Why Every Website Needs a Website Marketing Strategy

jross

May 7, 2021 (Updated: May 4, 2023)

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What Is Website Marketing?
Who Should Use Website Marketing?
When Should You Use Website Marketing?
Where Is Website Marketing Useful?
Why Is Website Marketing Important?
How Should You Use Website Marketing?

Website marketing is a vital component of a collective marketing strategy. Regardless of whether or not your business conducts e-commerce sales through your website, optimizing your pages for easy navigation and clear information can help boost your business online and offline. Understanding the ins and outs of website marketing will help you create a website marketing campaign that works for your unique business model.

What Is Website Marketing?

Website marketing is the optimization and strategic use of your website to attract new customers and grow your business. While you can use a number of tactics in your overall website marketing strategy, most focus on increasing the website’s “findability” on the internet, or SEO. Search Engine Optimization is a process that takes the content of your website and optimizes it for ranking on Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs. Technical SEO optimizes the behind-the-scenes coding and structure of your website for the same purpose. Both are important elements of website marketing.

When establishing or overhauling your website for maximum customer impact, consider these features and tactics:

Branding

Your website should serve as the digital face of your business. As such, it should be clearly and cohesively branded to match all of your other marketing channels, e-commerce sites, and physical packaging materials. Because your website is often a potential customer’s first introduction to your company, strong branding on your website is especially important. Consider elements like:

The name of your business.
Your logo.
The colors you use.
Your company’s slogan.
Any images or graphics, including both style and design.
Background shapes.
Typography.

Ensure that these design elements all work together to create a thorough and consistent brand on your website and on your other marketing and business channels.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a vital piece of your website. Essentially, content marketing is the creation of content like blog posts, articles, white papers, eBooks, and other knowledge-rich documents for potential customers to read. Usually, the goal of content marketing is to educate consumers rather than directly sell them your product or service as a traditional advertisement might. For websites, content marketing serves another valuable role — supporting SEO.

Posting content to your website helps boost your ranking on Google and other search engines for multiple reasons:

Keywords: Content that contains keywords related to your business will help your website show up on the SERP when a potential customer runs a search for that word.
Original content: The more original, non-duplicate content you have on your website, the more information Google or other search engines can index. This helps you rank higher on the SERP.
Updates: Introducing new content to your website keeps Google from thinking that your business is stagnant. With new articles or posts popping up consistently, Google sees that your website is in use.

SEO

SEO is a bit more strategic than content marketing, though content marketing is an important element of SEO. The overall goal of SEO is to help your website organically rank as high as possible on the SERP. SEO uses many different tactics, both visible and invisible to website visitors, to achieve a high SERP ranking, including:

An accessible website: Your website URL must be well-designed and easy for a search engine’s crawl bots to read and index.
Fast loading speeds: Fast loading speeds are a necessity for ranking high on search engines.
Mobile optimization: Mobile usage continues to increase every year, so mobile optimization for any website is a must.
An established position: Websites that have been active for at least a year tend to have better rankings than brand-new ones.
Excellent content: Strong content that’s been optimized for SEO and delivers valuable information to your website visitors will help increase traffic.
Background optimization: Optimizing your website coding, called technical SEO, ensures Google’s bots can easily crawl and index your website.
Positive user experience: Google tracks how long users spend on websites. The longer people spend on your pages, the higher your ranking will likely be.
Links: Linking to other pages within your website and to high-quality external webpages can help boost your SEO.
Social interaction: Interaction between your website and social media channels can help boost your ranking, particularly when third-party users share your content.
Local SEO: Claiming your business on Google My Business and ensuring all your contact information is accurate also improves your website’s SEO.

Conversion Optimization

Conversion is the process of enticing a customer to take a desired action. Often for e-commerce sites, conversion means a sale. However, conversions can also mean clicking on certain links, requesting information through a contact form, or downloading a white paper. Optimizing your website for these conversions helps increase overall customer interactions and hopefully encourages e-commerce sales or brick-and-mortar sales.

Social Media Marketing

While your social media channels are not a direct extension of your website, working to connect the two can boost your overall website efficacy. You can link to post-specific landing pages from social media to encourage visitors to check out your e-commerce page. Additionally, you can share your content, articles, or blog posts from your website to your social media channels to encourage sharing and interaction socially as well as encourage click-through to the actual content.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is similar to social media marketing in that it doesn’t live or function directly on your website, but it can vastly improve customer awareness of your website. Email marketing is straightforward — it involves sending past customers or potential customers emails about specific products, shopping opportunities, or other information about your business or website. The content in the email should link back to specific landing pages on your website. Email marketing is useful because you can target customers very specifically and personalize the content to encourage them to click-through to your website.

Who Should Use Website Marketing?

Anyone who wants to increase sales or traffic on their website should use website marketing. Having a solid marketing strategy is key to growing any business. No matter whether you have a brick-and-mortar location or you strictly deal with online sales or services, website marketing is the best way to spread the word about your business. The majority of people these days will visit a business’ website before they visit their actual location, if they have one. This is why having a website with valuable content that’s also easy to navigate is so important.

Some business owners believe that having a Facebook page or other social media outlet to promote their business is enough. However, this misconception leads to a lot of potential customers being lost. Because almost every major company, and tons of smaller companies, has a social media account to promote their business, it’s difficult to compete for new clients and customers through these platforms alone. Creating a website that’s specific to your brand and clientele and then marketing it will help you stand out. A few of the main reasons to have a website are:

Credibility: When your customers search the internet for your business, they want to find it easily. If they can get to your site and search for what they want hassle-free, you’re much more likely to convert that website visit into a sale. In other words, a website gives your business credibility in the eyes of your customers.
Control: The internet provides many ways for people to discuss and rate your business. Google reviews and other websites that allow users to contribute their opinions give people an opportunity to learn about a company or product without having to buy anything or visit a location. By having your own website with content that you create and reviews that you approve, you can have more control over the image of your company.
Interaction: Top-notch customer service is one of the best ways to get repeat customers and increase the positive feeling people have about your business. When you have a website, you can use it to regularly interact with your customers. This is a great way to ensure that your customers are completely satisfied or to address any problems promptly if they aren’t.
Promotion: If your business is like most, you probably run promotions, offer discounts, or want to highlight new products or services that are being offered. Your website is the best place to do any or all of these things. While you can use a variety of marketing tools to advertise for your business, having your promotions displayed prominently on your website is the ideal way to convert website visitors into e-commerce sales.

Once you have a website, you’ll need content. Simply obtaining a domain name and a website host isn’t the end of your work when it comes to website marketing. You’ll need to keep your website fresh by consistently adding content that provides valuable information to your audience. No business that wants to be taken seriously should be without a website or an online website marketing strategy.

When Should You Use Website Marketing?

To be completely honest, you’ll need to use website marketing for the duration of your business ownership. Constantly adding content to your website and staying up to date with online marketing techniques will help you continue to drive traffic and customers to your website. It can be tough to create perfect online marketing strategies that suit you and your business’ needs, but anyone can create an effective online strategy that works for their business model. With the right tools, you can use your website to achieve higher sales and increase customer satisfaction.

You’ll want to keep track of your website’s traffic through tools such as Google Analytics to determine if your marketing strategy is working. Tracking tools like this can tell you things like:

How many people are visiting your website.
How long website visitors are staying on your pages.
What the click-through rate is for your content.
The amount of return visits versus the amount of organic visitors to your website.
Where your traffic is coming from, such as another website’s link to your page or a search engine.

Keeping track of these things can help you find ways to improve your SEO and SERPs to increase traffic to your website. Regardless of your business model, you want to consistently use the best internet marketing for your business. Not all businesses attract customers from the same places; this is true even on the internet. Some companies may find that Facebook is a great resource, while others get most of their website viewership from organic searches. It doesn’t matter where your customers come from as long as you know where to attract new clientele.

Let’s look at some unique web marketing strategy examples to help you see where website marketing can help your business:

Marketing Strategy for Web Design Company

If you’re going to design websites for clients, it’s very important that your own website looks sharp and appealing and is easy to navigate. To market your web design company effectively, you’ll need to create an effective marketing campaign as well as:

Keep your clients updated on new products through email.
Share valuable content in relation to web design with your customers.
Advertise new products or services on your website and through your social media accounts.
Share some of your best work on a portfolio page on your website.
Offer deals or discounts to repeat customers.
Hire out if you’re feeling overwhelmed to ensure you don’t lose customers due to poor or incomplete work.
Ask your customers to leave positive reviews or give you referrals.

Marketing Strategy for Clothing Sales Company

While some of the marketing strategies will be the same across business models, a clothing company or other business that provides a wearable product can use some online marketing strategies that are unique to the industry. For example:

Create some type of loyalty program that promotes repeat business.
Host in-store events if you have a brick-and-mortar location.
Use social media to promote giveaways on your website.
Work with social media influencers to promote your brand and share the content on your website.
Ensure your website is optimized for mobile devices to make it easy for customers to make purchases using their phone or other device.
Make sure your products and your website are both visually appealing.

Marketing Strategy for Content Creation Company

These days, many businesses use outside sources to create content for their websites. This is why content creation companies are in high demand. Getting your content creation website noticed is the first step in gaining clients who want high-quality content for their own websites. A good marketing strategy for a content creation company’s website will include things like:

Having informative infographics that demonstrate the success of websites with good content.
Providing statistics for how your company has increased traffic and sales to the websites you’ve worked with.
Finding sources to advertise your services that will convert customers into clients.
Knowing your audience so that you can provide the exact type of content they’re looking for.

Where Is Website Marketing Useful?

Finding the right outlet for marketing your website can take time. Where you focus your marketing campaign will largely depend on who your audience is and the type of business you’re promoting. Other factors that will help guide the outlets you use to promote your website include how long your company or website has been around, your advertising budget, and the number of people you want to reach within a given time period.

If, for example, you have a well-established restaurant but your website is recent, you can encourage your regular customers to sign up for your website’s newsletter to receive promotions and discounts. This can be achieved by word-of-mouth, through social media, or by simply placing a sign in your brick-and-mortar location. Businesses trying to expand their customer base may want to explore new avenues for promoting their website and products. This could include creating new social media accounts or paid advertising campaigns on other websites that attract the customers they want.

With all the other websites and companies out there, finding new and creative ways to attract customers can seem like a daunting task. This is why it’s necessary to have the right online marketing strategy for your business. New websites can try free or inexpensive strategies to find new customers, while companies that are established can use their advertising budgets to try pulling in customers from unique places.

Use your Google Analytics tool to track where your website views are coming from to ensure your marketing campaign is effective. If you don’t notice many new or unique visitors frequenting your website, you probably need to try advertising through a different source. On the other hand, if you’re getting a lot of new visits and a high click-through rate on your website from your advertising campaign, you can nurture and expand your efforts in these areas. Take a look at some of the budget-friendly ways you can promote your website:

Writing guest posts: When first starting out, offering to write guest posts for other websites is a great way to get backlinks to your website. Websites with established traffic that put links to your website in their content can help make your website more credible to bots that index websites. It may seem counterproductive at first to write content for other people for free, but this is an excellent and inexpensive way to get traffic to your website, especially when it’s brand-new.
Increasing social media followers: Converting social media followers into website visitors and ultimately, customers, isn’t easy. Most of your social media followers will never even visit your website, let alone buy anything or click on ads. This is why it’s important to have a large following on your social media accounts. The more followers you have, the higher chance you have to convert those followers into customers. It can take time and a lot of networking to increase your follower count, but if you plan to use social media to promote your website, the effort will be worth the time.
Meeting new people: Whether it’s other influencers or potential customers, meeting new people and gently plugging your website when it’s appropriate is a terrific way to spread the word about your business. If other influencers are interested in what you’re doing, they may offer to help promote your business through their advertising channels. The more people you talk to about your business, the more likely you are to drive traffic to your website. Offering to promote the content of others can also lead to increased business for you.
Making videos: More and more people are relying on videos to get the information they need and want. Using outlets such as YouTube to promote your products and business is free and could result in gaining customers you wouldn’t have access to otherwise. You can also ask your customers and social media followers to create videos about your products or services. Having third-party validation and recommendations for your business gives you more credibility.

Those with a higher advertising budget will have more options when it comes to where they can focus their website marketing campaigns. Use some of these ideas to get started if you have a decent advertising budget for your website:

Paid advertising campaigns: Many social media outlets and websites offer paid advertising campaigns. These can range in price, so you can find a campaign strategy that fits your budget. These types of campaigns allow you to choose the audience you want to see your advertisements. This targeted marketing can result in a higher ROI than broader marketing strategies. You’ll also have the ability to choose how often your ads are shown. This is good because you don’t want people to see your ads too little or too often.
Email campaigns: Although email marketing can be budget-friendly, you will have to pay for a service if you want to create a really effective email marketing campaign. With the right email marketing strategy, you can end up reaching a wider range of customers. Many people will ignore your emails if they don’t provide valuable information or promotions and if they feel bombarded by them. Sending emails that provide value to your customers ensures they’re opened, read, and eventually lead to sales.
Traditional advertising methods: Despite the fact that a lot of people use the internet to get their information these days, using traditional methods, such as TV and radio, to advertise your business is still valuable. Paying for a quick plug on the radio or a commercial on a popular streaming channel can help you reach more people. These types of ads can still be targeted but also have the potential to be seen by those who might not find your advertisements otherwise.
Hiring content creators: Fresh content that ranks high in SERPs is the best way to get organic traffic to your website. Unfortunately, creating content regularly while keeping up with everything else that goes into running a profitable business is overwhelming. This is why many businesses hire freelance writers or content creation companies to provide high-quality content for their websites. If you use third-party content creators, make sure they’re familiar with SEO best practices to get your content ranking high on search engines.

Why Is Website Marketing Important?

Website marketing is important because without it, your website will be lost in the sea of websites that get started everyday. Of course, your friends and family might visit your website occasionally, but this isn’t enough to make your efforts profitable. Having valuable content on your website with strong SEO that comes up on SERPs means customers can find your website easily, and, therefore, get the information and products they want. By creating online marketing techniques that drive customers and clients to your website, you ensure that your business will thrive and stand out in the digital era.

Having a website isn’t enough; you need to market your website just as you would any other type of business. Whether or not you have a brick-and-mortar location makes no difference when it comes to marketing your website. Through your website, you can engage with your customers on a personal level that isn’t possible with other advertising methods or even at a physical location. Through your website, you can ensure that your customers feel valued and important. Offering deals, discounts, and information is just the beginning of how your website can reach customers on a personal level.

When you provide ways for your customers and clients to give you feedback about your products and services, you validate their opinions. This is especially true when you act on their recommendations. You can also highlight your clientele on your website or through your social media outlets. This encourages repeat business as well as the sharing of your content. When others share your content it gives you a chance to reach a new audience because all of their followers will see whatever it is that they love about your company.

While some businesses are well-suited to advertising to a wide range of people, others are better off focusing their advertising campaigns on certain audiences. For example, a company that makes eco-friendly toys may want to concentrate their efforts on higher income families with young children. They could partner with companies that supply other eco-friendly products as well as social media influencers who promote using eco-friendly products. On the other hand, a company that just sells toys and games would benefit from targeting all families with both young children and teenagers. This would require an altogether different marketing strategy.

The type of website you have will definitely effect your marketing techniques; however, you’ll need a marketing strategy regardless of your business model if you want your company to be profitable. Some people have a website just to provide valuable information and useful content to their readers. This is a noble cause, but it’s likely that these individuals would still like some sort of compensation for their efforts. Creating an effective marketing strategy and implementing it is key for anyone who wants to reach a larger audience and convert website visitors into repeat customers.

Let’s explore some of the reasons that you need to market your website:

Profitability: All profitable businesses have a marketing strategy, and businesses that operate online through a website also need a marketing strategy if they want to be profitable.
Customers: Strong SEO and easy “searchability” helps customers find your website. Without an online marketing strategy, potential customers will be lost, even if you have the best products, services, or information.
Visibility: In order to reach people, your website has to be seen. When you create an effective marketing campaign for your website, it will increase interest and the visibility of your business by giving people the opportunity to see what your company is all about.
Information: Through internet marketing, you provide an audience with information about your business without having to actually talk to or meet with anyone. When seeking information online, people want to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. If your marketing strategy helps them do this, they’ll use your website more often than one that is difficult to search or that doesn’t come up in SERPs.

Marketing gives you a way to tell people how your business can help them solve a problem. If your website is at or near the top of a Google search, more people will visit it than if it shows up several pages into a search engine.

Having a solid and effective marketing campaign is the best way for your website to come up at the top of a search engine. Your marketing efforts need to first focus on providing SEO-friendly content and then on getting that content in front of viewers. Using SEO best practices that are proven to work means your website will rank high in SERPs, which results in more traffic and a higher probability of making a sale.

How Should You Use Website Marketing?

Website marketing is a tool that every business owner these days should be using to get the word out about their products or services. Your website marketing strategy will be as unique as your business; however, some online strategies are proven to be more effective than others. The goal of your marketing is to create excitement about your website. You want people to feel like you have the information they need. It can take time to fine-tune a website marketing campaign, but the end result should be that you’re able to drive traffic to your website without much effort.

Whether you start off your marketing campaign by trying to reach a broader audience or a more targeted one, the main thing is to get started. Decide who your audience is, what information you want them to see, and where you’ll focus your campaign efforts. Going into website marketing with a plan and knowing the results you expect is the best way to convert traffic into e-commerce sales. When coming up with a marketing plan, you’ll want to think about:

The look of your website.
The audience you want to attract.
The budget you can use for marketing.
The advertising avenues that best suit your business.
The quality of the content you publish.
The goals of your marketing strategy.

How your website looks to visitors is important. Once you’ve attracted people to your website, you want them to navigate your site with ease to find what they’re seeking. All of your advertising efforts are for naught if visitors leave your website before taking a desired action, such as clicking on an ad or signing up for a newsletter, because your website is hard to search, slow to load, or otherwise unappealing in some way. Get outside opinions about the look and feel of your website, as you may have a biased opinion, especially if you created the website yourself.

Attracting the right audience is another important part of your website marketing strategy. A company that sells orthopedic shoes, for example, won’t want to focus their marketing efforts on a website that offers adventure travel services. On the same note, an adventure travel company won’t have much luck advertising on a hospital’s website. Focus your advertising efforts on the audience that will benefit most from your products or services. Even those who want to target a broader audience need to be aware of where they’ll attract the best customers. Consider demographics such as:

Age.
Gender.
Location.
Income level.
Interests.
Marital status.

Being aware of these factors will help you create a marketing campaign that’s engaging and appealing to your potential customers or clients. Advertising a service that costs $5,000 to someone who is low income and shows interest in shopping at second-hand stores isn’t likely to have good results. However, an advertising campaign for a low-cost apparel business could target this demographic and see excellent results. Understanding your audience is a major piece of the website marketing puzzle.

Not all companies have the same budget when it comes to advertising. Websites with a small advertising budget can use a Facebook account for free to get the word out about their business or trade content creation or ad space with other websites that have an audience that aligns with the products or services they offer. With a larger advertising budget, companies can target the audience that will benefit from their products the most by paying for ads on other websites that offer similar products or by paying for high-quality content with excellent SEO.

Whether or not you have the budget to pay for content that ranks high on SERPs, ensuring that your website only provides useful and valuable content to your audience is the best way to earn repeat visits. When someone finds the information or products on your site useful, they’ll not only come back to it themselves, but they’ll also tell people they know about what you have to offer. In addition, if your audience is willing to share content from your website with others, you’ll begin to rank even higher on search engines.

Knowing the results you expect from your online marketing campaign will help you actually reach your goals. If you want to increase your website traffic by 10,000 organic search engine visits per month, then you’ll want to focus your efforts on improving your SEO and website optimization. Perhaps you want to get your previous customers to return to your website regularly. For this type of marketing strategy, you’ll want to focus on establishing a strong email campaign that encourages past customers to click on email ads that bring them back to your website.

However you use website marketing, the main goal is to get your website in front of as many people as possible. The more visitors you have to your website, the more likely you are to convert those visits into paying customers. When you go into website marketing with a plan, you can adjust and alter that plan to fit your goals. If you notice that you’re consistently getting 9,000 organic visits from search engines instead of your goal of 10,000, you can look for ways to rank higher on SERPs, such as updating past posts or improving your backlinks.

Once you reach your goals, you want to set new goals. You can never do too much website marketing. From word-of-mouth to paid ads, you want everyone to see and talk about your business. Continue to grow your website constantly and consistently if you want a profitable business that can survive in the digital age.

Website marketing isn’t just for businesses that are established or those that are just starting out. It isn’t limited to websites with large advertising budgets or small ones. Website marketing is something that anyone with a website needs to focus on if they want to drive traffic to their website and convert that traffic to loyal visitors and customers.