Your website is the center of your online marketing presence. It is a place on the Internet over which you have complete control over the visuals, messaging and content. Everything else that you do online should take visitors to this website.
But that’s all, there are many other online channels to consider, from various social media to paid and organic search to local listings. As with all these other marketing channels, it’s best to plan everything around your website and work from there. Here are the steps to accomplish this.
1. Publish a working website
First things first, you need to build an effective website! I’ve talked about our model of marketing maturity before; It’s about making sure the basic marketing elements are in place before moving on to the more advanced elements. You have to crawl before you can walk and run! As you can see, a marketing website tops the list for our initial build phase. If you don’t have a good marketing website, it’s time to fix it.
This means building a website with modern promise and trust elements. It should be mobile-friendly with a smart, simple design that is easy to navigate. It should have a strong SEO strategy with metadata, keyword research, and off-page elements.
There should be a call to action on every page with the aim of increasing conversions. Also, you’ll want to share content in a variety of forms – blog posts, videos and podcasts – that is valuable to your audience and helps establish you as a resource for any information you may have in your area of ​​expertise.
Once the basics of a great website are in place, you can begin to shift your focus to integrating other online marketing channels into your plan.
2. Build Organic Social Media
We also include social media in the foundational building phase of the Marketing Maturity Index, and this is because social media has become an essential part of most people’s daily online experience. Sites like Facebook all have billions of daily users, and therefore it is important that you have a presence on these major social sites.
When setting up profiles on these sites, you want to make sure that your messaging and design are in line with what’s happening on your website. The voice and tone adopted in the logo, color schemes, and copywriting should be in sync with what visitors will find when they visit your website. A disconnect in look and feel between social assets and your website can close off possibilities and reduce trust in your brand.
Once you’ve established a basic profile (which includes your website URL, of course!), you can begin to leverage the power of social media to actively drive visitors to your website. Sharing the content you put on your website is one of the easiest ways to do this. Whenever you create a blog post, explainer video, webinar or podcast episode, share this content on social media. Be a bit vague with content, letting followers know what it is, and a link that takes them to your website’s content.
3. Build Email Marketing
Email marketing is an essential component of an overall marketing system, but it can sometimes feel isolated and isolated from your website. Since you are communicating directly with your audience through email, what does the website have to do with it?
There should be a symbiotic relationship between your email list and your website. A great website includes lead capture forms so interested visitors can sign up for your mailing list, and in return you can collect valuable information about who they are.
Also, the content of emails sent to your list should include back links to your website. Perhaps you send out a monthly newsletter, which can link to relevant blog content on your site. You may send emails about new products that are about to launch, and the link in the email directs readers to a page on your site that contains exclusive insider information about a publicly announced product.
4. Add & Search Paid Socials
Once you have established an organic presence on social media, you can start expanding your marketing horizons to paid social and paid search. With paid social and search efforts, you can create ads targeted at specific groups. This could mean people living in a certain geographic area who are already customers, or people with a demographic profile similar to the customers you already have.
After segmenting your audience and creating ad copy that speaks to each subgroup of the population, the final step in setting up a successful advertising campaign is to have a landing page on the website designed specifically for each ad.
A landing page designed for messaging in advertising can help increase conversion rates in paid social and search ads. Instead of directing visitors to a general page on your website, they’re greeted with information specific to the ad campaign that first caught their attention. This means it will be easier for them to find the information they want and then take action.
5. Integrate Offline and Online Strategy
While online marketing is essential to a modern business, it is important not to neglect an offline strategy as well. Especially for local businesses, advertising is often of importance in more traditional channels, such as a local print ad in a city newspaper or a direct mail campaign to neighbors.
Even though these strategies are taking place offline, it is still possible to drive traffic to your website with offline marketing efforts. Creating a UTM code is an effective way to track where traffic is coming from. In fact, if you create separate codes for each offline strategy, you can measure the results of each print ad, direct mailer, or radio spot you play.
An effective website should be the focus of any business’s marketing efforts. Whether online or offline, all marketing roads should lead back to that site. It empowers you to better understand your audience, control your messaging, and increase conversions at each stage of the customer journey. But a great website cannot exist in a vacuum; It needs all the other marketing efforts around it to be its most effective self.
If you liked this post, check out our Small Business Guide to Website Design.
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