How to Make Your Website the Cornerstone of Your Marketing Strategy
Utilizing your website as the cornerstone of your marketing campaign will allow for a consistent brand, easier tracking, targeted traffic and new opportunities for your visitors!
Picture this. You are a digital marketing manager and you have been tasked with creating your company’s new digital marketing strategy for the next 12-18 months. Your company is relatively new to the world of digital marketing, but your boss is pushing you and your department to up your digital marketing game in order to supply a new business function with a steady stream of qualified leads.
Where should I start?
So many small to medium-sized businesses have found themselves in a similar position, and many of them are approaching these tasks with little strategic direction to meet their goals. In order to set your business and yourself up for success, you really need to start at the ground level of your digital marketing strategy to determine if are equipped with the proper digital framework. Setting your company off on the right foot with a website that can scale as you grow is critical to avoid handcuffing yourself to inferior technology that does not meet your specific needs.
When planning a business’ marketing strategy, it’s important to identify specific end goals for every marketing process. In this blog post, we will cover four ways to utilize the website as the cornerstone of any marketing strategy, and the goals for each process.
1. Create a branded, comprehensive experience that connects on another level with site visitors: emotions guide decision making!
The website might be the only thing a client ever has seen from a company if they come across the business via Google search results. It’s best to use this opportunity to tell clients the company’s story. People like to buy from people they enjoy working with, and letting people get to know the company through the website is the first step in the process. An equally important part of the website is the branding elements and colors the team choses to use throughout the design. Using the website as the company’s brand guide for all other collateral will set a consistent brand presence throughout.
2. Identify how site visitors interact with the site and gather useful information to inform future marketing and sales decisions
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” - John Wanamaker
The frustrating nature of marketing and advertising used to be tracking results was almost impossible. Today, we have countless apps and techniques we can use to track traffic and conversions, but how well are the everyday marketers actually using the data these systems provide? Are they A/B testing landing pages? When was the last time the marketing team wrote a blog from the data collected from the FAQ page?
The first step of truly utilizing Google Analytics and the website to its full potential is to connect other marketing processes to the site. Allow site visitors to sign up for the email newsletter, include the URL on print materials, business cards, ads, and email footers, and link social media accounts to landing pages. Once the site is integrated into all the other marketing processes, it’s easier to track how many people are being marketed to, who those people are, and what content or service do they need next?
3. Continue improving your site through SEO to attract more potential buyers with a targeted approach!
The most well-known brands in the world are constantly investing into their site’s SEO value. Why is that? It’s because the benefit of SEO almost always outweighs the cost. Different from pay-per-click, traffic from organic search is a result of creating valuable content, earning relevant backlinks, and building trust throughout the internet.
While some keywords are more valuable, they may not result in the most fruitful returns for a specific company. Identifying long tail keywords that involve the services and areas the company can provide is a very valuable tactic that needs to come at the forefront of an SEO strategy.
The term ‘long tail keywords’ is a name for searches that are more targeted, since they have more keywords in the search. So instead of searching for ‘legal marketing’, one might try a long-tail search for ‘digital marketing agency specializing in legal marketing’. The second phrase might have less monthly searches, but the traffic searching those keywords are more qualified and have a better idea of what they are looking for. A good SEO campaign will target lots of these long tail searches, leading to more targeted traffic to your site.
4. Don’t leave a lead down a dead end, always offer more content or an opportunity to reach out! Increase that conversion rate!
A website cannot be a strong cornerstone if it doesn’t cater to its visitors' needs. Each website and each company’s goals are different, and assessing the goals in which site visitors need to achieve and ignoring them can lead to very different buyer journeys. Many website design teams will create a website that includes information about the company, case studies, testimonials, calls to action and blog posts, but rarely will design teams really take the time to identify how these elements will work with one another to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time. Understanding the user experience of a site allows for any team to boost conversion rates, increase email newsletter sign-ups, and convert more leads.
Speaking of not leading a prospect down a dead end....
We at efelle have worked with companies of all sizes identify ways to make the leap from a stale, dated website to a modern, attractive website with digital marketing strategies implemented to help drive conversions. We can help you, too. Give us a call at 206.384.4909 or contact us through our form to get the conversation started.