There’s nothing more frustrating than putting hours of time and money into a project only to watch it lay dormant. And yet, we see this happening constantly with brand landing pages and websites — the online face of the company — left neglected and forgotten for long stretches. So how can marketers break the mold and turn their websites into a long-lasting and user-friendly experience? That’s a question that Anne Stefanyk says her clients come to her with daily.

“The website has become a marketing decision more so than an IT decision. 80% of our clients tend to be Director of Marketing or CMOs. And what happens is they come to us and they say, ‘We need a real specialist to make sure that our website works. We need to be making sure that not only are we getting leads, but we're getting qualified leads, and we're moving them through the sales funnel as fast as possible.’”

Anne is the CEO and Founder of Kanopi Studios, a web agency designed around helping marketers create beautiful websites through adaptive execution and on this episode of Marketing Trends, Anne discusses specific growth strategies for how marketers can turn their websites into ROI machines. Plus she explains why search engines and search functions continue to be an undervalued asset and she details common mistakes she sees on most websites the marketers listening might want to check for.

Main Takeaways:

• Continuous Improvement: You will never find a savvy marketer who will tell you that you can build a website and simply leave it static. Instead, they are continuously monitoring and maintaining their overall website experiences to make sure that it is meeting user expectations, which change more frequently than ever before.
• The Three Cs: A successful website growth strategy starts with deploying the following strategy: Connect, Communicate, and then convert. One of the most common components of a failed website’s growth strategy is missing dialogue. Institute a conversational chat function that can learn and adapt to your users, but most importantly one that opens the experience up to more personalization efforts down the road.
• Through the Side Door: Marketers need to think of their website as a guided tour of their brand. Guests want to be shown around and they want you to make that process easy for them. Most times, guests won’t find your site through your homepage, but rather through search. SEO should be doing the work for you. Users that access your site through search are 200% more likely to convert on sales. Make sure you deploy a successful search strategy, but also you empower your site to have a search function as well.

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