As a company you work and slave to get your web site up and running. Then you wait for the deluge of users to come your way. But . . . as the days and weeks progress . . . it dawns on you – you built it and they didn’t come. What did you do wrong?
Building your Internet presence, your web site, is the first step to staking your claim to a loyal following of happy visitors and hopefully paying customers.
What’s needed is a coordinated plan of e-business programs that, taken together, builds a substantial base of people who regularly frequent your site and buy your products and/or services.
This coordinated Internet marketing plan includes email marketing, pay-per-click search engine marketing, search engine optimization and a few other off-line tried-and-true marketing activities such as direct mail and even a very targeted program of publication advertising. But of course, it all starts with a well-designed web site with periodically updated well-written content useful to your target market.
Taken as a whole this adds up to what I like to call your E-business Quotient™ (EQ). Your mix of these activities will always be different depending on what product or service you sell. But a mix is definitely required. If done only piece-meal the EQ will always be lower, because none of these activities is a single silver-bullet to success.
Each activity works from a marketing principal that is key to your business’ success. Email marketing, for example, is a very effective way to stay in front of customers and prospects on a consistent and economical way. We’re not talking about spam here. Effective email marketing is based on the best practices developed by the direct mail industry: It always starts with a good list. You need to build a list of people who have agreed to permit you to send them useful information about your company and your industry. This is what’s called having an “opt-in” email list. Done consistently, email marketing in an “ Ezine” format is a great way to stay in front of customers and prospects with you company and product message.
Pay-per-click search marketing is a very good tool to quickly market to a very focused group via the search engines. Pay-per-click works on a bid process for keyword ranking in the sponsor section of search results. You pick the headline and message with a click-able link to your site. There is a whole industry built around pay-per-click. If done well, pay-per-click can be a great tool for getting targeted prospects to you site.
Search engine optimization is sort of the flip side of pay-per-click. You try to optimize your site content for specific keyword phrases with the text content on your site. SEO is the long-term strategy for getting traffic from the search engines. Also, if done well SEO can be a great tool to build traffic to your site.
And lastly off-line activities you ignore at your peril are direct mail and a very targeted print advertising campaign. These two activities can work hand-in-hand by using the same creative for both and getting your list for the direct mail from the publications you advertise in.
This and more is what I can offer clients to build their E-business Quotient on the Internet. And with this increased traffic I help clients convert these eyeballs to paying customers. So yes it’s ultimately all about conversion.
We can help. From designing a web site to designing a local Internet lead generation program, we can help you in every step of the process to build your online presence. |