Develop a marketing strategy tailored specifically to you needs.
So….you’ve developed your new website. The form and function is all set. You couldn’t be more proud of your site and you are ready to strike gold. Ahh, if only it were that simple. Maybe once upon a time in the early days of Google, you could sit back and wait for the visitor traffic to flood your site. Today though, there are so many websites with so many innovative ways to capture a customer’s attention, that it is impossible to expect success by building a site without a marketing strategy.
Today I’m going to discuss the importance and value of a strategic promotional campaign. I’ll touch upon why you need to promote your site if you expect to grow your business.
Define the fundamental goal of your website.
One of the factors in determining a marketing strategy for your site is to first decide what the goal of your site is. There are a few broad categories that sites fall into , each with their own unique needs, in terms of promotion:
- An online brochure
- A lead generation tool
- A membership tool
- A mail list builder
- An eCommerce solution
As always there is no one size fits all. And you may find that you need a hybrid solution that includes 2 or more of the mentioned options. Once you’ve decided what the fundamental goal of your website is, only then can you put together a strategy that addresses the needs of your goals directly.
Choose the marketing method that directly addresses your goals.
I’ve taken an extremely broad sweep of the brush to categories marketing channels into 4 big buckets. Each bucket deserves its own article to really get into the features and benefits of each channel, but for the purpose of this article, we’ll keep things very simple.
Personal Networking
Odds are you manage and grow your personal network everyday. Basically, it’s the same as word-of-mouth advertising, and we all have heard or know first hand that it is an effective way to spread the word about your products and services. But we also know that is the slowest method available. It’s a traditional, pre-digital solution, that simply cannot compete with more modern marketing channels, if rated on speed alone. But it is still the best way to get qualified leads and customers.
There are so many avenues to promote your business through Personal Networking that it can seem overwhelming. Most likely, you already have a professional network of some sort, or you may belong to a Chamber, BNI group, or any other networking organization.
If your sole avenue of promotion is through Personal Networks, you may be perfectly happy with a website that has been published purely as a digital brochure.
Print Advertising
Print advertising is another traditional source for marketing your company and should not be forgotten. It’s my option that every company can benefit from some amount of printed trade advertising. The challenge here is finding the perfect print vehicle that is used by your customers. It may take some trial-and-error to find the right combination.
Social Networking
By far the most complex marketing solution today is Social Networking. The sheer magnitude of Social Networking as grown to include so many forms of digital promotion its mind-blowing. Included in this article is a graphic, originally developed by Brian Solis, and published, for free, from the websiteConversationPrism.com. It offers a fantastic way to visualize the complexity and variety of options available to you.
Of all the social networking options there are a couple categories that should be the foundation of almost any strategy. This list is a hyper-truncated list, pulled directly from the Conversion Prism.
Social Networks and Streaming
Facebook, Google+, and Twitter
Blogging Platforms
WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr
Digital Platforms
YouTube, Vimeo, and Mobile Apps
Digital Advertising
Google PPC, Ad Syndicates
How can MosaicVisual help you?
For any business that is trying to garner business through their website, the absolute most important thing you must do is devise a strategy marketing strategy that promotes your website and gets you the traffic and conversions you need.
Many business fall short in this regard because they might believe that if “you build it they will come”, but the reality is if you don’t market your website, you will never get the type of traffic you need to sustain your business.
One thing different about MosaicVisual is we will only recommend promotional campaigns that meet your business model and budget. You need to ask you self very focussed questions about what are your company goals, who your customers are, what are their habits, etc. From there, then and only then can you start developing a program that targets your key customer.
Let’s face it. Marketing costs are expensive. There is just no way around that. So the best thing you can do is plan well in the beginning which will save you big bucks by not wasting money on strategies that won’t work.
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