If you read our last blog post, you would have seen us refer to the website as the central hub of all of your operations. Everything goes through here, your discography, your biography, booking information and the links to all of your social medias.
We cant think of anything worse than creating lots of quality content, for no one to see it. This could be down to design flaws, navigation issues or just simply, confusing layouts.
Can your visitors tell what your business provides within five seconds of clicking on your website? Is it possible for people to get to the blog quickly if they need to? Is your price structure simple to comprehend? Are you generating lots of impressions but no leads? These are just a few questions you will need to ask yourself if you ever want to have a successful website. Once you have read through these tips for creating a killer website, you will be well on your way!
1. Be truthful with yourself and have a plan
Look, we have all been there. You think you have created your next masterpiece, a website a King would be proud of! But in reality, it is missing all the basics to make sure a website thrives.
Most people are too stubborn to change things that aren’t working, luckily you are not one of them, otherwise you would not be looking at this blog post in the first place. The first step to success in most things in life is analysis and reflection, just a few small changes can be the difference between success and failure. Maybe you are only going wrong in one little area and once that is rectified, the traffic starts flooding onto your website.
Your best friend with everything in the digital world when you are a creator, is the analytics tool. Analytics can be very daunting at first, and you may be looking at it like “where do I start?” But taking that plunge, and really having a look where your website is thriving and where it is lagging behind is imperative to success.
You can see all sorts of information, some of these things include – how many impressions have lead to a sale, which section of your site gets the most traffic, how long people stay on your site before leaving. Those are just three examples of information that can be retrieved from web analytics, do not neglect it. If people are entering your website and leaving within the first ten seconds, then you will need to put some more effort into making that home page more engaging. Maybe make it clearer what it is that you do, a short video is usually a good way to keep people’s attention. A lot of people nowadays prefer to digest there content in video form, and they would prefer that over reading. If they are just bombarded with a wall of text as soon as they enter the site, this could put them off and prompt them to exit without giving you a chance. Your analytics will inform you if this is the case. As a composer, it is important for you to show your music and your talent as soon as possible, in video form, and straight away on your website. This is a great way to capture people’s imaginations, and for them to give the rest of your site a thorough look through.
Now that you have thought about what could be wrong with your site, why not have an action plan on how you could improve your site even more.
It is important to understand your customers and where they are going on your site. Begin by charting your customer's journey from the first time they visit your website to the point at which they become a customer. Consider which pages they will visit, what information they will read, and which offers they will convert on. Having this knowledge will aid you in creating a website that effectively nurtures leads through the sales funnel.
Finally, gather data from your actual customers. Actively prompt them into leaving you reviews, or just general feedback. If people are apprehensive of doing this at first, entice them in with discounts or gift cards like Amazon and Starbucks. This information is very important when you are trying to improve your website, once you have this information, use it to influence your design choices and imagery. The more data the better!
Crafting the perfect website is like polishing a jewel.
2. Focus on the little things
Everybody appreciates the little things in life, the little details you think nobody notices and the nice gestures you give to people. Believe it or not, building a website incorporates this ideology too! Small details are really the difference between being successful and unsuccessful, and the biggest “small detail” there is, is SEO. We wont go into SEO too much in this blog post as we explained it in quite a lot of detail in my previous post “Digital Marketing – 5 Tips for composers to stand out and succeed.”
Another small detail you need to be focusing on is call-to-action buttons (CTA). A CTA is a button on a page that prompts users to go in a particular direction that you are intending for them. For example, as a composer, like I mentioned previously. You want people to see you work as soon as possible, to keep people on your website and for them to check out the rest of your work. One of the best ways to take potential consumers straight to your work would be with a CTA, as simple as “Watch NOW, Download NOW, Subscribe to our email list or Find out more.” They are just a few examples of a CTA that you can use to increase sales on your website today.
Additionally, you can think about creating a sense of community within your website. Think about how you see communities forming allover social media, the likes of Facebook groups, Reddit, forums ETC… They are places where likeminded people can get together and talk about things that they enjoy. Why can’t that place where people like your work be on your website? You can create a sense of community, organically, all by yourself. Within your own website. You can set followers challenges, start particular conversations, or just interact with them. Show them the person behind the music. People resonate with people and music a lot more when they don’t see just another corporation producing content. They see you, a person who has the personality to make this wonderful music that you are currently creating.
Think about the name Hans Zimmer, one of the most famous composers of our time. If you look on his website “https://hans-zimmer.com/forum” you can see he is trialing a new forum feature on his website, where likeminded people can go and express their opinions and try to get in contact with a member of Zimmer’s team.
Make sure your website is mobile friendly and caters to short attention spans.
3. Be aware of the modern landscape
wThe percentage of people who preferred to scroll the internet on their smartphone increased by 2% worldwide last year. Africa had the highest mobile usage with 70%, Asia came second with 63% and Europe third with 51%.6. As you can see with all these numbers, is the fact that the majority of people are using their smartphones for internet access nowadays. This proves the urgency that your website needs to be mobile friendly. The easiest way to check if this is the case is to literally just scroll through on your phone, make sure all the links work, nothing clips off the screen or nothing crashes.
Another thing you have got to be wary of in the modern landscape and with the generations growing up today, is the fact that people’s attention spans are decreasing exponentially. This was further proved by an article that Forbes created, where they delve into the analytics of Spotify. This is what they concluded; 24.14% chance of the song being skipped within the first 5 seconds, 28.97% chance of the song being skipped within the first 10 seconds, 35.05% in the first 30 seconds and 48.6% before the song finishes. The even scarier thing is the fact that this study was conducted in 2018, so you can best believe that these numbers would have increased even more in the last three years.
The overall point coming from this is, try to make sure your content is easily digestible on your website, do not clutter your screen. Don’t be scared of having too much empty space. Sometimes people do prefer just a simplistic feel to a website, where it is easy to navigate, and it is easy to understand. A good example of this is in effect is with legendary composer John Williams, his website is so simplistic, but you can see all of the information you would want from him within a blink of an eye.
The website of British composer Gareth Coker is a great reference from which to model your own website on.
4. Simplify!
Our third and fourth points do go hand in hand with each other but are indeed different points. Simplifying is so important in today’s day and age, gone are the days of people wanting to read vast swaths of text, (unless you come to a blog like this) but the days of people wanting their desired information straight away are upon us.
Remember a few years ago on Google, where when you Googled a question, you would need to actually click on websites to get your desired answer. Nowadays, you search a question, and you will get given the answer straight away without having to click on anything. This is obviously an evolution of search engines, but also highlights the fact of needing to simplify. If people are learning to expect this of off search engines then you best believe that they will be expecting this off of websites too.
Very similar to John Williams’ website, we have Gareth Coker’s website too. Which in our opinion is even better, the website looks sleek, it’s simple and has got a good picture of the composer himself, allowing you to attach a face to the music almost instantly. He has links to all of his social medias, videos and contact information. You can even tell the theme of what most of his music sounds like just off of the colour palette he has selected. We at NFO are quite confident in saying that this is quite possibly the model website for a composer to base their ideas off.
Your website is the place to flaunt your work and stand out from the pack.
5. Flaunt your work
Remember when you have to create/update your CV and you are told that this is one of the few examples in life where it is acceptable to brag about your work and achievements. Well, guess what? So is your website, do not be afraid to flaunt all of your discography and say how great it is. People need to see that you also believe in your own work, confidence is a good way to market your work. Nobody wants to see you say how your work is just “decent,” people want to see how magnificent and entertaining it is.
If you haven’t already, create a section on your website dedicated to just videos or your entire discography. Put all of your best work on there, show people what you are capable of. Links to Soundcloud, YouTube and Spotify are all imperative too.
Conclusion
Creating a website nowadays is a mammoth task, not just the creation of it, but finding out the right things to include on it and what to do to keep it engaging to the modern consumer. But hopefully after reading this article it will become less of a headache for you, and you are more confident with what should be included if you want to create a killer website.
We hope you have enjoyed this blog post!
Contact - jack@northernfilmorchestra.com
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