A Foundation For Marketing

Website Development

A website acts as a hub to support all of your school’s marketing efforts. Visitors arrive at your site through many different paths and with Metric’s approach to web development, you can make sure their experience on your website is useful, memorable, effective and secure.

linden christian website design

A Foundation For Marketing

Your website is a likely starting point for anyone who’s interested in your school. You can send anyone to your site to find the information they’re looking for using email, a newsletter, a digital media campaign, a print ad, a business card, social media, or just a conversation on the phone.

Look at your website as a foundational tool for your school’s marketing strategy. Whether you choose to build, rebuild, reskin or optimize, you can be confident that it’s a solid investment.

Empower Your Sales and Marketing Team

Your website is a tool to empower your admissions and marketing staff, not an IT project. It may be tempting to approach building a website as a technical project—and there are many technical details involved—but technology means nothing unless your website communicates well and helps you meet your goals.

The content you publish on your school’s website can increase credibility, build trust and position you as a formidable competitor. With a site that’s well-designed, on brand, useful and professional, your admissions team will be able to reach out to anyone with confidence.

Your website enables your marketing team to integrate their marketing strategies and campaigns, making it easier for prospective families to find you. Then your admissions team can interact with “warm” leads—people who are already looking for what you offer—making their job easier.

Strathcona-Tweedsmuir School brand guideline

Understanding the Investment

Let’s look at three key benefits of investing in web development:

DRIVE HIGHLY QUALIFIED LEADS TO YOUR WEBSITE

The quality of leads you’ll receive is higher with a properly planned website. You’ll attract and send people to your site who are already interested in your school, and more ready to take action. They’ll find you, instead of you looking for them.

CREATE A STRONG FIRST IMPRESSION

Prospective families may be visiting your site for the first time, and you want their encounter with your school to be memorable. By providing content that is clear, consistent and on brand, you’ll earn trust and respect while building brand equity.

INVEST IN THE NEXT FIVE YEARS

Five years is about how long a website can reasonably deliver relevant content and functionality before it starts to look dated or falls behind on current trends. Consider the investment as a capital cost, rather than a marketing expense.

Build, Rebuild or Optimize?

Let’s consider a few scenarios:

You probably just need to update the design, which doesn’t involve changing the back end. This is a site refresh, not a rebuild.

You may need to rewrite, edit or reorganize your content so it’s more concise and web friendly—maybe adding a few buttons to direct users to take an action. This mostly means optimizing content on the front end, but no major reorganizing of site sections or navigation.

If you don’t need a design or content refresh but you do need interactive opportunities to support your school’s goals for an email marketing campaign or visual showcase (for example), you can optimize your website for specific types of functionality without having to rebuild the entire site.

Maybe you need to rethink your site’s organization and get a fresh perspective on your site’s architecture and content. This involves programming and back-end development, and likely front-end content and design as well. That means a new build or a rebuild.

Adding e-commerce capabilities to your site doesn’t necessarily require a rebuild. Depending on the back end of your current site, we may be able to integrate an e-store CMS without much difficulty.

Sometimes there’s just no way around building or rebuilding a website, especially if your current site or platform no longer serves your needs. But other times, you just need to refresh or optimize your site by implementing a new design or content, getting rid of outdated or excessive content, or making your site responsive so customers and prospects can access your site on their smartphones and tablets. Either way, there are many “right” approaches to building a better website—and we can help you plan a project that will leverage what you have today so it will work better for you tomorrow.

Building Your Website With Metric

Metric offers a unique and specialized approach to web development that places your website at the centre of your marketing efforts. We’ve been building websites for a long time, and we’ve learned the most effective site is one that meets your company’s goals, leverages your users’ data and satisfies your unique requirements.

chicken chef website design

Data, Behaviours, & Conversion

When users visit your site, you want them to take an action—not just read a page or two, then leave. We start by studying your site data so we can learn about your users’ behaviour and look for these kinds of action or conversion opportunities. Conversion opportunities on your school’s website should always be tied to your objectives—increasing inquiries and applications, boosting event registration, providing easy access to program information, or any number of goals you might have. Conversions make your website an important piece of your marketing strategy, and your site much more than an online brochure.

What to expect

Web development begins with talking to a Metric account executive (AE). This person will be dedicated to your account and project, is experienced in building websites, and will take time to understand your school and requirements. They’ll also talk about web development in language you can understand. Once you and your AE have determined your goals, your AE will oversee everything—bringing in Metric’s specialists and subject matter experts whose skills are relevant to your project’s needs. Our in-house team has deep experience in key areas of web development including technical strategists, analytics experts, web designers and copywriters, coders, SEO specialists and systems developers.

The Importance Of Content And User Experience

When someone visits your website, you have their attention for just a few seconds. What kind of experience do you want them to have? What actions do you want them to take? Does the content on your website support your business goals? Does it give your website’s users what they’re looking for?

Content—and the quality of experience users have when they interact with it—is so important that even the most technically impressive site will accomplish little if the content doesn’t work.

Here’s a breakdown of how to create content that will maximize your goals and satisfy your users’ needs.

Know your audience

The first rule of effective school marketing is to know who you’re talking to. Tailor your messaging to resonate with prospective families and students. Find out what your audiences are looking for and answer their questions.

There are no shortcuts to understanding your audience. At Metric, we do research so we’re not guessing about who your audiences are or what they care about. Once we’ve learned about their demographics, behaviours and motivators, we can target content to their needs, using creativity to motivate and inspire them to take action. They’ll always be more likely to convert on your website when they find what they’re looking for.

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Understanding conversion pathways

Another important but overlooked aspect of understanding audiences is recognizing the various pathways they can take from seeing an ad or visiting a website to taking an action (converting). While they’re doing research about schools, they follow logical paths towards making a decision. Here are two examples.

A user on your website might land on the home page, go to an admission or event page, read some content, then take an action on that page—such as fill out an inquire form, register for an event, schedule a tour, subscribe to a newsletter or submit an application.

A user who clicks on your campaign ad might click to relevant content on your campaign landing page, continue to your website, then take action there by signing up for an event, watching a video, submitting a form or requesting information.

There are many conversion paths a user can take. What they can or should depend on your school’s goals, your marketing strategy, and your audience’s goals and behaviours.

Make an impression

Good content can create a lasting impression of who you are. Your brand is the total experience of how your school looks, feels and sounds to those who encounter you—in style, imagery, colours, typography and words—on your website and throughout your marketing.

The more consistently you express your school’s brand through visual identity and messaging, the more recognizable and memorable you’ll be in the eyes of your current and prospective families.

Technology Matters

Today, anyone can build a simple website. You don’t need to understand web technology because there are new tools that make it pretty easy to DIY. However, you do still need to understand audiences, design, content and brand. Your copy needs to be concise, compelling and professional for you to be taken seriously as a market contender.

So does technology even matter? Yes, but it’s just one aspect of your website.

At Metric, we keep technical costs down by focusing on the most important aspects of technology needed to build safe, user-friendly websites that work well on desktop or mobile. Here are three important technical considerations.

Choose a CMS that fits

Your content management system (CMS) drives your website. Whether it’s WordPress, Shopify or niche industry software like Blauckbaud or Forge, your CMS provides a foundation for your site’s content and functionality that should support the actions you want users to take on your site. Whether conversion means engagement, sales or something different, it’s important to choose your CMS wisely, because your marketing and sales people will be the ones using it day to day.

Your website must work on any device

Users need to be able to access and interact with your website on their smartphones and tablets as well as their desktops and laptops. At Metric, we’ve been measuring analytics for many years now, and we’ve seen the trend towards device use steadily increase, so it’s critical that your school’s website be optimized for mobile.

A secure site is a safe site

Once you’ve built a website that meets your school’s goals and helps users find what they need, you want to protect your investment. Your site must be safe so it can’t be exploited, hacked or infected by malware. You can have the best website or e-store in the market—but if it’s not secure, users will back off and your brand will suffer. There are many pieces of software involved in hosting a website, from CMS to the underlying operating systems. If regular maintenance and updates are not performed by professionals, your site—and its visitors—may be at risk. Work with a consultant that can assure you best practises for keeping the site secure.