A guide to marketing your website
The Internet offers a myriad of opportunities for your business and your customers. Your company website will provide you with the opportunity to:
- Improve the visibility of your company
- Strengthen your company’s image with better management of marketing and customer information
- Improve customer service in terms of:
- Convenience – provision of information accessible 24/7
- Speed of response – through online forms, basic queries (quotes)
- Efficiency – everything suspect and prospective customers, as well as existing customers need, to make a purchase decision, at their fingertips.
- Expand into new markets at minimal cost
- Boost your net profit through
- Lowering transaction (distribution) costs
- Lowering marketing communication costs (printing)
- Increase the measurement and control of leads/referrals, sales and customer service
How can you make your Website successful and profitable?
Successful online marketing is not just about paying enormous sums of money to achieve high rankings within search engines. Attracting visitors is one objective. Converting those visitors into paying customers is your ultimate goal. At Metastar, we combine classical marketing techniques with search engine optimisation strategies for marketing planning that meets the goals of your business. This guide provides basic information to help you to market your website.
Use your site to support existing marketing strategies
For effective target marketing, your company’s website and its marketing strategy should be structured to support the different stages of the classical buying process.
| Stage in buying process | Traditional & online marketing tools |
|---|---|
| Awareness, need arousal | PR Advertising, on/offline Promotion of URL |
| Information search | Search engine optimisation Lead generation via:
|
| Evaluation of the alternatives | Website content
|
| Purchase decision | Website content
|
| Post purchase feelings evaluation | Personalised website content and/or extranet and interaction |
Website content
Of course once you have attracted the right visitors to your website, you will want to ensure that they navigate to target areas within your site and return to your site. Statistics show that visitors are more likely to return to a website on the basis of:
- Quality of content. Is it easy to read, understand and most importantly, is it relevant?
- Ease of navigation navigate (move between different areas of the site, governed by site structure)
- Speed of downloads
- Frequency of updates
- Incentives (do you provide a cost incentive to purchase online rather than through other means?)
- Purchasing ability - the ease of interaction
- Web Forms
- Discussion communities
- Levels of web self service (think on-line banking)
The adage, KISS, 'Keep it simple, stupid', is key to creating good content. It must be clear to your visitors:
- What your company sells
- How and where products/services can be bought
- How your company be contacted
- What/if your company has any special offers
As well as being search engine friendly, the content of your site should demonstrate a natural flow. Consistency of design and content, as well as regular page indicators (such as roll over text) will offer your visitor reassurance as to its whereabouts within your site.
How should your website be promoted online and offline?
Search engine optimisation
This is the most important task, and one that needs to be regularly reviewed. Submitting your company's URL to a search engine may only get you within the first 100,000 search results. To improve your company's ranking, you will need to make the content of your website easy for a search engine to index.
Search Engines index pages of a website individually. They digest all the text and images within indexed pages. Complex algorithms allow search engines to determine the importance of the information, in order that they may direct information seekers to the most relevant sites.
Therefore, in order to generate traffic via natural searches (as opposed to paid for advertising), it is the task of the web master to consider each page separately and analyse key words or phrases likely to be used by visitors making a search relevant to the company. The web master should concentrate on optimising one or two phrases only per page.
Website copywriters use many techniques to ensure maximum copy appeal to search engines. Find out more about how you can effectively optimise your copy.
Link popularity
Search engines also seek 'meaningful' links from a website's content. Links should come from sites with relevant, related content. Sources of links may include directories, articles, press releases and reciprocal links made between relevant companies. Search engines work on the basis that if a website has many meaningful links, others must rate it highly. Therefore the website must be of importance, thus its ranking should be greater.
The term 'meaningful' is an important one to consider. Search engines are clever enough to spot 'Spamming'.
Pay per click advertising
When a company launches a website, pay per click advertising, offered by companies such as Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, can be used as a short-term strategy to ensure that your company is always visible on the first page of results. Pay per click advertisements can usually be found on the top or right hand side of natural search listings. Each time a user clicks onto the advertisement the company has the pay the relevant pay-per-click fee.
Get help to plan your pay per click strategy.
Update websites daily
In order to attract repeat visitors, content should be kept fresh. A company's offline communications should be consistent with its online communications.
Promotion of the URL
Your company's URL should feature on all marketing collateral and stationery.
Manage PR through your website
Distribution of press releases and images via your company's website will provide you with an immediate cost benefit, in terms of photography and postage costs.
It is worth noting that another major advantage on on-line PR management is that if a site indexes a company's press release, an automatic link will be created back to the press release originator's site. As explained earlier, link popularity is an advantage for good search engine rankings.
Get our advice about managing your PR via your website.
Other marketing communication tools
A variety of marketing communication tools and day to day operations can be driven through your website. Of these include:
- Customer, intermediary communications
- Customer service
- E-commerce
- Trade shows
- Sales promotions
Metastar would be delighted to offer you further advice about these and other online communications and transactions.
Use emails to communicate with customers and to build loyalty
Although email marketing is now accepted as a standard business tool, it must be undertaken with great care. Bulk emails can be sent at a low cost. As a result this medium has been subject to misuse, or spamming. Company administrators and recipients are alert and often hostile to what they perceive as unsolicited email. The Data Protection Act has many rules governing the handling of personal contact data.
Opt-in email mailing lists comply with the rules given under the Data Protection Act. By setting up an opt-in mailing list, you are giving your visitors permission to contact you again with further information by email. A typical opt-in mailing campaign is one that distributes a company's newsletter. You might also consider asking your visitors to sign up to the email distribution of 'What's new' announcements, press releases and authoritative articles.
Request further information about email marketing.
Online Advertising
There are many opportunities for online advertising, including banner adverts, online classified advertising, social network advertising and viral marketing. To determine which advertising opportunities are best suited to your company contact us today.
How to measure the performance of your web marketing strategy
One of the joys of online marketing is the ease in which you can measure the success of your campaigns. Whilst Google and Yahoo can provide you with statistics in relation to your pay per click campaigns, it would also be worthwhile to invest in a web statistics package. Statistics can be provided in real-time. Some of the many statistics available include:
- How many visitors your site is receiving by various time frames
- Where you are receiving your visitors from:
- Browsers
- Search engines
- Key words
- Which pages your visitors are entering your site from
- How your visitors navigate within your site
Further guides available:
Website examples
Testimonials
Nicky Easton & Virginia Fox
Received great site & service
Full testimonial >>
Nicole Mathes
Experienced great customer service
Full testimonial >>
Linda Casson
Thinks services are second to none
Full testimonial >>
Rob Little
Confirms Metastar's expertise
Full testimonial >>
© Copyright 2010 Metastar