There has been a lot of hype about online marketing but the truth is that for any business it offers real benefits – and for start up businesses it can give you real brand presence for a fraction of the marketing spend that traditional media would cost.
Online marketing allows you to play God and gives you the opportunity to build your brand and play to your key strengths. Online marketing can bring in a whole new set of customers or woo past customers and make them fall in love with your brand offer all over again. The possibilities are limitless and you can access an incredible amount of people at a fraction of the cost of traditional media advertising.
Calculate how much it would cost for you to advertise daily in all the national newspapers, TV and radio stations and the audience you would reach. The cost would be prohibitive for even the biggest furniture retailers. Yet you can access a similar audience day in and day out for the next few years just by getting the online basics right with a minimal investment.
The key to a successful online presence is ignoring what other people are doing and concentrating on what is right for you. While the big brands may be dazzling with cultist viral marketing campaigns and online glitter, most businesses can start by getting the basics right and see a return on their initial investment.
The first step with any online presence is the website. Obviously the design is important and should reflect key aspects of your brand. Invest in good design and good structure. The website should last at least three years so bear this in mind when you are costing it out. Your site needs to be quick, user friendly, accessible and interesting.
When you are setting a budget for a new website or a redesign ensure there is a good chunk of money set aside for search engine optimisation. The vast majority of your traffic will come from search engines. If you don’t have either good organic or paid for search ratings or as happens more usually a mixture of both, then your investment in your website is redundant. Check out google for more information on paid for search engine optimisation.
The key measures for effective website performance should be whether the site is attracting the right visitors and secondly whether you are managing you to convert these. A good web statistics package should be able to deliver the right information, ensuring you can monitor your marketing activity and return on investment as well as giving you valuable insights into your customer behaviour which can be fed back into other areas of the business such as buying. If you can follow the behaviour of early exit sessions based on search keywords and in-site search you’ll know the intent of the visitors as well as weaknesses in your offer.
Search engine optimisation should be considered before the site is even built, as it will depend on features you build into your site. If you already have a site that isn’t performing well on the optimisation side you would be well advised to revisit this aspect.
By building in the right features to your website you will achieve better organic listings, an increasingly important feature of the online market at the moment and one which is going to save you significant amounts on marketing your website and paying for online search optimisation.
However, achieving good search engine status by natural search results can be a long term project so most companies would be advised to mix both methods for optimum results. Talk to the company who is doing your website and they should be able to advise you what type of optimisation suits your business.