Is Your Website Marketing smart?

Tongfei Kou's Website / 寇同飞的个人网站

Forwarded from Take 10 Marketing
Posted on May 24, 2011 by ipreneur

See what happens in this funny animated video (Rated Pg 13 –  Warning Sexually Explicit Language & Crude Humor) when a business owner looks to update his website, then read the key marketing consideration (below) when you create or update your website…

Most business owners have a website or know they need a website, but they often fail at making their website marketing smart. Yes your site needs to provide  the who, what, when, where and how information about your business, be simple, attractive and intuitive to navigate, but what else? Here are 5 simple things you should do with your website to make sure it’s marketing smart…

1. Build it on a CMS system:

Building a basic website today has never been easier, you can hire a web designer, or built it yourself with various online tools. But whatever you do, make sure the site is created using a Content Management System (CMS). A Content Management System (or CMS) is basically and online platform that a website can be built on. The platform makes managing the website content easy. Many designers today will create your website on such platform, then train you on how to update, edit or add content. The advantages of this for a small business are multiple… 1) The ability to easily make content changes without hiring a designer or webmaster every time a minor change or alteration is needed. 2) The ability to create and manage regular site content in the form of a blog, work samples or something similar. 3) The ability to more easily plugin additional interactive tools into your site. Using a CMS doesn’t mean you don’t need a web designer, rather it means your enabled to manage simple content edits and additions on your site yourself, keeping website costs down, productivity up and limiting your need for a designer to major site and/or functionality enhancements.

2. Build It to Collect Visitor Information:

Did you know 90+% of visitors that come check out your website will never return again! Armed with this kind of information, and knowing how important consistent, repetitive communication is in building awareness, relationships and the buying process, how important do you think collecting visitor information is when someone visits your site? Without it you can never communicate with those visitors again. This is perhaps the biggest marketing mistake I see with small business websites. Most small business sites do little to nothing to collect a visitors email address and/or connect with the visitors via other broadcast communication tools like Facebook or Twitter.  There are numerous best practices and tips on how to best collect visitor contact information and you should consult with your web designer on these. Just remember, one of the main things you want to achieve with your site is to build a marketing communication list.

3. Use Social Media:

Many small businesses are still confused on how to use social media. While there are many ways to use social media in marketing, here are a couple of simple things you should incorporate into your site related to social media.

  • Social media makes it ultra easy for site visitors to quickly share information found on your site with those in their network. For example if I’m a chiropractors and I post a video or article on my site about, “the effects of sitting at your computer screen for long hrs”, a  facebook or twitter (social networks) share button on the website page makes it very easy for visitors to quickly share this information with their network — a couple clicks and a visitor can share a link to the story or content on your site with hundreds of others.
  • Social media also provides another way to grow your communication list. Remember how important it is to use your site as a way to build a communication channel. A Facebook “Like” Button and Twitter “Follow” us button, can help. If your are regularly putting out content, coupons or something of value on your site, that visitors may want to keep abreast of, you’ll want to incorporate these list building buttons.  Similar to an email list, a Facebook “Like” and Twitter “Follow” button allows you to build a communication list or channel to continually communicate and promote your business to a targeted, interested list of individuals.

4. Make Your Site SEO Friendly:

Search Engine Optimization or SEO (Search Engine Optimization simply means optimizing your website so that it’s more likely to show up highly in organic search results when someone does a search on a search engine like Google) is a big topic, far too detailed to cover in depth here, however there are a couple of simple items you should be aware of when designing or updating your website. 1) How you design your site and the content on it will play a role in SEO, so consult with your web designer and/or SEO professional on best practices and 2) If you want to show up more highly in search engines, don’t try to figure out SEO on your own, unless you have a significant amount of time and energy to commit to the project. Many people have been led to believe that if they do a couple of things with their site or their content they’ll start showing up first in search engines. This is a myth, effective SEO usually requires more work than someone running a business will have the time to do themselves, however, how you design your site on day one can play a role in your ability to implement a more effective SEO plan at a later date.

5. Figure Out What You Want Visitors to Do:

While I saved this for last, it actually comes first in the website design creation process. Answer this question, when people come to your website, what do you want them to do? Pick up the phone and call you, join your mailing list, request more information. Figure out the 2-3 main things you want people to do when they come to your website and then work backwards with those objectives in mind. If picking up the phone and calling you is key then shouldn’t your phone number appear on every page, and perhaps some incentive be used to help encourage? If joining your mailing list is important then shouldn’t there be some simple, intuitive way to do that and some value oriented incentive or reason for the visitor to want to do it?  If getting people to share information or content on your site with others is important then shouldn’t that be an emphasis in your design. Think first about what you want your site to accomplish, and then work backwards to design a site with focus on those core things.

Forwarded from Take 10 Marketing
Posted on May 24, 2011 by ipreneur

Tongfei Kou's Website / 寇同飞的个人网站


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