Ask any marketer, and they would say that your website is the perfect platform for online marketing.
The Internet is an infinite universe of its own, and your website is the best tool to represent your business in the infinite ocean and connect you with the right people who will buy your product/services.
Every organization that wants to do business online has to have a well-established website marketing strategy.
For firms looking to succeed in the insanely competitive online industry, not following an effective web marketing plan can result in their business being forgotten, AKA Not a viable option.
So, you must have realized by now that website marketing is something you need to learn quickly and adapt to even faster.
Keeping that in mind, let us start this blog where you’ll discover what website marketing is, why it’s valuable to have a website marketing plan, and a step-by-step guide to boost your website online effectively.
What is website marketing?
Website marketing is one of the simplest methods to boost relevant traffic to your website. The aim is to engage with people who would be interested in your business.
A surge of relevant traffic means more chances; to convert visitors into customers. Thus, your company website is one of the best online marketing channels, and you should pay more attention to it while planning your digital marketing strategy.
Why should you build a website marketing strategy?
One of my duties as a digital marketing manager is to demonstrate to my clients why they should have a robust website marketing strategy and how it would work for their company.
More than just SEO
Not so long ago, marketers made the error of assuming the answer was SEO to the question of website marketing.
However, the waters of digital marketing run deep with various players in the fields, including but not limited to content marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing, email marketing, and more. Just a portion of the variable is SEO.
To leverage most if not all available channels to promote your company online, you need a well-planned website marketing campaign.
Strategy is important
Without a laid-out plan and strategy, your online marketing efforts is a play of hit and miss while shooting in the dark.
The results will be meek if not a total failure. Your website marketing strategy answers the most important campaign queries, such as your website marketing plan’s goals and realistic ways of achieving them.
You need to know exactly which resources to use, how to use them, and what to expect from each tool when planning a strategy and schedule.
Besides, your digital marketing plan will make it easier for you and your team to understand your business goals and align with your strategy.
Get ahead of the curve
The way digital marketing trend is rising, it is certain that sooner or later, many if not all organizations will climb the digital marketing bandwagon, making it will be very difficult for anyone new to make it big then.
Thus, now is the time for you to take your online marketing more seriously and get ahead of the curve, and the best way to start is by designing a plan for web marketing.
Now that you know what is Website Marketing and why should you care about it, you must be thinking of how can I market my website?
Do not worry, I will take a deep dive into that as well. Let us get started with how to do website marketing.
How to do website marketing?
In order to effectively market your business website on the Internet, your website marketing strategy should include getting the most out of all your digital marketing channels.
Here are the 8 steps for you to follow and create your own all-encompassing website marketing strategy.
- Perform Website Design and User Experience Review
- Perform SEO Audit and Optimize Your Site For SEO
- Perform Content Audit of Your Website and Prepare Content Marketing Plan
- Promote Your Website on Social Media
- Use Paid Ads to Promote Your Product/Services
- Set Email Marketing to Engage Your Visitors
- Set Remarketing Ads to Get Users Back on Your Website
- Track and Analyze Your Website and Optimize It Constantly
Let us zoom in on each of them.
Perform Website Design and User Experience Review
The very first task is to develop a website that portrays your business correctly.
When I say it portrays your business, I do not necessarily mean its UI (User Interface) or aesthetic side of it but the accuracy and quality of its content.
Think of your website as a brick-and-mortar store; you should not ensure that it looks nice and inviting from the outside but should also offer a great shopping experience for customers that visit the store. AKA, your website should not just look nice but also offer a memorable user experience to visitors.
Take the time to evaluate your website before launching any campaigns to make sure that:
- The site structure is simple and hierarchical- A strong site structure allows both users and search engines to access the website and get the information they need quickly. Following the basic rule, it should not take users more than 3 clicks to access every page on your website from the homepage.
- The website is user-friendly and functional- Analyze the user-friendliness of your website using the concepts of SEO-friendly web design and attempt to eliminate design features that add unnecessary complications to the navigation flow.
- The information on your website is accurate and updated- Be sure that your website offers users what they want and need to know about your business and the products/services you offer. Visual elements such as photos, infographics, and videos are a great idea to really get your customers to focus.
- The website is fast and mobile-friendly- A large chunk of your website visitors will access your site from their mobile devices, so ensure that your website is responsive, mobile-friendliness and offers a refined user experience on mobile devices
Perform SEO Audit and Optimize Your Site For SEO
Thinking about your SEO strategy is the next step. A well-thought-of SEO strategy would improve your SERP rankings and effectively and gradually bring in organic search engine traffic, which is every marketer’s dream.
SEO is the method of enhancing the website’s visibility on search engines and consists of a series of steps:
Technical SEO- Ensure that your website is void of crawl errors and other problems that could hinder search engines from correctly indexing your website.
On-Page SEO– Make sure your website has an On-Page SEO element on all pages and your content is easy to read by users as well as search engine bots.
SEO Content- The most important step that many marketers ignore is creating content that matches the user’s intent, not just search engines.
Off-Page SEO– To advertise your website to obtain high-quality backlinks from other authoritative websites.
Local SEO– Upgrade your site structure and content for local SEO which will enable more location-aware searches, which will result in more footfall for our brick-and-mortar shop.
You should also optimize your website for modern SEO, including
incorporating schema markup and enhancing your content for rich snippets.
Perform Content Audit of Your Website and Prepare Content Marketing Plan
Evaluating your content and developing a content marketing strategy is the next step of the website marketing strategy.
You literally are promoting the content on your website when you market your website online, which is why it is called content marketing.
The key aim of content marketing is to enable you to create the best kind of content that can draw and sustain engagement with new users on your website.
In order to build a good content plan, first, you need to:
- Conduct keyword research and find out which SEO keywords your content can target.
- Perform an analysis of competitors to figure out what is working and what is not for other market players.
- You also need to study Google search results to figure out what kind of content Google prefers for your target keywords in terms of the length of the content, the kind of images/video to be used, etc.)
- You can also create a content marketing calendar where you have a list of topics/keywords to establish when each piece of content will be created, the owner of the task and how it will be marketed after publishing.
- Companies that work on an ongoing marketing strategy for content are more likely to thrive online versus businesses that occasionally post content willy-nilly without a plan.
Check out my 9-step guide on how to develop a content marketing strategy for more information
Promote Your Website on Social Media
A content marketing plan will ensure that you have a steady flow of content being created. You already know the next step; it is to promote your content on social media networks.
How to do that? Follow the below steps:
- Create your business accounts/pages on targeted Social Networks- Your first objective is to make business pages on social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, etc., that are important to your organization. These are the networks that are frequented by your potential clients.
- Complete your Social Accounts and link them to your website- After that, ensure that the business pages are configured correctly with all required details. The next step is to integrate links of your social accounts to the website. Additionally, add the appropriate schemas as well, which will help search engines correctly identify your website with the social pages.
- Work towards increasing your social media following- Getting a company page without followers will not be fruitful for your business. You need to identify and communicate with audiences interested in your business and influencers in your niche that could promote your pages.
- Creating a calendar for social media- The effectiveness of your social media is dependent on the content of your posts. You ought to periodically retrieve high-quality content for your social media networks. That is the perfect way to get users’ attention and develop a following for your company. A good place to start is to build a calendar for social media and specify what and when to post.
Use Paid Ads to Promote Your Product/Services
You will know one thing as soon as you get started with SEO and social media marketing.
It takes a long time for SEO to work and organically gain a respectable number of followers on social media. One way to get faster results is paid advertisement.
You can get targeted traffic easily with paid ads and jumpstart your conversion process. While there are various advertisement channels, the most common and effective ones are:
- Google Ads: Google Ads allows you to target and connect with users based on the search terms they use on Google. It also allows you to show your ads on other Google resources such as YouTube, Gmail, along with websites that engage in Google AdSense.
- Facebook Ads: The up-and-coming Facebook Ads platform allows you to promote your Facebook page, posts to get followers or show your ads to people on Facebook, Instagram or Facebook messenger to get traffic on your site.
Both strategies are very effective, but you should be careful not to spend a lot of marketing budget on ads without a good Return on Investment (ROI).
It is advisable to start with a lower budget and gradually increase it once you start getting more results.
Set Up Email Marketing to Engage Your Visitors
Out of all the different online marketing strategies, Email marketing is one of the most powerful phenomena for effective web marketing.
In reality, the growth of your email list should be one of the most important targets of your website marketing strategy.
An active email list will surely engage your target audience and attract them enough to come back to your website.
It will inform them about your fresh content or market a product directly to them. Do not let the rumors fool you; the magic of email is far from dead.
Keeping that in mind, I am going to share a few email marketing tips that will help you make the most of your email marketing efforts:
- Ensure that the process of subscribing to your email list is simple and straightforward. The best way to do it is by adding the newsletter sign up box that is effortlessly accessible to your website visitors.
- Awarding rewards to users such as free eBooks, cheat sheets, and free software trial will go a long way to getting more people to give you their email address, AKA lead magnets.
- Don’t be the sheep that cried wolf, meaning if you promise something to your subscribers such as monthly newsletters, free tutorials, ensure that you keep your commitments.
- When a user signs up to your newsletter, they trust you to send them content that is useful to them. Don’t break their trust by sending yet another sales heavy promotional email that lies dormant in their spam box.
For more insights, check my blog about what is email marketing and how can you make it for your business
Set Remarketing Ads to Get Users Back on Your Website
The rule of 7 is one of the oldest ones in the marketing bible. In a nutshell, rule of 7 says that it takes a user an average of seven interactions with your brand before making a buying decision.
You must keep this in mind while creating your website marketing strategy because this rule surely applies to online marketing as well.
In terms of website marketing, this indicates that you must get users to revisit your website at least a certain number of times before they progress to the next phase of the digital marketing funnel.
Publishing new content on a regular basis, along with promoting your content via social media and email marketing, are both fantastic ways to do this. Still, there is one more highly successful approach, and this is remarketing.
With remarketing, you use advertising networks to reconnect with users who have visited your website at least on one occasion.
Some of the most popular platforms to offer remarketing ads include Google Ads, Facebook, and perhaps even Twitter.
Various benefits of using remarketing ads include more targeted traffic, reduced advertising costs, and a higher conversion rate.
Track and Analyze Your Website and Optimize It Constantly
No marketing plan is complete without careful monitoring of the results. All things can be and need to be measured and evaluated when it comes to digital marketing.
There is no evaluation and analysis without the right tools and metrics in place.
You will get the data you want from Google Analytics in most situations, but you need to make sure you have Google Analytics enabled and correctly set up on your website.
The most prominent targets in a website marketing strategy are driving more traffic to your website and improving the conversion rate by increasing the number of sales, email subscribers, and more.
In Google analytics, these objectives can be easily tracked and analyzed, meaning that you can make the most informed decisions about the next steps of your website’s digital marketing strategy.
Conclusion
If it wasn’t clear before, your business website is one of the best platforms for marketing, and there’s no question about its value.
You need to review your website before launching a web marketing campaign and make sure that it represents your brand effectively.
To derive optimum results from your website marketing strategy, ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, fast, responsive and easy to use with a simplified page hierarchy.
Next, investing your time in SEO is important for just about any online marketing strategy to be successful. Everything else becomes a piece of cake once you can get your SEO right and start ranking for relevant keywords.
Dive into social media marketing campaigns and paid ads while you wait for your SEO efforts to bring organic results. Both social media marketing and paid are to urge faster results in bringing targeted traffic to the website.
Once traffic starts pouring in, it is essential to consider the plans for email marketing and remarketing. Both channels give other channels a run for their money when it comes to turning website visitors into paying customers.
Lastly, review your website regularly to guarantee that content is up-to-date and fulfills the user’s purpose of visiting your website.
If you enjoyed this article and learned something new today, consider sharing this on your social media profile.
Leave a comment if you have any other suggestions while creating a website marketing strategy.