We had a team lunch earlier this week and I was reminded of a state of mind I used to encourage all of our clients to take - "think about your website like you would your most valuable employee".

What did I mean by that? Well if I brought you the perfect employee through the door, what would you pay them? Someone who could work 24hrs a day without complaining. Someone who never took a sick day or needed a holiday? Someone who could bring you new business on a plate, provide great customer service, help attract new talent into your team and up-sell, cross-sell and re-sell your existing customers too...

Now think about what would that be worth to your business? Would it help it grow? Would it add value to your business?

Taking it a step further, when you find a great and ambitious employee, how do you manage, inspire and develop them even further? Setting KPIs is often the answer so think about the stats you could focus on regularly that would help you decide whether the website/employee is doing a good job.

Here are some example KPIs you can set today;

• How many visitors has it attracted directly from search engines? Is that number increasing/decreasing/staying the same over time and how does it compare to the competition? (if you're not sure on that, we offer a complimentary benchmarking report to show you vs 2 competitors)
• How well is it presenting your products/services? Equally, how does it portray your company and team in general to help generate the right type of interest? Quite often now you look at the social media accounts for companies which are on fire with great videos, photos etc. and their website looks like it's been gathering dust for 5 years.
• How many potential new clients has it inspired via lead capture forms / live chats / call bookings / brochure downloads etc? How valuable are the leads - is the website bringing through the prospects you want it to?
• How many applicants has it taken CVs from to push through to your hiring manager? Are they good potential hires or not? If not, is that because of how the company is presented?
• How many times has it provided support to your customers and saved you having to pay a human to do the same repetitive tasks, whilst delivering an exceptional customer experience?

You get the idea hopefully but unfortunately businesses invest in their website in the same way they would a brochure. They miss the true value of what I see as a living, breathing asset which has a pulse and can play a massive impact in the success of your business. Yes it requires a shift in your thinking and budgeting but keep investing and when it's well managed, the return on that investment will fuel your growth.

Anyway, whether you agree with me or simply clicked in because of the photo featuring the happiest guy I could find on Adobe Stock, thanks for reading. As you can probably tell, this article is a Chris Lunn original without the help of any AI tools so if it's littered with typos, I can pretend that's all part of me making it feel genuinely authentic.

By the way, if you've got to the end of this and are thinking "I'd fire my website if it was an employee", we should talk! At Digity, we specialise in creating websites you'd want to give a nice big bonus, so if yours isn't helping your business grow - get in touch and I'd be happy to share some examples of our work and budget estimates to suit your goals and give you something to think about.

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