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What makes your mobile phone “smart”?

What makes your television “smart”?

Essentially the common denominator between “smart” devices is that they all are connected to the internet and they all use information to deliver significantly enhanced user experiences, especially when they are personalized to meet the unique preferences of individuals.

What if the information on your Smartphone was only information related to one single day in time, the day that you bought the phone?

What if your “smart” TV only played a finite, limited loop of content that was never updated?

If faced with the scenarios above, it is safe to assume that in a relatively short period of time you will have very little use for these devices. The same logic can be applied to your website strategy.

Despite the obvious examples above, many businesses continue to repeat the mistakes of the past by building static, or “dumb” websites every three years. They are dumb in the sense that they do not capture and incorporate customer feedback into the continuous improvement of their website.

The opportunity cost of not making frequent, impactful changes based on feedback is large. This is because the “smart” approach of making frequent, impactful adjustments along the way, will have a compounding effect on your results over time. Very similar to the concept of compounding interest, where the rate at which compound interest accrues depends on the frequency of compounding.
Just like compounding interest, the number of times you compound your website (re-invest in by making adjustments) will significantly change your results over time.

So How Do I Make My Website Smart?

Going back to the smartphone analogy, to make your website SMART you’ll need to power it with information that significantly enhances the user experience and personalizes it to meet the unique preferences of individuals. You’ll also need to create a systematic approach to gathering and incorporating user feedback into your updates.

Powering your website with information from your CRM

Your CRM should be your single source of truth for information on your customers and prospects. The more information you can gather on your prospects and customers, the better the customer experience you can potentially deliver. Since your public-facing website is the best way to collect data on your prospects and clients, it is critical that your website syncs this data with your CRM. The more information you can share between your website and your CRM the better. This will allow you to track what content your prospects have consumed and where they are in the buyer journey. Coupling your CRM with Marketing Automation you can then create a repeatable process for nurturing web prospects into sales leads and customers. Timing is everything when it comes to nurturing web prospects, so you can rely on your CRM to help determine things such as when to email them that piece of content, or when (or when not) to have your sales team reach out.

Dynamic Content

A CRM that is is fully synced with your website can be used to display “dynamic content” to different types of users based on many criteria. Pulling data from their CRM profile you can create rules to show different content to different site visitors based on things such as location, industry; segment. You can even personalize web pages to great prospects or customers by name, company name, or with content or messages specifically intended for them.

Personalization

Achieving personalization can be a very difficult task if you are working off of disparate systems. The critical tools are going to be your CRM, your Marketing Automation Software, and your website’s Content Management System. If the data isn’t correct or your integration isn’t syncing the data properly you can get personalization wrong which can have the reverse effect on your customer experience.

HubSpot has made it easier for companies of all sizes to get to personalization faster by offering a way to centralize all of your tools and data in one, seamlessly integrated platform. Since HubSpot was built organically from the ground up and was not built based on acquisitions, the path to creating a “smart”, personalized website is much quicker. If you are using HubSpot, personalization does not require the same level of custom development or custom integrations as it has in the past. Without this centralization, you’ll be looking at lots of systems integrations and custom workflows between platforms that do not natively speak with one another.

Analytics & Automation

Lastly, the key to building a SMART website will depend on not only your ability to gather data but to centrally analyze it and draw insights from it. These insights will inspire the strategic and frequent adjustments you need to make to your website. Also, your insights from analytics can help you can create automated workflows that are triggered when prospects take certain actions on your site or match some pre-determined behavior metric that prompts something that will enhance their specific user experience.