Do You Have a Website Marketing Strategy for Your Business?

A smart website marketing strategy should begin with well-defined goals and milestones. How many site visitors, customer inquiries, newsletter subscribers, or followers do you hope to gain? Where do you want to be visible online? Is your website marketing goal to sell more products, announce a new product, or increase awareness for your brand / cause?

Once you’ve established the KPIs, you need to create a website marketing plan to achieve them and, if you have the budget, employ a website marketing company to implement!

Is your online marketing strategic?

Each element of your online marketing plan should define the specific activities you or your website marketing company will engage in to accomplish your goals. Each activity should be specific and measurable. For example, you might:

Develop 10 additional pages of website content to add value to your website in terms of user experience (and to help SEO!)

Distribute monthly email newsletters to improve your customer communications and to leverage your existing database.

Invest in Search Engine Marketing or an Auckland Google Adwords Company to generate new leads / increase your website ROI by 25% by end of financial year.

Ramp up your Search Engine Optimisation to increase your brand positioning and website presence in your industry for relevant keywords

Develop and distribute PR to increase apparent activity and awareness of your brand

Purchase banner / display advertising to generate brand awareness and website traffic

Set up a blog, Facebook and Twitter account to engage on a face-to-face level with your customers.

Are your priorities in the right place?

Do you have the resource to populate a blog? A six month old blog posts will end up doing more damage to your brand than good. Why have a Twitter account when you don’t have a blog? Do you know the difference?? Social media and blog posts need to be relevant and ideally integrated with your search engine optimisation campaign as well – so they need to be strategic.

Email newsletters should be distributed on a regular basis so that your customers expect them, get used to them and so that you are fresh in their minds. Most people don’t appreciate random emails!

A website marketing strategy is a moving target which you need to be ahead of. All its elements should be aligned to achieve the common goal of driving highly qualified traffic to your site to drive ‘conversions’ / sales / sign ups.

Finally, website traffic and conversion reporting and analysis will help you understand what’s working currently, and where the gaps are. Are your website marketing activities accomplishing the predefined goals?

Website marketing is an ongoing process that requires smart tactics and a decent budget; it’s not a one-off effort that your IT guy can handle in between fixing laptops! Make it a priority in your business.