There are millions of websites out there...
And you are adding one more to the cyber-sea (or the Bigpond as Australia's biggest telco likes to call it). So when setting your little lifeboat of a website free on whatever water analogy you may like to make you have to decide how are you going to market it. In short, you need a plan for which stepping stones you are going to place down so that your customers can step across the void and find your site.
The Importance Of Search Engine Optimisation (and why it can sometimes be overstated)
Search engine optimisation is important for many websites and it is one of the core online marketing functions we often perform for businesses like yours. However, search engine optimisation is just one tool in your online marketing ensemble and it should be secondary to creating an online marketing plan.
When evaluating online marketing consultants the level of focus they put on search engine optimisation will be your guide for whether you are talking to a web designer or an online marketer. The web designer will consider search engine optimisation to be a given and in many cases it will be the entire online marketing service they plan to offer you.
For an online marketer there is a far more important question to be answered before considering how much time and money to spend on search engine optimisation...
How Does Your Website Fit Into Your Business?
And how do you plan to make money out of your site? These two questions will help you plan for who you are trying to attract and why they are likely to be looking for you. It will tell you if you are targetting a global or local audience and therefore give you a starting point for if your are going to promote by online means or use your online tools as marketing leverage for your offline marketing efforts.
Once these questions are answered then you can get into what you want to do online, what you may need to optimise for, and what other marketing mediums you want to use. If you choose the online marketing path here are some things that you should consider and some tools that are available:
- How will you test and measure the things you decide to do
- What forms of online advertising should you use?
- What is your strategy for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaigns and what are the best ways to achieve this?
- How do you analyse performance of Search Engine Optimisation?
- Do you need to conduct online research and what is the best way to do this?
- Who do you have available to create continual flow of content necessary to maintain interest?
- How do you run a pay-per-click campaign and review its performance and continually improve?
- Have you prepared sales letters and video sales letters to back your campaign?
- What do you need to do to monitor & improve conversion?
- How do you go about inbound link generation?
- How do you manage relationships online?
- Do you have the resources for writing technical marketing materials, such as brochures, fact sheets, data sheets, feature comparisons, flip charts, etc for your product.
- How should you go about blogging & answering forum posts?
- How do you leverage social media?
- and more...
All of these questions will form a part of your online marketing plan and your plan will prioritise these based on the resources you have available. For more information on developing an online marketing plan contact us and we can get started.
