both boost your traffic AND your relevancy, so you hit double-digit conversion rates on your site. Of course, this means bumper profits for your Essex business.

How a Website Loads

Until five years ago, the length of time that a website took to load wasn’t considered much of a problem. For the people who grew up with dial-up internet and browsers on the precursors of smartphones, the internet in 2015 was incredibly fast. But standards have since shot up – dramatically.

We’ve seen the same from our standpoint as a Essex web design company. Today, an amazing 99% of the country has access to the internet on a smartphone, and 98% use social media. Internet in the UK is ultra-fast. Seconds matter. Actually, split-seconds matter. Several studies have confirmed that four seconds is pretty much the limit for modern consumers. Anything over that, and they’re already off loading a different website.

“A bad website is like a grumpy salesperson.” – Jakob Nielsen

Nielsen has it right: just as you’d high-tail it out of a store in which you’ve been treated rudely, you high-tail it away from a website that doesn’t load – or loads poorly. One large-scale research report found that websites that are slow to load result in a staggering $2.6 billion in lost revenue per year.

Is yours one such website? Our web design company Essex are keen to bring your website squarely in to the 2020s, ramping up your loading speed while keeping all your juiciest content on your main landing page. To do this, we’ll:

Use the right script embed and code language so that elements of your site load faster.
Reduce the size of your image files so they look as good on phones and on desktops, but they require less time to load.
Make use of web tools in the back-end that prioritise loading the top of your landing page before the content that’s off-screen towards the bottom.
Recommend that you re-upload videos and GIFs that might be slowing the overall load time of your site.

In spite of the need to reduce your website’s loading time, it’s also the case that longer landing pages get more conversions – 638% more, to be precise. That means we’re always going to be trying to strike a balance between simplicity and piles upon piles of content – to net you the best ROI.

All these changes can be completed within a fairly short space of time by our Essex web design team – and the difference, in terms of your traffic, will be instantly felt.

How a Website Looks

This one might seem obvious. A pretty website can’t do any harm to your brand, and won’t push people off your site. An ugly website does the opposite. A really ugly one will be left, on average, before a second has elapsed.

Think this is all just anecdotal? The data bears us out: a whopping 94% of first impressions relate to the visual design of your website. After visiting once, 52% of consumers blame aesthetics for their not returning to a website. Certain studies and white papers have found that this is the single most important factor for your business website. You simply have to get it right.

“There are three responses to a piece of design – yes, no, and WOW! Wow is the one to aim for.” – Milton Glaser

Our web design company Essex knows the ropes where a website’s visual appeal is concerned – and we’re interested in creating a ‘WOW’ website – not a passable one. We do this in dialogue with you about the essence of your business and brand – and, importantly, the type of consumer you’re trying to target with it.

The philosophy we follow is similar to that of web design expert Gerry McGovern, who believes that:

“Designing a website can be a bit like being a kid and inheriting a sweetshop. It’s easy to get carried away. There are so many choices. A website can be like an attic that never fills up. Space is not the problem. Attention is.” – Gerry McGovern

In short: there are literally thousands of bells and whistles out there we could place on your website – in just the same way as WordPress has thousands of plug-ins. We can kit your site out with chatbots and pop-ups, prompts and buttons, animations and embedded social media scrollers. But really, we’re looking to create something spacious and visually appealing. We’ll do that by:

Adhering to modern design standards set by the leading websites on the internet today.
Discussing with you which websites you’d most like to emulate in terms of visual design.
Using our knowledge of user expectations to tailor the look of your website to suit certain target demographics.
Performing research on your direct competitors in Essex in order to ensure your site outperforms theirs.
Making use of our best Essex web designers for each and every client that we engage with.

If the result of our work is something that gives the web user a breath of relief, encouraging them to slow down, explore your content, and flow naturally towards the pages on which you’ll convert them to a happy customer, we’ll have accomplished our mission.

And, of course, it goes without saying that better visual design means more conversions, a larger customer base, and a great return on your investment in our Essex web design skills.

“Design adds value faster than it adds costs.” – Joel Spolsky

How a Website Speaks

Can a website really speak? It depends who you’re asking. Any UX designer in Essex will tell you that every medium has a way of speaking to its audience – and that a website is constantly throwing out messaging to the end user; messaging that’s either persuasive or off-putting.

To control that messaging, you need a web design company Essex to help you think clearly and strategically about what you want your website to say to visiting consumers. Without this key insight, you’ll lose customers: 89% of consumers swap to a competitor if they have a poor user experience on your site.

“A website is a window through which your business says hello to the world.” – Amit Kalantri

When you’ve worked holistically with your Essex web developer team from the start, you’ll already have identified a target market in Essex. You’ll know who they are, what they tend to buy, and where their expectations are set. This is a brilliant start to help any UX designer to hit the ground running on your site. By and large, smart UX design will also:

Manage your tone. The tone of voice on your website – friendly, professional, austere, bland – is the register in which you’re speaking to end users. Make that tone reflect your brand.
Change your palette. UX designers are well aware of how colour influences consumers. Red equals passion, danger, and love. Gold, dark blue, and maroon are all associated with luxury. Your colours should express what your brand is about.
Be a guide. Users don’t want to have to solve a Chinese puzzle to navigate your website. Make it as friction-free and seamless as possible to keep them right up to the point of sale.
Optimise for mobile. Unsurprisingly, 65% of customers think better of a brand if its website offers a good mobile experience. If you’re not designing for mobile, your UX for mobile consumers will push them away from your site.
Curating your content. The best websites have dynamite content that’s been smartly designed by professional graphic designers. The way that content is shared and presented will decide whether it’s read or watched – or skimmed beyond.

On this last point, it’s clear that consumers are now expecting high-quality video content on your website. 80% of consumers only read the headline of blog posts and articles on your website – ignoring the main text. But 80% will watch a video in which the text is spoken to moving pictures.

This is how you’ll share the essence of your business – in videos featuring sweeping shots of your restaurant, or a break-down of the fintech solution you’re selling to Essex expats. Our web design company Essex will help you curate such videos.

“No one comes to your website to be entertained. They have questions they think you can answer. Content answers questions.” – Jay Baer

All that said, never lose touch of what your website’s for. It’s a functional asset your business uses to build its customer base, market itself, and deliver sales. So how a website works is till a pretty important element in your web design Essex priorities.

How a Website Works

After all of the above, you’re probably feeling a little bit swamped in the details, the jargon, and the tasks. So we thought we’d round off this section with a back-to-basics guide to how your website ought to work. Stripped down, what’s your site’s purpose? Perhaps it’s:

To get found locally. Around 90% of people use the internet to find local businesses. Listing yours online will generate you local custom.
For your reputation. If you’re online, you’re regarded as trustworthy. If you have dozens of positive online reviews, that’ll tip the balance permanently in your favour.
To outcompete and undercut. Other firms will have worse websites and higher prices. Some 40% of consumers check other outlets’ prices before making a purchase. Making yours the best will net you the customer.
To drive sales. The bottom line for most business websites: being online means you should generate more sales. You should find ore customers, convert more customers, and encourage them to buy more of your products or services.

Whatever the core reason behind your investment in a website, you need to ensure it works. In the simplest terms, this means paying a subscription for your domain name – or buying it outright. It means paying for web hosting, which you’ll pay for monthly or annually. Your website will go offline if neither of these essentials are met.

Further, you need to invest in privacy and cybersecurity measures on your website. Too many are the cases we’ve witnessed of promising Essex companies failing to build secure websites – and suffering as a result. Our expert Essex web designers always keep your site’s security in the forefront of our minds.

“The power of a website comes from the people using it, not the people making it.” – Chris Edwards

Then there are the really simple functionality features we need to get just right on your website. People using your site want buttons to connect to the pages they expect them to connect to. They want pop-ups to pop up when they need them. They need payments to process smoothly, or they’ll simply leave your site.

Rest assured, whether we’re editing your current website, making you a new one, or starting your first website from scratch, our Essex web designers will pay close attention to all these features to ensure your website works perfectly.

How a Website is Updated

Finally, we’ve got just enough time to show you how important it is to have a web design company Essex to lift the hood on your website from time to time. We’ll not be checking the oil or the window washer fluid – but we will be tweaking your SEO, repairing broken links, and optimising new content uploaded on your CMS system.

”Web analytics is a fire extinguisher. Your website is on fire and you’re burning cash.” – Jim Sterne

Moreover, we’ll be delighted to give your website a little test to see how it’s faring in Google’s search results – and in terms of conversion rates. We’ll use web analytics – like some of the tools provided by Neil Patel – to help us form an idea of where your website can be improved.

That means briefly coming through all the stages outlined above once more. Is your website being found by Essex residents? Do you need a Essex web designer to improve your site’s aesthetics of workability? How fast is your site loading, and what’s the UX direction of its messaging?

Our web design company Essex is quick to locate and act upon the areas where we can improve your conversion rate – keeping it firmly in the double figures, which is likely to be significantly better than your UK rivals.

Get in Touch Today!

Whatever your budget, whatever your business, we’re interested in hearing from you. Drop us a line, pop us a message, or give us a bell to discuss, free of charge, what you might have in mind for your new business website.

We’re especially interested in building websites for new businesses – as the ROI you’ll receive once your site’s live is an instant shot in the arm for a startup that’s looking for its first foothold in the UK economy. As one of the principal thought leaders in web design, Amit Kalantri, has wisely suggested:

“In the information age, build a website before you build a workplace.” – Amit Kalantri

Today, a website proceeds a workplace. You create your social media pages before you’ve designed your brand’s logo. And you should get the ball rolling on your website as soon as you’re ready for Essex residents to find your firm online.

Digital Marketing

The Best Online Marketing Strategies for Events, Hospitality & Hotels in London UK

Post author By andrew
Post date February 20, 2021
No Comments on The Best Online Marketing Strategies for Events, Hospitality & Hotels in London UK

Ignoring online marketing is like opening a business but not telling anyone. No one knows who said this immortal line, but it’s come to epitomise the attitude and mission of most digital marketing agencies in essex and beyond. The lesson is simple: building a business means nothing if you don’t have the right marketing behind it to help it grow.

And nowhere is this more apparent than in the hospitality industry, where your lack of trade is made abundantly apparent to you in empty restaurants, vacant hotels, or sparsely-visited events. Online marketing in essex will help you avoid these unpleasant loss-accruing situations – building instead a reliable source of custom and profits all year-round.

Why Market Online?

There are two simple reasons why you need to market your hospitality business online this year: it’s where you’ll find new customers and higher profits; and it’s also a space that’s relatively uncompetitive in essex today. Let’s take these reasons one by one.

New Customers, Higher Profits

The UK happens to be one of the most digitally-connected nations on earth.

An incredible 99% of the UK uses social media. A similar amount – 98.5% – own a smartphone through which they access the internet on a daily basis. The average UK citizen uses their social media for three hours per day – and that’s just one corner of the online world you can talk to.

Clearly, there’s huge space for a digital marketing agency essex to help promote hospitality firms across the city. The whole of essex is online and consuming content. They’re there to secure as customers, guests, and visitors – helping you boost your profits.

“Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.” – James Cash Penney

Relative Lack of Competition

Meanwhile, we’ve seen through our own experience how important marketing and customer experiences can be for hospitality firms in the UK and the US – which tend to live or die upon the level of service they provide.

In essex, customer expectations are incredibly high – and service needs to be spot-on. Your restaurant needs to impress as a five-star venue; your hotel has to go the extra mile in every way.

But, despite these requirements, essex web design and essex SEO remain uncompetitive compared to other Western markets. Standards are lower online, with poorer websites and less impressive marketing.

What does this mean? Well, it means that smart business leaders in the events, hospitality and hotelier space should see an opportunity here. By partnering with one of the best digital marketing agencies in essex, you can create marketing content that reflects your business’ prestige, professionalism, and passion – and in doing so, outcompete your rivals in showing off your venue.

The Best Marketing Strategies

There are several strategies for marketing that we currently view as optimal for hospitality firms looking to expand their reach and influence in essex. We’re constantly updating this list, and responding to developments in the field, in order to offer you the cutting edge of marketing – specifically for the UK area and the Google.co.uk domain. Our list includes:

Content Marketing. Using words, films, images, animations, and illustrations to tell a story about your brand and your services.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Climb higher in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) to get seen by more and more essex consumers.
Social Media Marketing. essex, like much of the world, loves social media. It’s the perfect place to promote your brand and your prestige venue.
Email Marketing. It’s an old and reliable form of marketing that experts still reckon is top of the list for ROI. It’s especially useful for returning customers who’ve visited you before.
Paid Advertising. All marketing agencies essex will provide Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing services across social media and search engines.

Changes to Your Website. Converting traffic to purchases and bookings is the aim of our web design company essex.

We’re going to walk you through all of these different strategies – explaining why they afford wonderful results for your hospitality business – before providing a recap, a summary, and a guide on your next steps to beginning a new marketing campaign for your firm this year.

Content Marketing

Every single digital marketing professional in essex has heard of the phrase: “Content is King.” But what exactly does this mean, in the context of marketing a hospitality firm?

You know what content is, of course. It’s anything you post online. It’s a tweet, a GIF, or a photo. It’s a feature-length film, or a two-minute explainer animation. It’s a blog post, a press release, or a slogan. Every time you produce content like this, you’re in with a chance of boosting your essex SEO (more on that later) and entertaining consumers across the web.

“Content marketing is more than a buzzword. It is the hottest trend in marketing because it is the biggest gap between what buyers want and brands produce.” – Michael Brenner

Videos are currently seen as the best content to create and share online: 81% of businesses currently use it as a marketing tool, because 78% of mobile users watch videos on their phones each week.

Blog content is also regarded as one of the best ways in which a digital marketing agency in essex can contribute to the growth of a hospitality brand. Companies the blog receive over 55% more web traffic. Plus, blogs share your stories, build your brand personality, and forge customer relationships – all at the same time.

“No matter what, the very first piece of social media real estate I’d start with is a blog.” – Chris Brogan

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Next up is our old friend SEO. If you’re familiar with SEO, you’ll know it’s the art of getting your website featured on the first page of Google’s search results. Google, by the way, are the unrivalled bosses of the web search industry: their search engine covers 95% of all searches on the internet. It’s barely worth thinking about Bing, Yahoo, or AskJeeves.

“Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.” – Wendy Piersall

SEO was once a game of cat and mouse, with marketers tricking Google’s algorithm by shoving your website so full of keywords that it appeared to be highly relevant to web users typing in those terms. Google’s ranking algorithm has since matured, as have web designers in essex. Now, SEO is about finding your specific audience.

“The future of SEO is here: understanding and marketing to specific and defined audiences through search engines.” – Adam Audette

Incredibly, relatively few businesses actually operate with an SEO strategy. Data from 2020 suggests that around 64% of marketers invest in SEO – and that figure is likely to be far lower in the UK specifically. This represents a huge chance for essex-based brands to steal a march on their rivals. For hospitality businesses in particular, good essex SEO will:

Match you up with consumers who are looking for your services and venues (words like “premium” and “luxury” word well here).

Distinguish your hospitality firm from your competitors by ranking higher in Google’s SERPS.

Drive higher relevant traffic to your website, ensuring that more essex residents connect with your brand.

Enhance the visibility of your brand and your business – which can only be good for the future profitability of your firm.

SEO, when left to the professionals at ad agencies in essex, is a case of building up keywords used on your website, and inserting them into relevant articles and web copy. For firms like us – we’re also a web design company essex – there’s also back-end SEO boosting to take care of: things like hyperlink verification, backlink checking, and meta tagging of pages. You’ll likely not have the skills within your hospitality business to perform such SEO boosting changes alone.

Social Media Marketing

You’re well aware that social media is a gold mine. But to access that precious metal, you’re going to have to import the right tools, and the right experience, to extract a high ROI on your social media spend. Web design companies in essex with marketing experience can help you do this.

Around 70% of online businesses use social media to successfully market themselves in the UK, according to HubSpot. That means you’re already facing stiff competition in this space. But hospitality firms have a distinct advantage for marketing in essex:

“Successful companies in social media function more like entertainment companies, publishers, or party planners than as traditional advertisers.” – Erik Qualman

You’re used to entertaining, to planning parties, and to making people feel involved and welcome. That’s exactly what social media marketing in the 2020s calls for. Sharing pictures of your venue and your menu will help entice social media users – but getting users to share photos themselves is the holy grail you’re looking for.

Our digital marketing agency essex recommends your firm should be on the following social media platforms:

Instagram. Some 90% of consumers follow at least one business on Instagram. Make your account beautiful, and you’ll get followed. Make your brand and your venue beautiful, and it’ll market itself through the posts of others.

This is where you should concentrate the majority of your ad spend. You can target users on Facebook to granular detail, which is perfect for niche hospitality firms in essex.

Twitter. Brilliant for customer service. Wicked for banter with competitors and partners. But not the place where you’ll be sharing many beautiful and enticing photos – or other marketing materials.

LinkedIn. There are thousands of business travellers in essex at any one time. Being present on LinkedIn will help you get seen by this huge and wealthy market.

Global ad spend will top $605 billion in 2020 – and spend on social media will form about $100 billion of that figure. As such, it’s worth considering investing around one sixth of your ad spend on social media, to keep up with the global average.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing is famously the go-to method for customer retention, journey and relationship-building, and bulletin-sharing.

If you have a new deal, a discount, an offer, or a coupon on the go, you need to let your mailing list know. If you’re taking bookings again after a brief closure, your email audience should be the first to know. For digital marketing companies in essex, the mailing list is the base of operations: the place to see how your target audience reacts to your other marketing material.

“To keep a customer demands as much skill as to win one.” – Jeff Bezos

You can trust Bezos: he’s built an empire on the repeat custom of most of the Western world’s online consumers. And this means being personal, friendly, and even a little conversational with your email audience – to build trust, and manage their impression of your firm.

Personalised experiences are hugely popular with your target customers: over 90% of consumers say such experiences encourage them to trade with a firm online. So even addressing an email with the first name of its recipient can go a long way to securing their return trade.

“Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.” – James Cash Penney

Practically, you’ll need CMS in your back-end, or an email marketing platform such as MailChimp or HubSpot, to help you manage emails – both automated ones, and those one-off messages to your existing customers. Our web design company essex can help you get started with these products, or integrate them in your existing website.

Paid Advertising

Marketing needn’t cost you an arm and a leg – but if you choose to pay for adverts, you are extremely likely to get a proven ROI of over 200% on what cash you put in. To run these campaigns effectively, though, you’ll want to partner with a web design company in essex.

“Don’t be afraid to get creative and experiment with your marketing.” – Mike Volpe

This is actually your chance to get most creative with your advertising, as you’re able to commit tiny amounts of cash (sometimes as little as £1) to each ad campaign to test how it runs. Through a series of trial-and-error A/B testing, you might emerge with a winning advert with a huge conversion rate. Advert formats include:

Banner adverts on various websites across the internet. These are cheap but ineffective – and aren’t often used by prestige brands.

Social media adverts, which target users based on their activity.

PPC (Pay Per Click) adverts, which you can set up on Google to boost your business when certain search terms are keyed in. You’ll only pay if your advert is clicked on, which helps increase your ROI.

Programmatic paid marketing. Your ad content enters an auction each time a user types in a search term. If you bid highest in this auction, your advert is shown. If not, you lose no money, and your advert isn’t shown.

As with the other forms of marketing listed above, we strongly recommend that you partner with a essex marketing agency like ours to help you run these adverts. We’ll save you time, and advise you based on our many years of experience working with online advertisements and hospitality businesses.

Changes to Your Website

Finally, our web design company essex is particularly keen on showing you why changing your website can drive an incredible amount of additional profits to your firm. This is massively overlooked in essex – and it’s something we’re more than ready to handle for you.

Did you know that only 22% of businesses are happy with their conversion rates? Does that surprise you? Most conversion rates languish far below 50% – which means that less than half of the people who find and arrive at your website do anything other than look at a couple of pages and leave. To encourage them to trade with you, a web design company in essex will add UX (User Experience) features – like CTAs (Calls to Action).

“You can’t just place a few ‘Buy’ buttons on your website and expect your visitors to buy.” – Neil Patel

But, as marketing guru Neil Patel is often reminding us, a big “BUY” button isn’t enough to encourage more trade. You need to be subtler and smarter than that. Amongst the changes we’ll make to your website, if you let us loose on it, will be:

A complete SEO overhaul to the code that Google’s algorithm sees. This will, of course, garner you more traffic.

An SEO test, which will reveal your site’s top-used keywords. Not relevant? We’ll recommend changes that’ll get you more relevant visitors – more of whom you’ll convert into customers.

A better sitemap, which will nudge visitors towards your booking, buying, or contact pages. It should only ever take a consumer three clicks to get to a place on your website where they part with their cash.

Adding wonderful new customer service and marketing features like chatbots, which have been shown to dramatically increase user engagement.

Integrating positive reviews from across the web on your site, as well as all of your social media channels and their rolling content. Over 90% of consumers have been influenced into trade by positive reviews. Sharing those reviews will boost trust while adding a sense that your firm is active and up-to-date.

“Instead of using technology to automate processes, think about using technology to enhance human interaction.” – Tony Zambito

Any technology our web designers essex use in your back-end will always be built with an eye on increasing human interaction – getting consumers to call, message, email, or book with you on your website as soon as they visit.

Digital Marketing in the 2020s

So, it’s time to take a breather and think back to what we’ve been discussing. The bottom line, we reckon, is that all hospitality businesses can enjoy huge boosts to their activity through using marketing techniques. Without marketing, your firm risks invisibility, obsolescence, and eventually – failure.

“Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of an intelligent effort.” – John Ruskin

But your marketing budget shouldn’t be sprayed out to any old digital agency in essex: you should remember that intelligence, forethought, and adequate planning are a hugely important part of successful marketing campaigns – and each strategy should be tailored to the objectives you’re trying to achieve. We love this guide to how you’ll set marketing objectives at your firm.

Working With Us

As one of essex’s most cutting-edge digital agencies, we’re keenly motivated to partner with the city’s flourishing and vibrant hospitality sector – helping firms get seen by tourists, business travellers, and expats alike.

We know that the difference between a booming hospitality firm and one that’s barely seeing a squeak of trade is incredibly simple: it’s all in the advertising.

“The man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time.” – Thomas Jefferson

And it looks like Thomas Jefferson, author of American democracy, agrees.

We’re always on the end of the phone to listen to your queries. Our expert essex web designers are here to explain which changes we’d recommend you make to your website. And our specialist essex marketing practitioners are here to co-devise the strategies that’ll get your business booming into the 2020s. The combination of our skills can help a business of any size – and any budget – make more of their digital presence.

And, if you’re still unsure and you’re looking for a little more advice and information, we’re more than happy to oblige, too: we’ve got dozens of case studies to run you by, all of which exhibit the incredible ROI we’ve seen hospitality firms enjoy after working with our web design company essex.

Categories
Business

How to Take Your Company Online in 2021

Post author By andrew

Post date February 20, 2021

No Comments on How to Take Your Company Online in 2021

It’s clear to anyone with their finger on the pulse of the modern economy that the world is changing – and that businesses are packing up shop and heading online in their droves.

Online commerce, digital marketing, and web-based trade are only set to grow into the future, eclipsing physical stores completely. Researchers estimate that by 2040, 95% of all purchases will take place online. This is not a party you can afford to be late to.

Our web design company Essex is at hand for a free consultation about your business and your ambitions to get it online in the UK this year. But, for now, here’s our complete, no-nonsense guide to unfurling your brand’s flag on the world wide web for customers to find online.

Why Go Online?

If you’re still in need of a little persuasion before you get involved in web design essex, we’ve arranged a little bit of a crash course for you to undergo. By the end of this section, you’ll have a better idea of why it’s worth making the investment in 2021 to get your firm online.

The benefits of taking your business online have been written about ad nauseum from the individual case-study perspective – but what about that stats? You can’t argue with stats, right?

There are 40,000 Google searches made every second – hundreds of them in the UAE. Each search is looking for a website, a product, or a service that you might offer. Being present online gives you the chance of securing their dirham.

Data in 2018 suggested that over half of small businesses didn’t have websites at all. There are still thousands of businesses in essex without a well-built web presence. They’re your competition, and it’s worth getting in line ahead of them.

There’s research out there that suggests that 71% of people believe they’ll get a better deal online. They’ll overlook you – even if you have a better deal available offline – if you don’t have a website.

Ecommerce sales topped $3.45 billion in 2019; that figure is forecast to more than double when all the beans are counted for 2020. Accessing a tiny sliver of this giant pie is what creating a business website in essex is all about.

All that said, we cannot agree more with Andrew Yang when he speaks of small businesses and their over-worked owners:

“The vast majority of small business owners want nothing to do with figuring out a website. They are neck-deep in their business trying to keep it going.” – Andrew Yang

Getting online might be one of your many priorities – but how can you actually find the time to build your website when you’re juggling so many other tasks? How can you ensure it’s visited by the millions of wealthy consumers you’re trying to target in the UAE? That’s really a question that a web design company essex will be here to answer.

Web Design Methods
In this piece, we want to show you why taking your company online in 2021 won’t just be the best business decision you make all year: it’ll fundamentally evolve your firm to make it more profitable and more efficient.

To make that argument, our web design company essex has set out the following sections of this piece, so that you can scroll to the bits that mean the most to you:

All good websites are born from good plans. Make one alongside us before you get the ball rolling.

Getting Online. How you’ll make your website, either on your own or with the help of our expert web designers.

Your website won’t function well until it’s optimised. Taking your company online won’t be complete until you perform this crucial step.

Marketing. A website without a marketing plan is a tree falling in a forest with no one there to hear it. It’s like not having a website at all.

Ongoing Changes. The paint never dries on a website. Learn how to keep your site relevant and up-to-date in this final part of our guide.

Right then; without further ado, let’s see how you’re going to make use of essex web design to carve yourself your very own corner of the internet from which to unfurl your stall.

Planning

There are nearly 2 billion websites online today. Many of them are hopelessly designed, which means consumers will never spend longer than a second or two on them. Many others are extinct or dormant. And many have seen hundreds of thousands of dirhams of investment in them, only to fail in their purpose to drive new profits for their firm.

Any good web design company in essex is aware of the risk of creating an obsolete and shunned website. It’s a great way of burning cash and time. And it’s always the result of a lack of forethought and planning.

“My rule of thumb is build a site for a user, not a spider.” – Dave Naylor

Dave Naylor’s dead right: your website needs to be built with the user in mind. A spider might crawl at lightning speed across a website, but it’s a user who will dwell, inspect, remember, critique, and ultimately buy.

That means doing a little bit of imaginative role play, and pretending that you’re searching for a company like yours online. What will they expect? What will they appreciate? We’ve got a shortlist of factors we always ask our clients to consider when they use the services of our web design company essex:

Design a logo and branding materials to reflect your business’ ethos and to fit the expectations of your end user.

What kind of pages will your end user expect? Are they looking for simple eCommerce pages? Perhaps a blog and how-to guides?

Make sure your home page is similar to your competitors in Essex, the UK, and elsewhere. The strongest performers in your industry will often have the best websites.

“You have to start with the basic premise that you need to know what your competition is doing.” – Guy Kawasaki

Show us your competitors from the start – and a portfolio of the websites that you like the most. Search online for the best web design trends too, and pick out your favourite. That’ll help us hit the ground running when it comes to your own bespoke website build.

Getting Online

With those planning essentials out of the way, it’ll be time to build your website and to get online in Essex.

To do this, you have three main options, based on the availability of time you have at your disposal, and your ability to fund the creation of a winning website in Essex.

Go it alone. This option is for time-rich and cash-poor firms. You’ll get a website, it just won’t be very impressive.

Get online fast. The middle-ground option. Here, you’ll use a web design company Essex to build your website – but with an emphasis on speed and value, rather than prestige and tailor-made features.

The complete package. Finally, if you have a little more time and more can to spend, we recommend getting online with a bespoke, fully-designed and equipped website.

Go it Alone

All web design companies in Essex will point to DIY website builders and templates as the bare minimum tools you can use independently to get online. Fewer Essex web design firms will recommend that you take this route, because it can quickly get messy, infuriating, and counter-productive.

WordPress, Wix, GoDaddy and other DIY website builders all offer an interface which they claim to be simple enough for a novice to use. You’ll still need tips – these ones are great – to get started. And you may still need a web design firm to step in to help you if you run into complications.

“Authenticity, honesty, and personal voice underlie much of what’s successful on the Web.” – Rick Levine

The biggest benefit of going it alone is that you’ll create a very authentic website. The downside is that it’ll be far less functional than one built by a web design company in Essex. As we always argue: a website has been proven to have an ROI that’s linked to the quality of the website. Why go small, and get a small ROI, when you can go big and experience a huge jump in sales?

The biggest decisions you’ll have to make at this stage are the name of your domain (what consumers will search for in their browser’s URL bar) and how much you pay for hosting. A handy guide on these questions is available here.

Get Online Fast

Your second option is the middle path. We recommend it for companies looking to capitalise on a sudden opportunity, or young firms testing their profitability in Essex and the UK.

This option will leave you mercifully free of the responsibility to create your website on your own, with the added benefit that the web design company Essex that you work with will charge you far less than they would for a fully-bespoke option. It’s time-cheap, and it’s cash-cheap, too.

Getting online fast with the help of Essex web designers means handing over your plans, and stepping aside as your dedicated team of techno-whizzes gets to work fast to build you a fully-functioning website. We’ve completed such websites to a week when clients have been rushed. It’s a 100-metre dash where building a bespoke website is a little more like a marathon. But it’s good fun – and you’ll be provided with a top-quality site at the end of your journey.

“The internet affords a level of relationship with consumers hitherto unfathomable.” – Lucas Donat

One of the biggest benefits of outsourcing your web design needs mirrors what Lucas Donat has said about the power of the internet for businesses. We build the website, so you can build the relationships. We take care of the technical details, and you take care of your business. It’s that simple.

The Complete Package

We’re about to get onto the ‘optimising’ section of this guide and, to be honest, if you don’t build a high-quality website from the get-go, you’re going to have more optimising to do over the following months and years.

This option – involving spending more cash on your website, getting it built from the ground up, and having our expert designers produce something market-leading for your firm – is the top tier. We recommend this option to medium-sized firms and highly-competitive businesses looking to boost their Essex SEO so that they effectively conquer their market.

Again, you’ll hand our essex web design company your plan. We’ll consult with you and reach consensus on how we’ll build your website. Then we’ll leave no stone unturned in our search for the optimal build for your site. We’ll use cutting-edge industry knowledge to get there. The design will be holistic, in that it’ll take your essex digital marketing requirements into account from the get-go. And we’ll be building a site that has the ability to scale at speed – in the event that your firm takes off in Essex, UK, and across Europe.

Optimising

When you take your business online, you can either go it alone, outsource it on the cheap, or invest more cash in a bespoke website that’s built to last. The smaller your investment in the initial site, the higher your future investments will be when you seek to optimise your website. That means you’ll be requiring the services of a web design company Essex again some time after your site is built.

“On the Internet, speed matters. According to research by Microsoft, Google, and others, if a website is even 250 milliseconds slower than a rival, people will visit it less often.” – Marvin Ammori

Tweaking your firm to avoid losing traffic needlessly is a key component of web maintenance. It’s time for another few statistics to underscore why optimisation will be a business strategy you simply cannot ignore once you have made your home on the web:

It only takes 05 seconds for a user to form a base opinion of your website. If that opinion is poor, they’re likely to leave within a second.

Over half of consumers would never recommend a business that has a poorly-designed website.

Over a third of web users will leave a website if they find the content or layout unattractive.

Interestingly, users linger on a home page’s main image for 6 seconds on average. Clearly, getting that image right is crucial for their ongoing journey.

You’re just not going to be able to lasso web visitors and drag them towards your sales pages if they’re put off by your home page. This is exactly what’s meant when web marketing gurus talk about the difference between traffic and engagement. This is termed the conversion rate, and it’s the key metric that all of your optimisation will check and channel.

Why? Because this is one of the easiest ways to boost your profits, as web design guru Jeff Eisenberg has said.

“It’s much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic.” – Jeff Eisenberg

Our essex web design company is focused on that conversion rate. We’re here to boost it – through savvy optimisation, which you can pay for on a case-by-case basis, after consultation with our team.

Marketing

Much fanfare is created when a company launches a website. They set their social media platforms ablaze with links, and they tell their friends and family all about the latest step their business has taken in the world of commerce. They get a spike in their traffic for a week or two. Then… nothing.

We don’t just operate a web design company in essex – we’re also a essex digital marketing agency familiar with boosting the performance of web pages on the Google.co.uk domain in particular. We’ve helped dozens of firms increase their essex SEO, get seen by hundreds more people, and convert visitors into customers through harnessing relevant keywords and targeted advertisements.

“Today it’s not about ‘get the traffic’ — it’s about ‘get the targeted and relevant traffic.’” – Adam Audette

In that sense, we very much follow the advice of Adam Audette, whose wisdom in the digital marketing domain is virtually unparalleled. Getting 10,000 visits to a website that only 1,000 people will be remotely interested in isn’t a great start. Getting 1,000 people looking at your website, and having 900 take an interest, is far more preferable.

And that’s the duty of marketing: to find you those people, and to deliver them directly to your home pages and your products pages. All of the best web design agencies in essex will offer the following marketing methods – which we’re pleased to offer as part of our services:

SEO Boosting. Search Engine Optimisation. Get yourself onto the first page of Google’s search results with our help in boosting your keyword presence and key phrase matching.

PPC Advertising. Pay-Per-Click adverts. What they say on the tin: you only pay when a user clicks on your advert, which is usually a good sign that they’re interested in your brand.

Social Media. Influencer marketing has officially taken off in essex – especially for hospitality firms, which use stars with thousands of followers to promote their venue, menu, and brand.

Content Marketing. Looking to share more about your brand, services, and products? Producing five-star content, both video and written blog posts, will have a huge impact on your ability to market your firm online.

“Companies are rushing headlong into content today, and rightly so. It’s a battle to get noticed online amidst the noise and crowds.” – Adam Audette

Our web design company essex is focused on building traffic that’s relevant to your website, and ticking up that conversation rate. To do that, we look at your website’s data, in the back-end. That means we can offer you to-the-minute, real-time updates on all of your marketing drives at any time. Neil Patel, SEO guru and data analyst, has a wonderful guide on how this works on his website.

Ongoing Changes

Well, let’s take a quick breather to look at all you’ll have achieved if you followed the above advice.

You’ll have planned your website, so that whoever designs it has a firm idea of where it’s heading.

You’ve made your website: it’s now live on the world wide web for all citizens of essex to find.

You’ve tinkered with your pages in a quest to optimise your website, generating a higher conversion rate as a result.

Your energies have been redirected to marketing your website to relevant and interested essex consumers.

Now, all you’ll have to worry about are smaller and less impactful changes to the plumbing of your website. These might require our web design company essex to take a look at your back-end code for a day or two, tidying it up as the internet evolves and your website drifts out of date.

It’ll also, of course, mean continuing to pay for your domain name, as well as building up your privacy and security as you scale. These maintenance responsibilities are well explained by this piece by LifeHack.

“What you do after you create your content is what truly counts.” – Gary Vaynerchuk

Conclusions

Creating a website for a business of any size is a huge and exciting step for a firm to take. We’re always delighted to make contact with a new essex business – which is keen on generating revenue by being present in the online space. As always, we’re here for a chat whenever you feel ready to enquire about our services.

Take your company online in essex by talking with a trusted web design company essex, and getting the ball rolling on your site’s planning phase.

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Digital Marketing Digital Marketing Agency London digital marketing in London

Digital Marketing Trends for 2021: Your Complete Guide

Post author By andrew

Post date February 19, 2021

No Comments on Digital Marketing Trends for 2021: Your Complete Guide

One of the tragedies of the business world is that professional, innovative, cutting-edge companies fail simply because no one ever hears about them. They got everything right – except the marketing. And without making use of savvy digital marketing, any product, service, or brand is essentially rendered invisible.

In Essex, the digital marketing landscape is relatively new, relatively impressive, but with huge potential for further growth and development. With the EU and the US largely driving the market, it’s up to the best digital marketing agencies in Essex & the UK to pick up on digital marketing trends developing around the world – implementing them domestically for the greatest impact.

And it’s up to you, as a new business, to pick the right marketing partner to take your brand to new heights in 2021 – already billed as a boom year for businesses after a rotten 2020.

In what follows, we’ll provide you with a nice, wholesome introduction to:

The Industry. What successful digital marketing is, and what it looks like.

The State of Play. How the Essex market remains unsaturated – and why that’s good news for your firm.

The Price Tag. The difference between free and paid forms of marketing.

The Methods. The on-trend ways in which you’re going to go about marketing in 2021.

The Agency. Why working with a leading digital marketing agency in Essex or a web design company Essex will add jet fuel to your campaign.

If we’ve done our job right, you’ll emerge with the firm belief that savvy, expert digital marketing interventions are the way to outcompete your UK rivals next year.

“Your brand is a story unfolding across all customer touch points.” – Jonah Sachs

If you’re here to learn the top trends for Essex’s digital marketing industry, and you’re well-versed in digital marketing, scroll down to The Methods section. But you should keep reading if you’re keen to learn a little more about marketing opportunities in the Essex & the UK market, and the potential ROI you’ll see from engaging in digital marketing.

The Industry

Last year, the size of the digital marketing industry overtook that of print and television combined, heralding the beginning of the digital-first marketing epoch. It’s really not hard to see why:

One-sixth of global retail sales were made online this year. That’s predicted to rise to nearly a quarter by 2023, and an almost unimaginable 95% by 2040.

That means that by next year, total online retail purchases will amount to $4.9 trillion. That’s about the same size as Japan’s GDP. And that’s just products purchased – not services provided or booked online.

The digital marketing industry’s valued at around $50 billion. A decade and a half ago, it barely existed.

Why’s it ballooned so large? Because around 18% of companies that engage in digital marketing see a $70 ROI for every dollar they invest. More than 80% see a five-fold ROI.

Whether your business sells important products throughout the UK, or you’re marketing for a hospitality business in Essex, you need to portion off some of your overall budget for digital marketing. It’s no longer optional; it’s a matter of survival.

“People shop and learn in a whole new way compared to just a few years ago, so marketers need to adapt or risk extinction.” – Brian Halligan, founder & CEO of HubSpot

The State of Play

There’s really no point searching for marketing trends from Dubai when the situation is so different here in the UK. What’s cutting edge in Abu Dhabi is probably old hat in London or LA. What’s driving engagement in Essex just won’t work in New York – and vice versa, of course.

It’s worth acknowledging from the outset that digital marketing in Essex is a little less developed than in Europe and North America. You’ll get why: the UK remains a fairytale of recent development, but there are far fewer people and businesses here than in Western markets. Any web design company Essex knows that they’re able to deliver more to their customers for less when they work in the UK.

This is great news for UK businesses: it means the market is far from saturated. The potential ROI on digital marketing projects in Essex is huge. That’s due to these factors:

With fewer businesses advertising on the Google.co.uk domain, you’ll pay less for high-reward advertising

There are fewer companies in the UK doing what you do. Boosting your Essex SEO should be easy, with the right marketing partner.

Many businesses in the UK only digitized in 2020 due to the pandemic. They’re still finding their feet online. This is your chance to pounce and capture their market share

The best digital agencies in Essex are always keeping an eye on what’s working best in other markets – to bring those insights to the UK.

And then, there’s this super-quick data that it’s worth you chewing over before we commence our deep-dive into the technical side of digital marketing:

Internet penetration in the UK sits at 99.5%.

It’s the same for social media penetration: 99%.

In the UK, 96% of consumers own smartphones.

92% of those check their social media every day on their mobile.

And 75% of all those with smartphones in the UK regularly shop online on their devices.

These statistics reveal a market absolutely primed for savvy companies to market to consumers in the digital space. Our web design company Essex is keenly aware of the opportunities for firms to excel online. Let’s see how you’ll do it.

“No nation has embraced e-commerce and e-government with greater enthusiasm than Essex. Such innovations have given Essex a competitive edge.” – Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair

The Price Tag

Righty-right, enough with the data and the statistics – let’s get down to business, shall we?

Specifically, and crucially, you’re wondering how much it costs to launch a digital marketing campaign in Essex. You’re willing to budget for a campaign – you just need to know how much you should set aside for it.

Unlike other business investments – like, for instance, the cost of building a new website for your Essex-based company – investing in marketing comes with a discernible ROI. You’re not dropping £10k into the ocean without any nibbles on your bait. Actually, you’re pretty much guaranteed a feeding frenzy.

Essex marketing agencies should give you a ball-park figure from the get-go regarding your ROI. We certainly try to. That way, you’ll know what you’re letting yourself in for. We’re actually used to telling firms to expect web traffic and trade to peak to such an extent that they should put in place the infrastructure to enable them to scale at speed. You know your marketing drive’s successful when you’re forced to level up your firm to keep up with demand.

The best way to optimise your marketing investment for maximum impact (and a big, juicy ROI figure) is to carefully purchase ads and marketing services you feel will be most valuable for your brand, assembling a bespoke strategy targeting certain consumers with certain marketing materials. Select on-trend marketing techniques and strategies for the best results.

We can separate overarching marketing costs into two general categories:

Labour and expertise. Unless you enjoy the luxury of an in-house marketing team, you’re going to have to outsource to a trustworthy digital marketing agency in Essex. You’ll pay for their knowledge as well as their labour.

Advertising costs. Certain online marketing is made for the layman – like Google, Facebook, and Amazon promotional campaigns. You can leave this side of your marketing drive to the professionals too – or take a course to have a go yourself.

Meanwhile, you can perform certain digital marketing tricks for free – and if you’ve got a spare member of staff knocking around to experiment, you should introduce them to these FOC marketing techniques:

Social media marketing. It’s free to set up an account on all social media sites. And you’ll pay an hourly wage for a social media executive to monitor your channels and engage with your customers there. There’s massive potential for vitality (read: giant free exposure) if you hire a smart social media exec.

Website promotions. Any content you upload through your CMS interface on your website is obviously free and has the potential to enchant your site visitors. Don’t have CMS on your website? We can help with that.

Email marketing. We’ll look at this in more depth later, but you should make sure you’re collecting the email addresses of your customers at every opportunity. It’s free to send them an email with an offer, a coupon, or a handy reminder that you exist.

Web Blogs. Finally, have you noticed that most websites maintain blogs? Have you ever wondered why? It’s because a blog is an extra entry point for consumers to find your website – and thus your products and services. Plus, every word and image published on your blog will boost your SEO.

That’s your complete digital marketing overview. Excluding the services of a web design company Essex, which will handle SEO in the back-end code, those are the kinds of tasks you’ll be managing in your marketing drive. The rest of this guide will show you which digital marketing trends to engage with in Essex.

Saddle up, strap in, and/or settle down: here are the methods we recommend you concentrate your marketing spend on in 2021.

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” – Peter F. Drucker

The Methods

Our web experts at our web design company in Essex and digital practitioners have been in the marketing game for a long, long time. They know how to spot a trend.

Trends develop in marketing as a result of two factors: they’re either returning impressive ROI figures, or they’re developing in a new space that on-rushing companies can make their own at the expense of their competitors (we saw this most clearly in the shift to social media marketing that took place in earnest about seven years ago).

It makes sense for us to separate our recommendations into these two larger categories. So, we’ll begin with old stalwarts of the digital marketing scene that continue to deliver, and we’ll conclude this guide with the newest, flashiest, and most exciting marketing innovations to be hitting Essex in 2021.

The Best Digital Marketing Techniques in Essex

Those of us who are long in the tooth when it comes to running marketing campaigns in Essex know where marketing departments are wasting their money. Paid banner adverts are a great example of foolish marketing expenditure: they have a terrible ROI, and they frankly look tacky.

We’re equally aware of what techniques have worked incredibly well in 2020 – and will continue to deliver in 2021. They are:

Targeted Social Media Marketing

Local Listings and Review Boosting

Email Marketing

Video and Content Marketing

SEO and Organic Search

We’re going to break these down briefly to explain exactly why we’ve tipped these five forms of marketing as the best in Essex for 2021.

Targeted Social Media Marketing

Social media engagement is higher in the UK than in nearly every Western state. Essex businesses have been taking to social media for some time to share their wares – but in 2020 that shift hit hyper-speed as a result of the coronavirus.

“Focus on how to be social, not how to do social.” – Jay Baer
Data from 2019 proves how valuable good social media marketing can be for businesses. Some 43% of businesses enjoy a notable bounce in their web traffic from social media. Meanwhile, 64% of shoppers say social media videos have influenced them into making a purchase. The impressions you generate on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram can mean mega-bucks for your business.

Our top tips for social media marketing in 2020 include:

ALWAYS target your posts. You know how diverse Essex can be. You’re looking to advertise to the people that matter to your firm.

Use Instagram and Twitter. These are the two most popular social media sites for wealthy UK residents.

Content is King. Sharing text isn’t enough. Essex residents expect videos, animations, and infographics. Appease them.

Local Listings and Review Boosting

Are you listed locally? If you’re not, get listed right now.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a brick-and-mortar store or a totally online business. Listing your business online in Essex means consumers can see how customers have reviewed your products and services. And that means they can decide if you’re worth doing business with. 84% of online shoppers in the UK rely on positive feedback to buy products. No wonder so many firms are scrambling to improve their online reputations.

To boost your review score on Google, offer customers a small reward if they leave you a rating. This is best organised through an email campaign.

Email Marketing

Honestly, we can’t get enough of email marketing. An estimated 205 billion emails are sent every day, and the best ones encourage consumers to spend, spend, spend. How do they do it? We go by Eric Miller’s advice – an expert in consumer attention online.

“Keep it short. No one reads more than the first paragraph. You have 10 seconds, make it count.” – Eric Miller

Services like MailChimp and HubSpot help time-sensitive businesses keep spinning hundreds of emails out to subscribed existing customers – with automated emails and replies a standard part of their CRM solution. Email marketing is currently regarded as the best form of marketing, in terms of ROI, for eCommerce businesses in Essex. The reason’s simple: consumers who’ve already traded to you are more than twice as likely to trade with you again if nudged to do so.

Video and Content Marketing

Over 60% of marketers create at least a single piece of original content every day. Another little dose of brutal honesty: if your firm isn’t doing the same, you’ll be hemorrhaging customers to your rivals who are. Marketing guru Jon Buscall puts it better than we can:

“Content Marketing is a commitment, not a campaign.” Jon Buscall

Video is your gold standard. Wonderful, creative ad agencies in Essex will create them for you. Share them everywhere – on social media, and all over your website. Written blogs are also a good bet – you can stuff them full of keywords, which will naturally boost your SEO.

SEO and Organic Search

Essex has been a little late to the SEO bear-pit. That means keywords are still up for grabs, and that fighting to arrive on page one of Google’s search results remains relatively uncompetitive. That’s likely to change in 2021, as more and more businesses rely on web traffic from Google.co.uk for their income – and web design companies in Essex get wise to SEO best-practice.

The latest data suggests that 94.5% of UK citizens rely on Google.co.uk as their primary search engine. Optimising your content – both in terms of its underlying code, and in terms of the keywords you deploy – is what’ll spell the difference for your firm in 2021.

SEO in Essex & the UK is about to come of age. Get in there just before it does so that your firm is easily found when consumers Google products or services online.

Future-Facing Marketing Methods

As promised, it’s time for some futuristic marketing methods we expect to be pivotal in 2021. Again, you can choose not to engage with these emerging technologies – but to do so will cede ground in your ongoing attempt to dominate your competitors online.

We’re going to look at three key emerging marketing tools here:

AI Chatbots

Challenger Platforms

Hyper-Personalisation

You’ll have seen glimpses of these in Essex & the UK already; we reckon that they’ll be well established in the city by the end of 2021.

AI Chatbots

These have been trialed for years, with varying results – and it’s only been in the last two years or so that we’ve seen the promised breakthrough: working chatbots that deliver customer satisfaction AND higher sales. Our web design company Essex can help build one of these for your firm.

It’s probably a little rich to call them AI – they’re essentially machine learning algorithms with a smiling face and a chatty persona – but chatbots popping up on all of your social media accounts and on your website is an incredibly useful way to engage your customer as soon as they discover your brand.

Challenger Platforms

Anti-trust cases against tech giants mean that 2021 is looking pretty saucy for any competitors to Google, Facebook, Amazon, et al. The “too long; didn’t read” summary here is that we might be about to see the rules reset for online advertising.

“Content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants.”– Jonathan Perelman, Buzzfeed

We’ve mentioned content already – but the new battle in 2021 may well be where you choose to distribute it. TikTok forced its way onto the scene in 2020. Zoom emerged from obscurity to become the world’s favored conference calling technology. Slack exploded during national lockdowns. Expect marketers to watch new ‘challenger platforms’ keenly in 2021. Getting there and planting your business’ flag first will be the modern world’s equivalent of the Gold Rush.

Hyper-Personalisation

Thought leaders are all in agreement that consumers are ridiculously picky, and this year they’re expecting products and services to be strongly personalised to their expectations and needs. Marketing in Essex might be less mature than marketing in the UK, but it’s still

That means always addressing consumers by their name. It means knowing your customers intimately, and rewarding them for repeat visits to your site. It means bearing in mind your User Journey – and plotting touchpoints to maximize your impact on the value chain. And it means honing your content to make it as relevant as possible to your target consumer.

“Personalisation – it’s not about first/last name. It’s about relevant content.” – Dan Jay

Fancy a Chat?

Harnessing the power of digital marketing takes skill and experience. Our team possesses both in abundance, and we’ll be more than happy to take a call from you to talk through options for your firm’s marketing drive. Equally, you’re welcome to drop us a line – we’ll get back to you within 24 hours.

As a leading digital agency in Essex – providing both web design services and digital marketing expertise – we’re able to offer bespoke services to fit any budget. That means cherry-picking only the most effective marketing methods for your tailor-made strategy, and giving you an idea of the ROI you’re going to see on each and every dirham you spend.

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How Much Does a Website Cost UK Web Design

How Much Does a Website Cost in UK?

Post author By andrew

Post date February 19, 2021

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Arriving at a place in your business lifecycle at which you’re beginning to think about creating a website is an exciting moment. For young Essex businesses looking to expand their reach across the UKs citizens, setting up a website means you’re ready to do business. The problem is, you’re not sure how much to set aside to pay for its creation.

In truth, asking how much it’ll cost to build a website is a little like enquiring about the length of a piece of string: it’s a question with no immediate answer.

Instead, any web design company in Essex worth their salt will tell you that you’re operating on a sliding scale, with the cheapest, simplest websites unlikely to exceed even the smallest of budgets – and bespoke, custom-made sites costing your more.

The best web developers in Essex will be upfront with you about all of this. We’re keen to impress upon you that what you save financially, you’ll be sacrificing in quality. Let’s have a closer look at the different tiers of expense you’re likely to encounter setting up a website in Essex. We’ve separated these tiers into three groups:

Basic. These are your run-of-the-mill websites, composed mostly of templates and built with little to no optimisation for SEO, security, or functionality (more on all that later). It’s your spartan home on the web.

Intermediate. This is where you start adding plug-ins, tidying up the front end, and considering things like User Experience (UX) and responsiveness. You’ll have a decent website, but it’s not blowing anyone away.

Advanced. Now we’re getting somewhere – competing with the best business websites in the UK. It’ll cost you, but advanced websites will be designed beautifully, with prompts and cues to convert consumers into customers.

We’re going to walk you through all three of these levels, starting with basic websites, to give you a nice holistic understanding of what kind of site will suit you – and how much it’ll cost. It’s then up to you to determine which level of investment fits with your specific brief, and whether a web design company Essex will be able to help with your project.

Basic Websites

This site’s only going to fulfil your most basic functionality – which, we’ve got to say, is fine for about 20% of Essex companies. If you’re not trading directly on your website, and you’re just interested in staking out your little corner of the World Wide Web, then a basic website will probably do the job. It won’t take a web design company Essex longer than a day or two to fix you up with a bare-bones website such as this.

If you’re feeling up to the job, there are DIY website builders to consider for your most regimental-looking sites. You know, the ones that have just a front page, and About, and a Contact Us. You know the drill here: check out Wix, or SquareSpace, or WordPress – or the dozens of other options. If you want anything but the most basic designs for your site, you’ll still have to pay these DIY platforms.

Your other option is to approach web designers in Essex with a simple request: “I want a cheap and cheerful website”. What’ll you be able to expect from such a site?

The Components of a Basic Website

All websites come equipped with a handful of features that you’ll have to pay for either upfront or on an ongoing basis. It’s worth listing through those now to give you an idea of the very lowest cost you might be able to wrangle for the construction of your website.

Web Hosting. Web pages don’t just exist somewhere in the ether: they’re based on servers that are distributed all over the world. You’re effectively renting space on one of these servers when you make a website – and that rent costs. £20 per month tops.

Domain Name. Sometimes this comes as part of your hosting fee, sometimes not. You’re going to set up on the ‘.co.uk’ domain (or that’s at least recommended for Essex SEO & throughout the UK) so you’ll be paying for a unique URL on that domain. Again, it’s going to be around £2 to £50 depending on where you look.

If your website is going to handle any consumer data at all – and especially their payment card details, you’ll need some basic level of security. Different DIY platforms offer different packages here. We’d always recommend robust web security for Essex websites. It’ll save you huge headaches in the future – honest.

Whether you go it alone with a DIY website maker, or you use a web designer’s services, you’ll probably end up paying for templates. They make your site look a lot nicer. If you don’t know what templates are, Wix are happy to fill you in. As one-off purchases, templates might cost £100 max.

On top of these minor payments (which you’re going to have to commit to whatever the size of your website, remember) you’ll also pay your Essex-based web developer an hourly wage. Simple websites really shouldn’t take longer than a day or two to make. Here, it really depends on your specifications.

So: how much for a basic website? All told, you could be looking at around £1,500 at the baseline. As we mentioned, though, every job’s different. Ping an email to our web design company Essex and we’ll be able to give you a far more accurate quote.

Dos and Don’ts of Basic Websites

Before we move on to intermediate websites, we want to leave you with some super-quick tips – if this is the route you’re considering going down.

Don’t sell expensive goods on cheap-looking websites. You’ll look untrustworthy.

Do try and nail your domain name. The easier it is for consumers to find, the better.

Don’t use a basic website for e-commerce in Essex. You’ll get outcompeted and ignored.

Do choose a basic website for a new Essex hospitality business to let consumers know who you are.

Right, that should do it. Now we’re going to take a look at intermediate websites – the kind of website you probably visit most days to read, shop, communicate and learn.

Intermediate Websites

The jump from a basic website to an intermediate one is comparable to the difference between a pushbike and a motorbike. Both are functional – but deep down, you know which one’s going to take you places.

Web design companies in Essex & the UK tend, we’ve noticed, to overlook some of the features which the best websites in the US will support as standard. We’re a little more cutting edge – which is important if you’re to outcompete your rivals in Essex and internationally. In this section, we’ll cover:

Visual Design & User Experience

Advanced Functionality & Site-Mapping

Accessibility & Responsiveness

SEO & Digital Marketing in essex & the UK

These are the bells and whistles you should expect when you’re paying for an intermediate website.

In doing so, you should be willing to budget around a factor of ten up from a basic website – so from £1.5k minimum up to perhaps around the £10,000 mark. That’s a ballpark figure: bear in mind the sliding scale we mentioned earlier, depending on your specific brief. Our web design company Essex can give you a more detailed break-down when you get in touch with us.

When you invest in an intermediate website, you’re doing it because you know the return on investment it’ll generate will make this one-off expense worth it. Here’s why.

Visual Design & User Experience

Let’s kick things off with how things look and feel on your website.
“Intuitive design is how we give the user new superpowers” – Design guru Jared Spool

Great design will make your end-user feel positive about your brand (Unconvinced? Just ask Steve Jobs). We understand that when you’re making a website, you’re thinking bottom line, KPIs, and conversion rates – not making things look pretty. But visual design just might be the most important element of your website.

There’s been an avalanche of UX (User Experience) research in the last half-decade to back up this assertion. The evidence is stark:

It can take as little as 50 milliseconds, or 0.05 seconds, for a user to judge your website. Before a second has elapsed, they’ll have decided whether to stay or relocate to a new website.

Tiny errors on your website, like a poorly-rendered logo, are enough to turn web users away forever.

The industry wisdom with design and user experience is to always respond to consumer expectation. That means being willing to change your website if it’s drifting out of fashion.

The benefit of using a web design agency in Essex – instead of a lone web developer – is that you’ll draw on the skills of a graphic designer and a UX expert as well as a web designer. That’s also why you’ll be paying a little extra for top-drawer visual design.

Advanced Functionality & Site Mapping

This one really is simple: you need your site to work.

A working site will load fast. Buttons will send users to the appropriate page. Meta-tags, telling browsers how to categorise your pages, will be labelled correctly. Your site will be mapped, so users and Google’s crawling algorithms know how to read each page. And any flashy animations, gifs, and embedded functionalities will work like clockwork on any browser.

If that sounds pretty manageable, you’ll be surprised to hear just how many UK websites are currently hamstrung by serious functionality issues that a web design company Essex should be able to resolve. Running a test on a website to see how many ‘errors’ it hosts takes seconds. We’re big fans of Neil Patel and his free ‘Analyzer’ tool- exposing how poorly-built many websites are for today’s digital ecosystem.

“Great web design without functionality is like a sports car with no engine.” – Paul Cookson

When you engage with professional web designers in Essex, you’re signing up for a service that irons out these errors, issues, and faults. And enhancing functionality isn’t just a way to make your website neat and tidy – research tells us that around 80% of all internet users will leave a website if it hasn’t fully, functionally loaded within two seconds.

Accessibility & Responsiveness

More people now access the internet from mobile phones than from desktop computers. Given that the UK is ranked first in the world for mobile broadband speed, your website really can’t do without mobile optimisation. If you don’t, you may as well wave goodbye to over 50% of your traffic.

“Digital design is like painting, except the paint never dries.” – Design Thought-Leader Neville Brody

Unfortunately, as Brody reminds us, this means that older websites perfected in that bygone era before mobile internet will need a complete revamp. From-scratch websites, meanwhile, ought to be built with a flexible back-end. The more you’re able to chop, change, and tinker with your site’s mechanics over time, the better you’re able to perfect that painting with new layers of paint.

Mobile optimisation takes a little trial and error testing, but it shouldn’t take a web design company Essex more than a couple of days to get spot-on.

When you pay for an intermediate-quality website, you’ll have the option of paying extra for the following coding wizardry, too:

Integration with APIs. From digital checkouts through to AI-enabled document scanners, expert web designers can integrate the world’s technological bells and whistles onto your site.

Java and Scripts. Experienced coders can borrow the best bits from Javascript – and other coding languages – to add whole sections to your site speedily. To paraphrase Einstein, this means your website can stand on the shoulders of the coding giants that came before you.

Front-End Wisdom. If you’re capable of basic web mechanics, your web developer can leave you with editing windows through which you’ll be able to change content on your website without calling them up – and covering their hourly wage.

SEO & Digital Marketing in Essex & The UK

The Essex ad market is still relatively undeveloped – and SEO in Essex is still very much up for grabs. For those scratching their heads, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is all about getting to the top of Google’s search results. Websites optimised for search engines tend to purr with far more traffic than those that aren’t.

And the benefits, in terms of conversion and profits, are kind of incredible. No wonder firms in the UK and the US – where SEO and digital marketing have reached their competitive zenith – are willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for web designers to develop their SEO.

“Being first in the search result organically in Google is the dream of all website owners.” – Dr. Chris Dayagdag

Like we said, Essex SEO & throughout the UK is pretty young and undeveloped. Prime your site for SEO and you’re likely to gobble up a huge number of consumers searching for products and services in the UK.

You can choose to boost your SEO with a Essex digital marketing agency, or you can lean on your web design team to boost SEO in your code. Optimising your website for traffic costs – and if you want to be top of Google’s search results in your niche, you’ll be paying advanced fees for the honour.

Advanced Websites

When you ask how much a website in Essex should cost, an advanced website represents the highest cost-bracket.

Everything about an advanced website will communicate trustworthiness, professionalism, and prestige. For the majority of Essex’s high-end business websites, looking the part means a lot. That means optimising your design, your functionality, and your SEO – all while trusting top-level web developers to build you a bespoke site from the bottom up.

We’ll not beat about the bush here: an advanced website represents a large investment for your business. It’s up to you to decide whether you listen to industry leaders when they say it’s worth it – that the ROI is higher than the one-off expense.

“Building a beautifully designed, fully capable website is no longer a luxury – it’s a necessity.” – Greg Shugar, Co-Founder of Thread Experiment

Did you know that the UK has one of the highest internet penetration figures in the world? That almost 99% of the adult population are active on social media? That the vast majority of business in UK is forecast to be conducted online post-COVID?

The world’s only moving in one direction – and owning an advanced website has got to be the best way to position yourself at the vanguard of the ongoing digital revolution.

Bespoke Features

When your web design company in Essex is building your website from the grassroots, they’ll be more flexible. Unconstrained by web hosting platforms and template-based web development systems, they’ll be your ‘Yes-Men’ -inputting any and all features you want to be installed on your website.

If you can budget for an advanced website, delivered by our web design company Essex, you’ll enjoy the use of:

Smart CMS

Expert UX

Omnichannel SEO

Let’s take a little tour through each of these three benefits to give you a sense of why an advanced website costs that bit extra.

Smart CMS

For the uninitiated, CMS stands for ‘Content Management System’. The concept of CMS takes a little explaining so that you’re abreast of how powerful smart CMS installations can be.

You should see your web developer like a technician on the bridge of the SS Enterprise. They’re typing in a frenzy, connecting wires under the hood, and doing a hundred and one highly technical, highly specialised job. CMS represents the control panel of the Enterprise. It works as a kind of translator between the technical world and the managerial one. And it means that you’re able to punch in commands (and add new content to your website) without the specialised skills, or the constant assistance, of your web developer.

If you’re expecting to have long, unending string-up updates for your website, it’s a given that integration with a reliable CMS system will save you a hundred headaches. Our web design company Essex put this very high on our priority list for new clients.

Expert UX

There’s UX design, and then there’s expert UX design. And there’s a giant gulf between the two.

Basic UX design will understand that you need to funnel your site visitors gently towards the parts of your website where you’ll be able to convert them from consumers to customers. They’ll add a nudge or two, and maybe a flashy ‘Call to Action’ button for good measure.

“Rule of thumb for UX: More options, more problems.” – Scott Belsky, Chief Product Officer

Expert UX, in contrast, starts with basic principles – and then A/B tests the living daylights out of them. Top UX Designers in Essex know how important rigorous, data-driven testing is on your site.

For example, an expert UX designer will keep an eye on the data analysis in your back end and will make tiny trial-and-error tweaks to your website to make it utterly frictionless. The more seamless the UX, the less confused, frustrated, or bored the end user.

Omnichannel SEO

We’ve already given you a little introduction to the wonderful world of SEO. Omnichannel SEO is the holistic approach to the problem of whether your website is ever found by your target consumers in Essex.

As such, omnichannel SEO will focus upon:

Making your site’s content perfect for Google’s crawlers to inspect and rank.

Building backlinks and through-links to other pages on your website and other reputable sites.

Using keywords and key phrases to boost your likelihood of being found on search engines.

Dozens of small technical tweaks to your back end code, to make your site perfectly-rendered.

The aim of all these approaches is to give Google’s algorithmic website inspectors a gleaming impression of your website. The better that impression, the higher you’ll get ranked on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). And, believe us, finishing even one rank up is worth thousands of social media followers – and thousands of dirhams, too.

So – What’s The Damage?

You’ve come this far, and you’ve not been given a straight answer about what kind of budget you ought to set aside to pay for your new website. Believe us, we’d love to – but as you’ve read, it’s a little bit complicated without seeing your brief.

As a leading web design company in Essex, we’re used to working with customers with a range of budgets – and we’re committed to delivering beautiful and fully-functional websites, whatever your budget. We know that every company’s different, with different profit margins, different liquidity, and different objectives for how they’ll invest their funds. We’re ready to work to your budget.

But we’re also going to be totally honest with you: you always get what you pay for with web design. The more you invest, the more your site will return you loyal customers, positive impressions, and higher sales.

We’d love to give you a more accurate quote on your website – so do drop us a line, and we’ll be in touch with more information about our services.