The question business people should have on their minds the moment their website goes “live” is—what next? There are now a billion websites on the Internet, which means your website is the proverbial needle in the haystack—a very large haystack!
When your bricks-and-mortar business is ready, what do you do? You might put a sign on the front, get yourself into a local directory, put an ad in the paper, and get your friends to tell their friends about it.
On the Internet, there are no streets; only networks and connections. There ARE local directories, such as Finda, Yellow Pages, and industry-specific sites. You CAN place ads here and there—on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And you certainly CAN get your friends to share your website on the Internet. These will be the topics of this and subsequent articles.
Just be aware that a website is not a “set and forget” tool.
Your website is a business asset and needs to be looked after, just like the company car. It needs to be secured (with best practices and software), and kept in a safe neighbourhood (ie business-standard web hosting). It needs insurance - ie regular backups. And it needs to be cleaned and kept fresh with regular plugin and software updates. A quarterly review would also be good, to pick up on areas where code may have gone wrong over time.
SEO is really important for your website to get found on the Internet. People look for content by entering search terms into search engines like Google. How “findable” your website is, depends on many factors, which make up the science and art of SEO:
1. Whether you have targeted your pages for well-focused keywords
2. How much competition there is for those keywords
3. How good your SEO is so you are ranked above your competition
I said that SEO is an “art” because we don’t know the exact algorithms search engines use to rank sites—they keep them a deep secret. However, Google tells us that if you follow basic principles, your site will rank better than many others. These principles include the website offering a great user experience, and having quality content that is relevant, authoritative, interesting, and shareable.
These principles include the website offering a great user experience, and having quality content that is relevant, authoritative, interesting, and shareable.
SEO is a long term solution, and is not entirely reliable—it is like waiting for the rain to fall. If you want to build traffic quickly so your website can gather leads and convert prospects, you really need a budget for advertising—you need a waterhose that you can turn on and adjust the volume.
The reality for the 2020’s is you no longer get a free ride on the Internet—you have to invest in being seen.
Digital advertising is still relatively cheap, and with the right strategy, can be stunningly effective with great returns on investment. Depending on your industry, you can purchase clicks to your website for a few dollars per acquisition. You then have to ensure your website effectively converts those incoming visitors.
The great thing about digital marketing is that it is highly measurable, and can be very highly targeted to specific market segments, whether they are segmented based on specific search terms (Google), demographic profile (Facebook and Google), on interests (Facebook), or on specific job titles (LinkedIn).
The reality for the 2020’s is you no longer get a free ride on the Internet—you have to invest in being seen.
Despite the fact that most people don’t read all their emails because they are flooded with “junk,” email still has the highest effectiveness and return on investment—when done properly. Email is a great way to genuinely communicate with your leads, prospects, and customers.
By nurturing your incoming subscribers with welcome messages, genuinely useful information, and relevant news, you create a relationship and communication channel that stays open.
Don’t use emails to sell—there is too much of that already, and it turns people off. Use emails to build trust and to educate, to show care and concern, to explain how they will benefit from your wider range of offerings.
A refined method of emailing is to use a CRM that segments your list so you can send them highly relevant mail that suits their position in the sales funnel. Like normal offline communication, relevance and appropriateness is key.
Email is a great way to genuinely communicate with your leads, prospects, and customers.
Social media is the digital equivalent of the village square—people gather to chat and share news and the latest about themselves. It is a “warm and fuzzy” platform where people let their guard down and put their feet up.
This is where your business can engage with the market. It is where you build your brand, not through sales pitches, but through sharing.
Depending on your industry, it could be sharing about your latest product development, about events in your business, or just sharing curated content from the Internet.
Social media is where people can influence your brand—positively or negatively. You should be monitoring social media for brand mentions and seeing what people are saying about you. It is definitely an ideal opportunity to publicly attend to negative reactions, and to offer acknowledgement and gratitude for positive feedback.
Paid ads on social media should reflect the mood, and be subtle rather than hard-sell. They should be visually appealing, and ideally, only be shown to those who would be interested.
Social media is where people can influence your brand—positively or negatively.
All the above-mentioned marketing tools have a common interest—to attract your market to engage with your website, and eventually, with you. In this digital age, your website is the hub, where most of your prospects will land.
A digital marketing plan has many moving parts, and is constantly evolving. There is a lot of marketing infrastructure to build once your website is up. The upside is that, once the infrastructure is up, a lot of the repetitive work can be automated. An integrated digital marketing plan allows experimentation, testing, and precise measuring, to accurately determine what works and what doesn’t.
GezzMedia offers consultation on setting up your integrated digital marketing plan. I even offer a one-hour high level overview so will know what you need to do to be prepared for 2020. Give me a call on +6421 123 5023 to find out more.
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