Is your website the hub of your marketing or just bolted on?
Your website should be working for you as a 24 hour attendant providing customers and potential customers with a channel to your business and what it offers.
The key to making your website centre of the hub is to ensure that you are driving traffic to your website by planned online campaigns as well as traditional offline campaigns.
Setting up a website is NOT about simply bolting on an e brochure to your business but should be much more. Websites can be designed to deliver a wide array of applications and methods for customers and other people to contact your business. The website needs to be providing its visitors with some value which then prompts them to contact your company, which should be made easy.
Putting your website at the centre of the hub
Below is an eight step plan to put your website at the centre of your marketing communications hub.
- Understand what you want to achieve from communicating with customers, suppliers, partners, prospects and other stakeholders and draw this into a plan
- List all of the different methods that will be used to communicate with all of the above people
- Build a website that meets the needs of the communications plan
- keep the website current and deliver a plan for site optimization (SEO) and couple this with other online based traffic generation campaigns such as email marketing or Google pay per click (PPC) ads
- Make sure you add your web address to every piece of literature that leaves the company (i.e. add website to invoices, letter heads, business cards, newspaper ads, posters, flyers, brochures, and don’t forget company vehicles or promotional items)
- Align any traditional marketing campaign to drive traffic to your 24 hour attendant as well as offering a human alternative during business hours
- Measure the response to online and offline campaigns using all of the statistics available
- Use the data to continually evolve your website and strategies for driving traffic to the hub!
Website design and technology is advancing at a fast pace and a good web designer will help keep you informed of the best ways of optimising your website in terms of its ease of use, application and search engine ranking.
Plan to drive traffic to your site
Driving traffic to the website is not just about the things that can be done with online technology; things that include Google pay per click (PPC) ads, Search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing. Etc. Offline or traditional marketing campaigns can be used to drive traffic towards the website. You will notice more and more companies adopting this strategy in their newspaper, billboard, radio and TV campaigns. It is not enough to leave communicating the website to the marketing team; ensure you add the website address to every piece of communications leaving your company including invoices. Any thing that your prospective customer may see should be branded with the website.
People who end up at your site want to be there!
The website is a very powerful tool; having driven traffic to your site the people will be there because they want to be there. Whether the traffic came from a Google search or the sight of a TV ad your visitor wants to find out about your company and its products / services.
Now you have attracted the visitor there is a great opportunity not just to tell him how you can help him (which is building your brand), but there is the potential to capture their contact details as a qualified lead for new business. It is also possible to use the website for research, whether this is through a traditional form filling or a customer blog.
Use the data you collect
The latest websites offer a wide opportunity to really engage with customers and provide the marketing teams with data and information that has not previously been available. This data will provide opportunities to improve product and service offerings and also help to more accurately measure how campaigns have performed, providing a stronger guide to the potential return on money invested (ROI).
More information
This article was written by Mark Carver. If you would like to find out how we can help you achieve better return for your online and offline marketing and make this hub work for you please give us a call on 02476 22 6814.
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