Creating a Website for Consultants
Your journey is about to get more exciting! Now is the time to set up your company’s website to showcase your offerings. A website is the window to your business and there’s endless things that you can do as you grow your business to enhance the user experience. Let us walk you through the basics of setting up your website.
ConnectsUs makes it easy to instantly set up your website and blog.
Topics in this Section
Domain name
A domain is the URL (address) for your website. For example, ConnectsUs.com or Amazon.com. Top tips in choosing a domain name: make sure it's pronounceable and easy to remember. You want to avoid people staring at your domain name trying to guess how to pronounce it. They may just give up after a while and you've lost a potential customer! Sounds familiar?
You can also buy domain names that don't reflect your business name and forward to your actual website. For example PeopleHR.com is a lot easier for someone you meet to remember than JaneSareskyconsulting.com.
It's also beneficial to refer to an easy-to-remember URL anytime you're providing a prospect with paper information, such as your business card or Services Brochure. It's also beneficial for direct mail campaigns where your information will be paper-based and not digital. The goal is to easily drive traffic to your website where information will be digital and navigatable from that point onward.
Aliases that can be forwarded to website. Such as HRconsultantToday.
Email address
Your customers will expect you to have an email address to facilitate communication.
In the consulting business, it's important to look and sound professional and that extends to email addresses. Therefore, Rule #1 is avoid using Gmail. Gmail address gives the impression of a fly-by-night operation and that's not good for branding. Compare ssmith@gmail.com to ssmith@credoconsulting.com. Which one is more professional sounding and instill trust?
If you already have a domain name, getting an email address is super easy. Some domain registrars even offer free email addresses.
Testimonials
Testimonials are written recommendations provided by customers or individuals who have first hand knowledge of the quality of your services. It is an important marketing tool and can tip the buying decision in your favour especially if there are two closely competing service providers.
According to a survey conducted by Dimensional Research, 90% of respondents who recalled reading online reviews claimed that positive online reviews influenced buying decisions. Therefore, it's important to get from your past clients value based non-generic testimonials that speaks to the quality of your services. For example, you can send them a short questionnaire to complete. This way you can avoid receiving a generic testimonial that says your work is awesome but without additional information on your role in resolving their business pain points. Also, if you can, ask for a copy of their photo and get permission to use them along with the testimonial. Having a photo adds more credibility to the testimonial and gives the reader a level of comfort knowing that it's not made-up material.
There isn't a magic number on how many testimonials you should have but it should be more than one! It's more important to have a breadth of testimonials that showcase your different value propositions (eg quality of expertise, timeliness, business acumen) instead of 20 testimonials that all have the same theme. When setting up testimonials, always think of how it can be used to influence conversion rate.
Your Call to Action
A 'call to action' (CTA), as the name suggests, is an instruction or text created to entice visitors to your website to take immediate action. An effective CTA increases conversion of traffic to your website into sales leads.
Examples of CTAs are:
- "Sign up" for a white paper on how HR can help a business mitigate legal risks
- "Call now" for a 1 hour complementary consulting session on any HR issues
- "Sign up - seats are limited" for a webinar on how to improve employee engagement
Check out these tips on Mastering the CTA: Call to Action Strategies that Convert Every Time.
Resources
Create articles/contents that speak to your expertise and appeals to your target audience/influencers in your target market. Without the latter, you will have a hard time driving traffic to your site even if your content is great. It's akin to having a great product with the best features and quality that no one cares!
Actively seek for backlinking to your articles. The more sites backlink to your article, the higher your website will rank in the search engine results page.
What are backlinks? Check this out.
This section of your website can be used to replace a blog as they both fulfill the same purpose, ie drive traffic to your website.