Introduction to the series
In a series of articles over the coming months, we’ll be covering a range of topics starting with Website Marketing and ending with Web to Print Storefronts, with a variety of subjects in between. Our intention is to provide you with a wide span of information, enabling you to make rapid and informed decisions that will generate more business and increase your profitability. We’ll start the series with a brief look at Website Marketing.
Website Marketing – why?
In today’s highly competitive market-place, a well designed website with high quality content is an essential plank of any strategy to grow business. Clients first need to find out about you; then understand what you can offer them; after that they need to recognise the benefits of the services and care that you provide; and have the ability to make an enquiry and/or place an order on-line. And you need to impress them!
Some statistics (source: BRMB)
- 8 out of 10 customers say that they would contact a company which has a website over one that doesn’t!
- 70% of users actually go on to make contact with a company that they find listed on a search engine
How to get found …
This is self-evidently a hugely important topic, as clearly if you don’t get found in the first place nothing will follow from it! We’ll be covering this in much greater detail in a future article, but for now it’s useful to introduce the term “Search Engine Marketing”. This is how your website is optimised using a variety of techniques to help to ensure that it is highly visible online. Remember that your competitors are also familiar with these techniques, so it’s crucial that your approach is very carefully thought through and implemented.
“You only make a first impression once”
There is a mass of evidence that when surfing the web people will only spend a small amount of time on a site before moving on if it doesn’t grab their attention. Just think about your own behaviour! Your potential clients are no different, so it’s vitally important that what they see when they first visit is impactful and relevant to them. So here’s another term to consider, “Content Management”. Again we’ll be covering this in a future article, but for now it’s important that you reflect not simply on what your message is and how you want it to be portrayed, but on how flexible and easy to modify it is. What you certainly don’t want are lengthy and costly delays each time you want to update your site.
Future-proofing
So you now have a quality site, it’s being found more frequently, and more business is coming in. Excellent news, except what’s next? You may want to upgrade to provide an advanced web2print capability for your clients. You may even want to supply websites yourself, taking advantage of new revenue streams from this large and growing marketplace … in future articles we’ll show you how!
Next time
In our next article we’ll be covering how to keep the content of your web-site up-to-date easily and effectively using the WordPress Content Management System.