There are lots of things to consider when you are designing and building a new website.  Unfortunately, one of the most commonly forgotten elements of a website is the online marketing strategy.

If we consider all of the successful websites in the World, they all have a marketing strategy and plan.  Long gone are the days of, “if you build it, they will come”, in fact I don’t think it ever existed, I think some early Internet adopters just got lucky and bloomed.  Most online businesses fail when they don’t have a marketing plan.  Consider this; you wouldn’t build a water-slide theme park in the middle of the Sahara desert, without having a good marketing plan.

So, have you considered how you are going to drive visitors and potential customers to your website? – do you have an online marketing plan?

The online market place is becoming more and more crowded and is often hyper competitive, as every company small and large, jockey for capturing more market share, increasing website visitors and converting visitors into customers.  This is why, when all the elements of a website are considered, the most important aspect is to have a complete strategy and plan for the marketing of your website.

More often than not marketing of the website is an afterthought for website owners.  Clearly having a strategy around how the business is targeting their potential customers online provides an edge over most of your competition and provides clear goals.  It is no secret that marketing is one of the most essential elements that contribute to the success, or failure, of any business, whether that be online or offline and it should be considered up front, prior to the design and development of any website.

Typically an online marketing strategy will detail a plan to utilise the following variables:-

  • Age and sex of the target audience
  • Location of the target audience (geo-location)
  • Goals of the website (e.g. to make sales, email contact, information resource, etc)
  • Expectations of the target audience (e.g. expecting to buy on the site, but it’s only an information source, etc)
  • How the target audience look for the products and services on offer (e.g. search engines, like Google, social media, news sites, etc)
  • Is the website built in an SEO friendly manner? (e.g. total flash websites are impossible to market in search engines)
  • Is the website visually appealing to my audience?
  • Where do my audience spend most of their time interacting?
  • Plan for increasing the presence of the website in search engines
  • Plan for increasing visitors from other means, like social networks, social media and outlets
  • Syndication of content through buying and product networks
  • Email marketing campaigns
  • Pay Per Click campaign analysis

Let’s consider only one aspect from the above variables - search engine optimisation.  There are over 27 billion searches per month on Google worldwide.  Of these searches it is highly likely that there are many millions of searches occurring for the products and services that you offer.  So, if your website is not positioning itself within the top 10 results then you are missing out on this visitor traffic to your website and missing out on customers.  So, where is your site ranked for the generic terms referring to your products or services?

Don’t put off your online marketing and SEO strategy, for a no-obligation free consultation on your SEO and online marketing strategy then please contact Chris Diprose.