Web Site Marketing
The biggest question you can ask yourself about web site marketing is this: What do I need my web site to do for my business or organization? Answers could range from providing good information to driving leads that convert to sales. Rarely will any two companies share the exact same web marketing strategy or even a very similar one. Marketing your organization online should almost always be a custom approach.
Where Do You Start?
Hopefully you have a general marketing plan in place and you can simply add your web site marketing strategy to it. If not, please develop a comprehensive marketing plan. Marketing plans almost always save companies money and improve marketing in general. Hopefully we don’t have to convince you of the importance of a marketing plan. A marketing plan will answer a number of web site marketing questions as well. For example: Defining your target market will help define the design approach as well as address usability issues (depending on age for example), among others. Knowing how print advertising may push traffic to your web site is important. You can probably see from those few examples how important the marketing plan is to developing a web site.
Assess Your Competition
Marketing plans should address your competition in many ways: Who are they? What do they do that is different? How big are they? What makes them successful? There are many more. You should apply that to web site marketing as well. Beyond the normal marketing assessment of your competition, there are many other things to look at in terms of web site marketing. Marketing your business on-line can take minimal effort or a lot of effort. The amount of work that you will have to do depends on the amount and quality of your competitor’s web sites. For example: If there are only a few legitimate web sites that are in competition with you, then you can put forth a minimal effort and be successful. If however, there are hundreds of web sites that are optimized for your search terms, you will spend more effort. That effort may be spent writing better copy than the other web sites or spending more on Pay-Per-Click advertising, among others.
Setting & Defining Web Site Goals
Web sites can do many things. Most often they provide good information about your company, services and products. In addition, they can alleviate repetitive phone calls about your business hours or provide a simple map so customers can find you more easily. Web sites can save you time. Web sites can also provide sales leads/sales by using search engines and referring web sites to drive traffic to your web site. You should decide what you need your web site to do and document those goals in your web site plan.
Developing Web Site Marketing Strategy
Once your web site goals are set, look at how you can achieve those goals. Your strategy will be different, depending on where you are with your web site. If you don’t have a web site, you have a lot of work to do. If you have a good web site already, you may need to rewrite copy, add pages to expand your site or break up your site into more focused pages (in terms of key words/copy). Link 2 can evaluate your current site and help you with web site marketing strategy.
Implementing A Web Site Marketing Plan
Implementation of a web strategy, again, depends on your unique business, those goals and where you are with your web site. Many times we have suggested to clients that we simply recode there existing site using good CSS and HTML techniques. We call it using “Lean Code” and the technique aids in search results. Lean refers to less code so search engines only have to look through the smallest amount of web site code to index the real content. We have literally boosted traffic significantly by only changing the source code for the site.
On-Going Web Site Marketing
Marketing your business is never a set in stone plan. It takes even more diligence to keep up with web site marketing. Search engines change the way they rank sites on a regular basis. You can be in the top three on Google for a particular search term today and be number six tomorrow. It is the nature of web site marketing. Keeping up is worth it, especially if it means building business on the web. There are always opportunities to find other related web sites to get or trade a link back to your web site (Link building strategies are relevant as of this writing).
Contact us if you would like help in developing a web site strategy – 330-374-9812







