Web Marketing
Having a gorgeously designed and brilliantly constructed website is great, but if you don’t have a marketing plan, you will not fully maximise your investment.
Web marketing, or digital marketing, is an umbrella term for various methods of bringing your website (and therefore your business) to the attention of your prospective clients. The main strategies for web marketing are as follows:
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - this is the process of boosting your website ranking in the 'organic' (ie non-paid) search engine results and is a fundamental part of digital marketing because trillions of searches are conducted every year to find products and services. Search is often the primary source of digital traffic for brands and complements other marketing channels. Successful SEO depends on a site being developed to enable search engine ‘robots’ to crawl content and assess its legitimacy, relevance and effectiveness to attract traffic.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - this is paid placement of adverts on search engine results pages (the ads that appear top or right of the main 'organic' search results) for various business relevant keywords. Ads are paid for on a Pay Per Click (PPC) model (see below)
- Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) - this is similar to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) but extends beyond search engine results pages to other websites via advertising networks - for example news websites, blogs etc. - or directly on social media websites.
- Display Advertising - this is related to PPC in that it involves paid adverts on other websites and/or social media websites but is priced on a pay-per-view model (eg: cpm or cost per 1000 views)
- Affiliate Marketing - this is a very specialised form of PPC/display advertising where owners of other websites market your product/service directly on their website and, via tracking technologies, take a commission on successful sale. This process is usually managed via a third-party Affiliate Marketing network which verifies clicks and sales and calculates commission.
- Email Marketing - the sending of regular newsletters is one of the most established and proven methods of reaching out directly to your audience. Providing value is key here - you want to provide content/offers over and above what's on the website in order to keep subscribers reading and signed-up.
- Social Media Marketing - this is another great way to connect directly with your audience via audience appropriate channels (eg) Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. It is similar to email marketing in that you want to provide value to keep engagement but each different social channel has different formats, strengths and weaknesses that may suit particular marketing approaches and/or products/brands - eg: Instagram is very visual, YouTube is primarily video etc.
- Content Marketing - this is the process of creating original, relevant content, typically in the form of web content, blogging and vlogging, videos and ebooks - this content can then be used to support other marketing efforts such as SEO and SEM and also directly marketed via blog search engines or syndicated to other websites.
Your website is at the heart of your web marketing plan. Each of these methods will drive visitors back to your site, so it is critical that your site is up to date and reflects your business, products and services professionally and with your visitors’ expectations in mind. These visitors can then be converted into 'sales' for your business in whatever form that might take - eg product sales, enquiries, sales leads etc.
Before you invest in any of these strategies, it is vital that you prepare properly:
- Identify your target audience
- Set your budget
- Understand your goals and measures
- Choose your strategies
- Undertake keyword research
- Create compelling, high-quality content
- Choose your platforms
Talk to us, we build search engine friendly websites and work with you and our expert partners to help your business grow and succeed.