Is your website just a shop window?
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The website, it’s the one marketing tool that most of us have these days. The trouble is though that many companies fall into the trap of considering it as their main (and often only) form of marketing.
The phrase ‘visit our website for full details’ is in my opinion often used as a lazy excuse for marketing. Yes absolutely you should direct people to your website for further information about your company and its products/services, that is after all one of its purposes – to act as a shop window for your business. Notice I said ‘one of its purposes’?
A website should not be considered simply as a replacement to the traditional printed brochure (the old marketing ‘shop window’), yet for many this is exactly how they perceive it.
Your website is a tool that should enable you to attract new customers to buy from you and not simply those people who you know and direct to it. Your job is to attract potential customers to your website, people who have never heard of your company but might be looking for the products/services that you sell.
This is where the search engine plays a key role. When someone ‘Googles’ a key phrase such as ‘caravanning holidays in Spain’ if you’re a travel agent that sells caravanning holidays in Spain then surely you would want the individual concerned to find your company listed in the search results. Of course you would but it doesn’t just miraculously happen. You have to implement a full Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy that is designed specifically to help you to appear on these listings.
SEO strategies involve time, effort and patience. If you’re not familiar with SEO then its well worth investing some time to gain a basic understanding of it. The results of introducing a well thought out SEO strategy can have an incredibly positive impact on the traffic that visits your website but more importantly on the quality of the visitors. After all it’s not how many people visit your website but how many take a positive action such as enquiring about your services or buying from you that counts. If you need a little advice when it comes to SEO then it might be worth you investing in the services of an expert. The financial outlay should be worth it.
Don’t forget that there are many marketing methods at your disposal, not just your website. Don’t just discard the traditional marketing methods in favour of online ones. Instead align them so that they work in harmony. For example, if you use direct mail and telemarketing and it works for your company that’s great, don’t stop doing it. What you should be doing next is linking these methods with your website. Instead of simply saying ‘visit our website’ (which could in fact only prolong the sales process and potentially increase the risk of a lost sale) why not use the website to its full potential? You could add a demonstration of the product, a free trial, industry papers and information, case studies, newsletter sign up and so on.
By using this approach to your website rather than using it to simply say ‘this is who we are, this is what we do, contact us’ you are actually adding depth to your proposition, demonstrating your expertise and if you use it to its full, capturing valuable information.
Wouldn’t you also like to know who is visiting your website, what pages they look at and what action they take? Building a profile of your visitors and understanding where they come from and what words they type to find you, for example is such a powerful marketing tool. Google Analytics is free and serves this purpose well. However, you can take this even further by incorporating similar tools on your social media pages and email marketing management. Over time the result will be that you have a comprehensive understanding of your web audience and their preferences, including; what times of the day are best to issue your emails, what types of social media message they will respond most positively to, which products they are most interested and so on.
We’ve barely touched the surface of the many activities that you should be taking in order to make your website work properly for you, social media being one. Hopefully though you can start to see that simply putting your website ‘live’ and leaving it there is not a sufficient way of attracting new business off it.
You can download a free guide that outlines 6 steps that you can take today to help improve your website called ‘The VMA Web Marketing Challenge’ by visiting http://www.the-vma.com/free-guides/
To find out more about web marketing you can visit our website at http://www.the-vma.com/courses/beginner/
Clare Tucker is the Managing Director of The Vocational Marketing Academy. The Vocational Marketing Academy specialises in teaching the basics of marketing through a range of short courses that are delivered online. Full details are available at www.the-vma.com.
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