Does your website need an overhaul? There are all these new trends that pop up with websites every five years or so. Still, sometimes, we get really attached to the websites we have and forego the opportunity for redesigning or redevelopment for a better brand or better customer experience. And so, today, I want to talk to you about a couple of questions to ask yourself to see if your website is ready for an overhaul and update.
1. Do You Integrate Your Social Media Channels Into Your Website?
Are you fully integrating features like Shop Instagram into your website? Shop Instagram is an amazing phenomenon. Just a few years ago, only the big fashion companies like Reebok, Nike, Adidas and Revolve would be able to use these types of technologies. However, what’s so great about technology is that once more people begin to use it, we can actually decrease how much it costs to use it on an individual basis.
Now you have amazing APIs and plug-ins for Shopify, et al. that allow you to integrate a Shop Instagram section into your website. It’s really important that every piece of content you produce, whether on social media or anywhere else, has a direct relationship back to your brand hub- your website. Your brand hub is exactly where everything you’re doing with your brand comes to life.
If someone’s on your Instagram account and sees all these cool products and then they head to your website and your website has tons of different products, you could run into issues. The lack of organization means it’s going to take them too long to find exactly what they saw on your feed, meaning you could lose the sale. However, using a feature like Shop Instagram in your navigation is going to be a great way to help convert that potential customer from a browser to a buyer.
2. Has Your Content Grown?
Have you started using a blog over the last few years? Are you optimizing for SEO? What’s really happening with all of your external content? Hopefully you’re one of those brands that’s moved into video content, because it’s so valuable to be able to speak directly to your consumer, whether through models, beautiful narratives, engaging audio or anything else you can use to really tell that brand story.
3. Has Your Brand Evolved?
If your marketing strategies have changed and grown since you started your business or since you launched your website, make sure you’ve incorporated all of these different aspects of marketing back into your site. Again, everything comes back to that brand hub, your e-commerce platform.
Look at marketing, video content and blog content- all of those aspects need a home. Has your brand platform changed? Sometimes, when you start your businesses or launch your very first websites, you have aspirations about who you want your customers to be and not necessarily the hard data about who they really are. You have ideas about the products you want to create, but you don’t know what your bestsellers are going to be. You don’t know how the market is going to react to those products. As a result, as your brand evolves and your website ages out, you may have found your customer has changed, that your products have changed or even your price points. Any one of these factors calls for a branding change which always calls for an overhaul of your website.
4. Is Your Website Optimized for the New User Experience?
Over the last few years, we’ve seen so much more consumer research and consumer data that really tells us how consumers are absorbing content and data and how they’re navigating websites. Certainly, the website template you use or may have launched with five years ago is not going to be the most up-to-date or best version for today’s consumer. The more analytics, and information scientists gather about how consumers are shopping will directly influence and relate to all of consumer-facing websites online.
When you think about your website being updated or when you think about how consumers are responding, stay on top of the new trends in user experience and user interfaces. Keep your eye on the prize in terms of what other brands are reinventing or redesigning, even tiny tweaks to their user experience.
These days, it really feels like websites are similar to MacBook Airs. Every five years, they begin to break down. Functions are not optimized as well and things aren’t working as quickly as you’d like. Maybe you have too many images and need to take care of the backend to make sure that your load times are faster. When it comes to the consumer experience and what consumers really desire, it’s important to think about your brand in its entirety, from a 360° perspective.
- Has your perceived value changed?
- Do you understand your customer better?
- Is there a better user interface out there?
- Are you merging your marketing and website for one beautiful selling cycle?
We hope this leaves you with a lot of great ideas on how to optimize your website. If you need consulting or execution support for a website relaunch or fresh, new website development for your fashion business, get in touch. Email the Scaling Retail team at hello@scalingretail.com.