Almost every business has a website, but not every business has a successful website. In order to make your website successful, you need a website marketing strategy.
Tactics without strategy is the noise of defeat.
-Sun Tzu
This insight would be your guiding principle in understanding and crafting your own Website Marketing Strategy.
Before we go deeper, we must truly understand that website is just a tool to reach more people. As a tool, it’s dumb, it doesn’t do anything unless we tell them to.
Think of your website as a sales staff. If you don’t give them the right info, where to go, how to get clients, he will forever be at the desk. We don’t want non-productive personnel. Similarly a website.
Alternatively, I’d like to think of the website as the Best Marketing Asset.
The first step before anything else is understanding who your customer is. If you’re not sure who your customer is, you need to do some market research.
Once you know your customer, you need to figure out what they want.
After you know what they want, you need to give it to them. The last step is making sure they come back.
What I’ve explained so far is a simple marketing funnel. Read to learn more about the marketing funnel.
The Marketing Funnel
The marketing funnel is a model that explains how people interact with a company or product.
The top of the funnel is where people find out about a product or company. They might see an ad, hear about it from a friend, or find it on the internet.
Which leads them to the website. The website has to be persuasive, convincing and trustworthy before visitors can take the next action.
The next step is contacting the company. Most people reach out to a company through the contact form, email or telephone.
After people contact the company, the company decides whether or not to deal with them. If the company decides to deal with them, it might send them information about the product, give them a discount, or send them the product. If the company doesn’t want to deal with them, it might ignore them or delete their email.
After a visitor reaches the bottom of the funnel, they might do one of three things:
- They might buy the product.
- They might sign up for a mailing list.
- They might leave a comment on a blog post.
1. What is a Website Marketing Strategy?
A website marketing strategy is a plan that you use to market your website. Consider Before, During, After visiting the website scenario.
Before the Website Visit
A website isn’t capable of promoting itself. You need to know what the visitor wants before you can give it to them. You need to feed it with traffic. Either run Facebook ads, Google ads, SEO or any promotion.
During the Website Visit
When they reach the website, you need to give persuasive, convincing and relevant content so they are clear about what you are selling.
The website must be also visually attractive, have a link hierarchy and preferred next action steps.
50% of people didn’t turn to leads or customers because they can’t find the right information. Either it’s too much, or too little content.
You need to find a web design agency that specialized in not just building a beautiful website, but ones that can do copywriting as well. A clear example, Laman7, which specialized in getting leads for Corporate websites.
Once visitors take the next action step, it may lead to contact or purchase. These results need to be measured.
After the Website Visit
The last step is making sure you are providing the visitor with what they need to keep them coming back.
This is why most companies have newsletters, gated content, blogs and relevant news. To get past visitors to come back to the website the cheapest way possible.
2. Why is a Website Marketing Strategy Important?
Website marketing strategies are important for a few reasons.
First, without a website marketing strategy, your website will not get the traffic it needs to be successful.
Second, if your website does not have a website marketing strategy, you might not be able to convert your visitors into customers.
Third, a website without a website marketing strategy is likely to lose relevance and be abandoned by its visitors.
Forth, many businesses discard the power of websites as their marketing asset. Through observation, many tech-enabled companies survived through Covid-19.
3. How to Create a Website Marketing Strategy?
There are a few things you need to do to create a website marketing strategy.
First, know your sales target.
Second, you need to know who your target market is.
Third, you need to know what your website visitors are looking for.
Fourth, you need to know to attract website’s visitors from other media.
Fifth, you need to know what content your website’s visitors are interested in.
Sixth, you need to know how to get the most out of your website’s visitors.
Seventh, you need to measure the success of your website
Eighth, you need to make changes to your website’s website marketing strategy as needed.
4. Implementing Your Website Marketing Strategy
Now that you have a general idea of what you’re doing and what you need to do, let’s get started. In this section, we’ll go over the different ways you can implement your website marketing strategy.
1. Plan Your Strategy
The first step is to plan what you’re going to do. Start with Goals
You need to figure out what your goals are and what you need to do to achieve them. You also need to figure out where your website’s visitors come from, what content they’re interested in, and how you’re going to get them to your site.
Once you have this information, you can start creating your strategy based on it.
2. Build A Website or Revamp Website
There are a lot of different ways to build a website. You could go with a free website builder, like Wix or Weebly, or you could pay for a more specialized website builder, like Webflow.
Whichever route you choose, make sure to research the different options and pick the one that’s right for you.
3. Write Your Content
You’ll need to write the content for your website yourself or find a content writer who can do it for you. Make sure to research different writing options and pick the one that’s right for your business.
Tips on Website Writing Content
You may have a complete understanding of your business and products, however, writing to appeal to visitors is a different skill set. Hire web designers that can do both, design and copywriting.
4. Design Your Website
You’ll need to design your website yourself or find a designer who can do it for you. Make sure to research different design options and pick the one that’s right for your website.
Tips on Website Design
Don’t focus too much on the design, as long as it’s easy to read, loads quickly and has less clutter, visitors will take the next action. Hire designers who understand and obeys Design Psychology.
5. Publish Your Website
Once you have all of your content, design, and writing finalized, it’s time to publish your website. You can do this by uploading your website to a hosting provider, like Bluehost or GoDaddy, or by publishing it on a dedicated website publishing platform, like WordPress or Medium.
You may also want to submit your website to Google for SEO purposes.
6. Analyse Your Results
Once your website is live, it’s time to analyse your results. Use tracking tools like Google Analytics or Hotjar to see how people are interacting with your website, and measure the success of your marketing strategy based off of that data.
5. Measuring the Success of Your Website Marketing Strategy
1. Get a Tracking Code
To track your website’s performance, you’ll need to get a tracking code from a tracking provider, like Google Analytics or Hotjar. These codes will allow you to see how people are interacting with your website, and measure the success of your website marketing strategy based on that data.
2. Use Analytics
Once you have your tracking code, you can start using analytics to analyse your results. Use Google Analytics or Hotjar to see how people are interacting with your website, and measure the success of your website marketing strategy based on that data.
3. Look at Conversion Rates
Once you know how people are interacting with your website, you can look at your conversion rates to see how successful your website marketing strategy has been. Look at how many people have visited your website, and how many of those people have made a purchase or registered for your email list.
4. Look at Traffic Sources
You can also look at your website’s traffic sources to see where people are coming from. Are people visiting your website from Google Search or Facebook? Are they coming from organic search results or paid ad campaigns?
5. Look at Your Costs
Finally, look at your costs to see whether your website marketing strategy is costing you too much money. Are you spending too much on Google AdWords ads? Are you spending too much on website design or hosting?
Conclusion
This may seem like a lot of work. It is.
There are 200 million active websites in the world, you certainly do not want to ‘just another website’. You need to have a solid, persuasive and compelling website. You need a website marketing strategy.
A website marketing strategy is essential for any business with a website. Without a strategy, you will not be able to reach your target audience or achieve your desired results.
Don’t build a website, get more leads with persuasive web design.
