A website is one of the best marketing tools for any business in the 21st century. Thus, it is crucial to set the foundation for your website strategy. It is critical in establishing your brand, generating leads, building your customer base and growing your business in general. These days you can build your own website with very little investment required, so there really is no excuse not to have a website to promote your business.
In order to get the maximum benefits from your site, it is important to integrate it into your overall marketing strategy. In other words, your site should support your other marketing efforts, and vice versa. This synergy will drive more sales, increase your profits, and make your business more successful in 2020! Let’s have a look at how to accomplish this goal.
Your Marketing Strategy & Your Website
Above all, your website should be completely congruous with your overall marketing and communications strategy. If you do not have a formal communications strategy, marketing plan, it is highly recommended to create one before you start working on your website. Your marketing strategy should cover the crucial aspects of how you are going to grow your business through your communications, and your website will be a critical part of that. Therefore, your strategy will dictate how you design and present your website.
One of the aspects to cover in your formal communications strategy is your messaging. Think of how you want your business to appear and the key messages you look to get across to your audience. This messaging should be deeply rooted in your website. It is important to run a critical eye over your site to make sure every aspect – from the copy to the visual elements – are on message.
Your website should represent your brand – and it is recommended to check out a branding firm if you don’t have experience with this – as it is defined in your overall communications strategy. Your strategy should lay out what your brand stands for and its key values. And you need to reflect all this on your website. This branding can come across on a website in a variety of ways. Colors can convey certain qualities: for example, dark blue is generally associated with traditional and trustworthiness. Fonts and other style elements can also convey values, as can imagery and graphics.
Social Media & Your Website
Many businesses tend to think of social media and their website as two separate elements. However, these two essential digital marketing elements are closely related. Both will perform best when used in close coordination with each other.
Your website is a great opportunity to drive traffic to your social media platforms and grow your followers there. You can do it in a variety of ways, the most basic being to have social media icons showing on your site with links to your platforms. You can also include a social media feed and various calls to action to your website. They encourage visitors to visit your social media platforms and follow you.
Equally, you can use your social media posts to get your followers to visit your website. A great way to drive traffic to your website is to include a corporate link or a particular piece of content from your site to your social media posts. You can also leverage your activity on Quora. Just direct people back to your website: either by directly linking it when appropriate or simply by having your website link in your profile.
Offline Marketing & Your Website
Your website plays a critical role even when it comes to non-digital forms of marketing such as word of mouth marketing. New customers get to know about your business through their friends, family or colleagues who are your existing clients. Even though these conversations happen “offline”, the first thing they will do after such conversation is looking for your business up online! This is where your website plays a crucial role, and there is an important thing to take into consideration!
Ideally, your potential customers may have a link sent to him/her by the person who is referring you. It will still be great if this person gives your new potential customers the correct or approximate URL of your website. However, most likely they will just get the name (perhaps, partial or incorrect) of your business.
To make sure your website supports you in turning this word of mouth referral into an actual customer, you should have three things in place:
1) Your site’s URL should be simple and easy to remember. And your clients will be able to remember and pass it on
2) You should have great SEO in place, so your site ranks highly in Google searches. This way your potential customer will find you before your competitors
3) You should have a professional, engaging site that will convert your potential customers when they have found you.
