Now that we live in a technologically evolved world where literally everything has gone digital, having a website is crucial for every kind of business, be it a small brick-and-mortar to a large multinational corporation. A website is used to accomplish a number of strategies that will help your business grow. It has a far more extensive reach than any other form of advertising and is the perfect means for your company to establish an online presence.
A website is also important because it helps establish credibility and it also helps you market your business to a larger audience. According to a survey, 93% of business decisions start with a search engine search. That means if you don’t have a website, you are only selling to 7% of your market. Hence proving it is extremely important to have a website if a business wants to survive in today’s competitive corporate environment. Having a website is not enough. You need to know the right ways in which you can market your website. This phenomenon is known as website marketing. In this article we’ll talk about what website marketing is and its importance and we’ll also discuss a few strategies that will help you maximize leads.
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So What Really is Website Marketing?
Website Marketing is a promotional strategy used to drive relevant traffic to the site. The main aim of website marketing is to attract people who may be interested in a company’s products or services. Increased traffic on the site means an increase in the number of opportunities of putting your business’s value proposition in front of its potential customers.
The main goal of a website marketing strategy is to make the site rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs) with the help of an effective search engine optimization strategy and other online marketing strategies like content marketing, social media engagement, search engine marketing, and other digital and offline efforts.
Effectively implemented, a website marketing strategy can help your business attract new customers and eventually lead to the expansion of your business’s share in the market.
Why Do I Need a Website For My Small Business?
Today you can have a website for pretty much anything, from beauty blogs to pet sitter websites. But still nearly half of the small businesses around the world don’t have an online presence as yet. Some of them say that they lack the resources and money to create a website of their own while most have surprisingly said that they don’t need a website in the first place, either because it’s not required or because they use social media instead.
But after the outbreak of the coronavirus which made in-person business particularly difficult, many small businesses have now realized that they need to establish an online presence in order to survive and stay relevant in today’s market. There are a number of other reasons why small businesses are considering launching their own website. Some of which include:
- Customers want to be able to find information about you from your company website. Most consumers do research online before they make a purchase, even if it’s to buy something from their local shop. If you don’t have a website, it sends a message that your business has not evolved or you may not exist anymore.
- A website helps enhance your business’s reputation and make you look more trustworthy. According to a survey, 75% of customers will judge your business’s credibility based on looking at your website design.
- The most important reason for having a website is that it gives you a platform through which you can sell your products online and reach a larger audience.
13 Website Marketing Strategies For Maximum Leads
Your website is one of your most important marketing tools today. The more you effectively promote your website, the more traffic you can generate on your website. There are around 1.7 billion websites out there which means you need a few good website marketing strategies to generate more leads that can be converted into customers. Here are a few online marketing strategies that you can use to accomplish your goals.
- Look for that Killer Website Design
Our ability to form quick first impressions is a critical reason your website needs to have top-tier visual appeal. You could have the most fantastic, compelling content on your website but if your site lacks visual appeal, visitors won’t make it far enough to appreciate your content. If you want to reach your target consumer, stellar visual communication on your website is essential. If your content is gold it needs to glitter, and that’s where effective website design can help your brand shine. For a killer website design, you need a couple of tools and frameworks. The first is to have a good website design tool like WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace. These tools are extremely intuitive and help build sleek looking websites. Work with the best user experience and user interface experts who will help you design good visual layouts and themes which will include color schemes, logo placement, call to action, and videos and infographics, and the overall navigation of the website. Lastly, test the navigation of the website to make sure its user friendly
- Know Your Ideal Audience
It is crucial to know and understand the requirements of your audience. Identifying the audience you’re designing for will help you figure out the best way to approach your new site’s look and feel. You’ll likely take a different approach to appeal to teenagers and youngsters then you will to target people from the corporate environment.
- Know Your Competition
You need to know what website marketing strategies your competition is using and which ones are working for them and which ones ain’t. For example, if you have a business that belongs to the healthcare sector like a clinic or hospital and your competition has recently launched a campaign for a new type of drug or test that it is offering, you should also launch a marketing campaign for any unique test and vaccine being given at your facility.
- Create Viral Content That Appeals to Your Audience
In simple terms, the word “viral” means an ongoing topic everyone is talking about and is eager to learn more about. Viral content means a content piece that talks about a viral topic and which is circulated rapidly and widely from one web user to another. Many marketers dream of having their great content go viral across social networks. So it is important that you learn and then create content that has the potential to go viral. You have to keep in mind that the content itself must be worthy of being shared. It has to solve a particular problem, enhance your reader’s life or make something better.
- Optimize Your Website for Search Engines
On the first page alone, the first five organic results account for 67.60% of all the clicks. That’s how important it is for your website to rank high on search engines because if not then users might not even visit your website. To help your site get found in search, optimize your site for search. Focus on the keywords that have low competition and high search frequency to help you create compelling blog posts customers, and will get noticed. Using the right SEO strategy will help you as you focus on promoting your site. The keywords you select must be added to the title, headings, content, and Meta description. If you add images, remember to include the keyword in the picture title tag and the alt tag. Promoting your website by using traditional SEO is one of the best ways to gain natural traffic and a higher ranking.
- Make The Most of Email Marketing to Engage With Your Customers
In 2017 Statista reported that there were over 3.7 million email users, and that number is set to grow to 4.3 billion users by 2022. Emails aren’t just limited to welcoming your new customers, it can also help to push customers to your website with promotions, deals, discounts, and contests. Having an active email list is a great way to get people back to your website, let them know of new content, or directly sell them a product. Make no mistake, email is not yet dead. To make the most of your email marketing campaigns, give you some incentives to subscribe to your newsletter and make it easy for users to subscribe.
- Use PPC to Reach More Customers In Lesser time
Paid search is a form of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, where businesses can create an ad on search engines, such as Google and Bing, that appears as a top search result. It gives you a way to rank highly in search, even if your site doesn’t yet rank in search organically. Because you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, it’s considered a cost-effective marketing strategy. It helps you garner traffic on your website quickly.
- Use Remarketing Strategies to Bring Back Those Leads
In digital marketing, remarketing is the practice of serving ads across the internet to people who have already visited your website. It allows your company to seem like they’re “following” people around the internet by serving ads on the websites and platforms they use most. Remarketing is a great way to advertise your products and services to people who are already familiar with your company but didn’t convert into customers due to some reasons. On average, only 2% of your website visitors convert. Remarketing goes after that other 98%. In fact, customers who see retargeted ads are 70% more likely to convert to your website.
- Optimize Your Website For Social Media
Optimizing your website for social media is not the same as social media marketing. It means you need to have visual elements like images and videos on your website that can be shared on social media networks. You should also place share buttons on the pages you want to be shared on social networks and make sure when a user clicks the share button, the generated snippet is well-formatted. Adding the necessary open graph meta tags and using image sizes and formats supported by all major networks is recommended.
- Reduce That Bounce Rate
A high bounce could mean you don’t have an enticing, well-organized landing page. You might not have a landing page at all, creating CTA confusion on your main home page. You can reduce the bounce rate of your website by improving your content’s readability, adding compelling CTAs, improving your brand’s storytelling, and keeping your blog posts fresh with the right content.
- Upgrade Old Blog Posts
To make sure your webpage has content that people would actually want to read, you need to upgrade your content. We often share information that was previously but due to new discoveries have now changed. Make sure you read your previous content and upgrade the information where needed.
- A/B Testing
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is the process of comparing two versions of a web page, email, or other marketing asset and measuring the difference in performance. Creating a website or email marketing campaign is just the first step in marketing. Once you have a website, you’ll want to know if it helps or hinders sales.
A/B testing lets you know what words, phrases, images, videos, testimonials, and other elements work best. Even the simplest changes can impact conversion rates.
- Monitor, Analyze, Repeat
Frequent website analysis is an essential part of ensuring your site is efficient, competitive, and useful for your users, and specific analysis checklists can help you stay on task. Most traditional website analysis begins with examining traffic volume and patterns, to monitor: where your web traffic comes from, which pages on your site are most popular, and which traffic sources convert most effectively (and on which pages). This information can then be used to single out a website’s most successful pages and traffic-generation techniques and increase the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. This information can be collected with the help of website analytics tools like Google Analytics, Zendesk Explore, SEMrush, Alexa, Ahrefs, and more.
Over to You
Website marketing is a very important marketing tool. It helps represent your business on the Internet and it’s one of the most important digital marketing channels you can use to get more traffic or make more sales, therefore having an effective website marketing strategy is important. We are a website marketing company and we have some knowledgeable and skilled experts on board who can help you market your website and successfully generate relevant traffic on it.