One of our clients recently stated to us that websites are a thing of the past and no one uses them anymore. He couldn’t have been more wrong. With Covid-19 fundamentally changing the way we interact with each other and introducing a new age of virtual working and networking, websites have never been a more critical part of your businesses marketing. But what is marketing and how does it all fit together with your website?
The fundamentals
“Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service. Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses. Some marketing is done by affiliates on behalf of a company.” – https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketing.asp
The above quote is a pretty succinct and well-worded summary of what marketing is. Basically anything you do that gets your brand out their and sells your products or services is marketing. But in the modern world marketing your business is an ongoing and sometimes tedious task that every business needs to do if they are to succeed. Social media, telemarketing, word of mouth, physical and online advertising, blogs and much more. There are so many options for how you can get your brand out there for people to see. In almost all cases though these forms of advertising commonly point back to the website where calls to action close the sale. This is why having a good website is key. It is no good having state of the art ad campaigns or marketing that then point back to an insecure, badly designed, slow or non-responsive website. That will instantly cool that warmed up lead and possibly put them off your business rather than close the sale.
Social Media
Many people still sigh when thinking about marketing on social media, but the reality is that this is the one of the best places now to promote your business. That doesn’t mean you have to be on Facebook, if that is your worry. There are plenty of social platforms out there and selecting which will work best for your business is key to your marketing strategy. If you’re a professional services company then think about how you can utilise sites link LinkedIn. If you offer products that are visually appealing then sites like instagram are going to be very suited to you. And if you’re an online shop then think about integrating to Facebook marketplace or Google products.
The key thing with social media is pick the right sites and always bring the user back to your website. Don’t post all your good content only on the social platforms as you aren’t then getting traffic to your site. Instead post the teaser on social media and bring them to the site for the full information and conversion.
We can help you with your social media strategy and run these for some of our other clients very successfully. Why not contact us to ask about how this might work for your business?
Blogging
Show your customers that you are engaged and informed about what you do by having a regular blog. Once a month is enough if you don’t have the time to do more, but this is a cheap and easy way to tell your customers and prospects about news, the latest thinking from your industry, promote a latest offer or just show a bit more about what you do. Then post out a teaser to the article on your social channels to entice those readers onto your site. Make sure you also include links to your service pages within your blog so that you can then move those users into a service page and hopefully convert them.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Whether it is making sure you have the right content for the searches you want to hit, or you want to have a fully managed and monitored SEO strategy, search engines will play a part in any good marketing strategy. It is all well and good having a website but if no one sees it then it is pretty pointless and if you aren’t actively sending people to your site through other means then SEO is something to consider.
There are varying levels of search engine optimisation that can be done to your site. The simplest form, organic SEO, is simply making sure your site is well structured with good keyword rich content and making sure you include calls to action and cross links where appropriate. This will create a good set of content that Google and other search engines can scan, understand and link to search terms when people use their websites. There is also meta data, which is behind the scenes content that sits on your site specifically for search engines to use. This includes page titles and descriptions, alt tags for imagery and sitemaps. These can all be setup in your site easily but you do need to consider what keywords you want to include and also what locations you are targeting. Make sure you don’t forget these!
But you can go further than organic if you need to. If your website is a key part of your lead generation and sales strategy then considering a fully managed SEO service is the way forwards. This will actively monitor you placement in google searches for your targeted terms and then optimise and adjust your existing and new content to help boost your ratings. Also, and possibly more importantly, a good SEO service will also look at offsite links where backlinks to your site can be created from other high ranking sites such as listing sites. This is really important as it will increase the footprint of your own website in search and improve your rankings significantly. This sort of service is intensive and requires expert input which is why many companies charge very large fees. We offer an affordable SEO solution that can help you optimise your site and compete with others in search.
What you need to do
The key thing here is that you make sure you do something. Marketing has many avenues and what is right for your business will depend on what you do, who your customers are and what budget you have available to you. But no matter what you do, at the heart of your strategy will be your website so make sure its a good one.
Talk to us today about marketing services or about get an excellent website with support included for landing pages, extra content and even design updates, all as part of your affordable monthly fee.
