What is Web Marketing?

" Web Marketing is the marketing of products or services over the Internet, email or wireless media. "

This can include marketing via:

• Your website
• Search engines (like Google)
• Email
• Social media websites (Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn)
• Text messages

Why should you use Web Marketing?

• The web is the biggest and best source of information available to your customers.
  - They use it to research, compare and source products and services.
• It’s highly targeted and more cost effective than traditional forms of marketing (like TV, Print & radio).
• Web marketing is an interactive marketing channel- it provides quicker and easier communication and online ordering.
• A professionally designed web presence reinforces credibility for your business.

The 6 Steps to Successful Web Marketing...

1. Strategy – developing a web marketing strategy that achieves your goals
2. Design – creating a powerful web presence
3. Promote – attracting targeted visitors to your website
4. Convert - turning your visitors into customers
5. Nurture – developing relationships for loyalty & repeat business
6. Improve – monitoring & enhancing your web marketing

1.  WEB STRATEGY - Develop a Web Marketing Strategy.

Step 1 is strategy. Just like a successful business, successful Web marketing starts with a good strategy; a clear set of goals and objectives coupled with a well thought out plan as to how and when they are going to be achieved.  In short this is "where you want your business to be and how you are going to get it there"

In order to develop a web marketing strategy that meets your goals there are a number of questions you will need to ask of your business, these can be seen in the diagram below:

Question 1 - What is my target market? – who am I aiming my product or service at?
The answers to these questions will help determine how and where to promote your product or service on the web.

Question 2 - What is my Unique Selling Point (USP)? – how is your business different from your competition?
What is the one differentiating factor that sets you apart from others? Once you know what that unique selling point is then it should become the main focus of your marketing message, and you need to shout it from the rooftops in all your marketing material.

Question 3 - Positioning – how do you want people to perceive your business? Do you want to position your business at the premium or lower end of the market?
Do you want to be seen to be at the cutting edge of technology? Or a proven product?

Positioning is influenced by a combination of factors - your products and services themselves, your marketing and the price you charge. Take Apple for example – they are perceived by many to offer very cool, innovative products that are more expensive, but offer great quality.

Apple achieve this perception through product innovation, stylish marketing, premium prices and a great customer buying experience.
 

If you feel that you need help developing your web strategy or simply want an expert opinion on a strategy that you have already devised, we will ensure that the end product is a comprehensive, realistic web marketing strategy designed to ensure the success of your business online.

2.  DESIGN - Create a Powerful Web Presence.

Step 2 is Design, and its about creating a powerful web presence for your business.

Design encompasses the layout, choice of colours and general style and is responsible for that all important first impression. Here are a few guidelines for creating a powerful web presence:

• Your website is your ‘shop window’ to the online world so it needs to look professional.
• You have 5-10 seconds to make a good impression. If you fail to catch the users attention, they’ll hit the back button!
• Your website must be easy to use and navigate around. Make visitors work and you’ve lost them! Simplicity is the key.
• Present information in a clear and uncluttered way.  Avoid large paragraphs of text – users scan web pages so break text up into manageable chunks.
• Provide a search function - people don’t have time to trawl through every page.

The content of your website or social media page is vitally important as well. Content is a generic term we use to refer to information we can publish on a website - be it articles, news stories, videos, blog posts, reviews or photos. We all use the internet to find useful information and resources ("content") that help us answer specific questions, research topics we're interested in or assist us in finding products/services and making purchase decisions. it is imperative that you ensure the content is interesting, relevant, informative and fresh.

3 - PROMOTE - Attract Targeted Visitors to your Website.

Step 3 is all about web promotion, the process of attracting targeted visitors to your website.

Many website owners have the "build it and they will come" mentality. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth on the web.

Without effective web promotion your website is like a needle in a haystack...people may occasionally find it by chance but on the whole it’ll be invisible to most.

You need to promote your business on the web in order to drive visitors to your website.  However, we don’t just want any visitors, we need to attract the right visitors (our target market) who we’ve identified at our strategy stage.

1. We can use search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.
2. We can use Social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN.
3. We can use email marketing

3.1     Search Engine Marketing

• Highly targeted - specific keyword searches
• People are further along the purchase decision process (almost ready to buy)
• A captive audience - actively looking for your products and services – make sure you’re “in it to win it!”.

1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – to improve your ranking in the natural search results (shown with a green border below)
2. Search Engine Advertising (Google AdWords) – to advertise your products / services (shown with a red border below).

The image below of a typical Google search engine results page shows how the page is made up of both Google Adverts (in red) and the Google natural search listings (in green).

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Search Engine Optimisation is the process of optimising each page on your website for one or two specific search terms, so that when these searches are performed the webpage appears in the search engine results pages.

Search Engine Optimisationis is a complex process. It is also extremely time consuming and although it is essentially a free method of website promotion, it is an area where most businesses will enlist the help of a search engine optimisation service rather than embarking upon it themselves.

Search Engine Advertising (also known as Pay Per Click Advertising)

In addition to the normal search results, Google, Yahoo and Bing also include text adverts on their search results pages. These provide an opportunity for businesses to advertise only when specific search terms are used.  Although you pay to use this service, it is a very effective form of targeted advertising for small businesses, especially as you only pay when someone actually clicks on the advert.

These text adverts are normally positioned at the top or on the right hand side of the search engine results pages (see above), and are usually denoted by the words "ads" or "sponsored links". Google’s version of this type of advertising is known as Google Advertising or Google AdWords.

3.3 Email Marketing

• Cost effective way of promoting your products and services
• Providing continuous awareness of your business in the customers mind.
• Provides an opportunity to add value for potential customers via:
  
  –Monthly newsletters
  –Special offers
  –Interesting articles and useful advice.
  –New product / service announcements
   
• Customer research
  - Customer service questionnaires.

4.  CONVERT - Turning Visitors into Customers.

Step 4 focuses on turning visitors into customers.This is achieved by encouraging visitors to your website to take action which leads to a conversion:

This could be:

• Buying a product / service from your website
• Completing an online enquiry form
• Contacting you via telephone or email
• Subscribing to your email newsletter

Regardless of what your website is about, you will no doubt have one or more objectives that you want it to achieve. This might be to sell a product or service, generate enquiries or to encourage people to sign up to your email newsletter so you can communicate with them regularly.

To be able to achieve any of these objectives your website needs to be able to persuade visitors to take some form of ACTION. For example, if you want them to sign up to receive your email newsletter, you will need your visitors to enter their name and email address, or if you want it to generate enquiries, you will need them to fill out an enquiry form. We collectively refer to these different actions as "conversions".

The success of your website rests in its ability to maximise the number of conversions you get from your visitors. You can have an endless supply of traffic to your website, but it is useless unless they take some form of action when they are on your website. Ideally, we would want to convert 100% of all our visitors to customers or prospects.

Poorly designed websites and those that fail to engage and persuade their visitors to take action suffer from very low conversion rates. If you are paying to promote your website (i.e. advertising, PR or other forms of marketing), you need to ensure the conversion rate is as high as possible, otherwise you will not get a sufficient return on investment (ROI) and your business will not be sustainable.

How can conversion rates be improved?

The best way to improve your conversion rate is through testing and trying different strategies on your web pages. For instance, the position of your newsletter sign up form can have dramatic effects on the conversion rate; put it towards the bottom of your webpage and most people will miss it, but place it at the top and highlight it with a slightly different background colour and all of a sudden your visitors eyes are drawn to it and your conversion rates will go through the roof.

5. NURTURE - Develop relationships to Create Loyalty and Repeat Business.

The brutal reality of most internet users is that they trawl the World Wide Web visiting hundreds of different websites, most of which they forget about the second they decide to leave and move on to the next.

The websites and social media pages that internet users remember, and more importantly return to regularly, are those that focus on building a relationship with them. Instead of accepting that visitors to your website (which you've worked hard to get) will eventually leave and you may never see them again, why not give them the opportunity to join your email newsletter or download a free e-book or email course, which provide information they will find useful and interesting. Once you have their name and email address you can then keep in contact with them (via email) to provide details on special offers, new features on the website or more information of interest to them. Sales experts suggest that it can take around 7 contacts with a prospect before you have built up enough trust for then to purchase from you.

Remember though, your relationship is not over once your prospects have purchased from you or used your services. A big mistake most business owners make is to neglect their existing customers who have already purchased from them. It is a well known fact that existing customers are easier to sell to than finding new ones. This could be repeat business for the same product or service, or the sale of additional products and services, not to mention of course the opportunity of referrals from those existing customers.

Eventhough existing customers or subscribers are easier to sell to than new customers, most businesses fail to develop these existing relationships.

How can you develop these existing relationships?

6. IMPROVE - Monitor and Enhance your Web Marketing

Once you've completed the 5 steps above don't sit back and assume that everything is working perfectly. You need to continuously monitor and improve your overall web strategy to assess what is working and what needs further work.

Use website statistics programs like Google Analytics (free) to monitor and highlight problems on your website like high bounce rates (customers leaving after viewing just one page), pages with low conversion rates and technical errors that are preventing users from getting the full benefit of your website content.

To find out more information about the web marketing services that we offer at each of the above steps, please visit the 'services' page or call us on 08444 933 067.