For most entrepreneurs and business owners, having a great looking website is not enough. You likely also want your website to contribute to the growth of your business, which means that you’re receiving leads, sales, and customers via online strategies. If you want your website to serve as more than just an online business card or brochure there are online strategies that can help. Some of these strategies are essential, depending on the results you want. Keep in mind that not all of these strategies are going to be beneficial for all businesses. Talk to an experienced internet marketing consultant to understand which strategies will work best for you.
- Lead Generation Campaigns
- SEO Campaigns
- Landing Pages With A Call To Action
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
Lead Generation Campaigns
Digital marketing and advertising, such as via Facebook ads or Google Adwords, can contribute to an effective online lead generation campaign. Lead generation campaigns are a more focused and targeted approach for building an email marketing list, generating leads, or to sale products. This type of campaign involves sending people to a landing page designed specifically for achieving the goals of your campaign. For example, a law firm might use this to get qualified leads, a chiropractor might use this approach to get new patients, a business consultant could use it as a way to build their email marketing list. When creating a lead generation campaign it’s important to start with the end goal in mind. Consider what actions you want people to take and create the campaign to effectively funnel people through to that end goal.
SEO Campaigns
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is essential if you want people to easily find your website via the search engines (such as Google). If you want to be found on the first page of those results, you’re likely going have to put in a lot of effort to get there, depending on how competitive your industry is. An SEO campaign often involves making sure your website content is optimized for the keywords and phrases you want to target (i.e. what are people searching for to find your site), writing unique content (content is king), creating citations (those are online business listings such as a listing on Google Maps or Yellow Pages), and sometimes link-building (other websites linking back to you). The best effective strategy varies for each business.
Landing Page With A Call To Action
When a visitor arrives at your website there should be a clear message and specific calls to action based on what you want the visitor to do as a result of visiting your website or landing page. For example, if you are a dentist and your goal is to receive phone calls from people interested in your services, make sure your phone number is clearly visible at the top of the page. You would also want to have a “request appointment” or “contact us” button visible at the top of the page. Putting a contact form on the page can also be beneficial – it removes the steps required to contact you. You want to remove barriers and make it as easy as possible for people to take the desired action.
For businesses with a physical location make the address easy to find, if you want customers to come to you.
Always be thinking of what actions you want people to take and make it a priority in how your website is designed and laid out. It can also be beneficial to create landing pages for specific campaigns, such as for a special you are offering to new clients or a new product launch.
Email Marketing
You’re missing out on a lot of potential customers and sales if you’re not building an email list. Often times people might be interested in your service or product but are not ready yet to purchase. People are typically more willing to join your mailing list if you provide useful information. This is also a way to educate and bring awareness to other products and service you offer that they might not know about. Be careful not to overwhelm. You may want to limit sending emails to your list to just once a month. For some businesses, weekly emails might make sense.
Social Media Marketing
A lot of people are using social media, whether it’s Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. For some businesses it can be beneficial to use social media marketing, especially if your target market includes the people who are already spending a lot of time on those platforms. Facebook makes it easy to target a specific audience with their Ad Manager (and it doesn’t cost much to give it a try). This targeting increases the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. Social media marketing is not a good fit for all businesses but some businesses actually have great success doing it.