Website Marketing Strategy Basics

5 Steps of a Website Marketing Strategy

So…you’ve got a website and want to know how to increase it’s profitability? Here are the basics:

Identify Your Market – Who Do You Want to Reach?

The most ideal thing to do first is to identify your market. Who are you looking to do business with? The key here is to understand what they are looking for when they’re online, or reading magazines, newspapers, etc. Identifying your marketing is really about understanding the conversation that’s going on inside their head. What questions are they asking? What solutions are they looking for? What problems or pain do they most want to eliminate from their life? When you get the answer to those questions…you are well on your way to knowing what to sell.

A great place to start is with keyword research. I use a couple of resources, but a free one is www.GoodKeywords.com. That will allow you to see what the demand is in a particular industry. For instance, one of my tools shows that about 1983 people per day are typing in ‘search engine marketing’. That let’s me know that there’s a significant demand in that arena.

Determine What They Want by Starting a Dialogue

What I now want to do (as a marketing professional) is to get in front of that traffic and find out what their concerns are. I choose to do that by using a survey that allows me to ask a question like, “What is your single most important question about search engine marketing?” The answers tell me what the conversation is inside of my potential clients mind. From that point, I know what answers I need to provide.

Write Your Marketing Message

Once I know what my potential clients are looking for, I can clarify my marketing message based on what the market is looking for. My message needs to be something that 1.) provides the answers they are looking for; and 2.) does so with added value. This is where my unique selling proposition (USP) comes in. Without a USP, they don’t know why they should do business with me as opposed to any one of my competitors.

Begin Driving Traffic to Your Website

Now that you are clear on your market, you know what is they want as a result of surveying them, and you have a laser focused marketing message that matches the ‘want’ of the market, NOW you are ready to begin sending traffic to a website that has taken these things into consideration. There are multiple ways to send targeted traffic to your website. I will list five:

1. Pay-per-click marketing
2. Search Engine Optimization
3. Writing Articles for Article Directories
4. Press Releases
5. Linking Strategies

I will do future posts on all of those methods. However, it’s important to understand that you need a well-rounded strategy to insure that your website marketing strategy is successful. It take a bit of forethought and planning, but will be well worth the time.

Test, Test, and Test Some More to Improve Your Results

Herein lies one of the great downfalls of many a marketing campaign. They do not test. BIG MISTAKE. Take this statement from one of fathers of advertising, Claude Hopkins – author of Scientific Advertising. He states,

“Almost any questions can be answered, cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. That is the way to answer them, not by arguments around a table. Go to the court of last resort. The buyers of your product.”

Far too many business owners risk their families well-being on the mere opinion that their marketing is performing at an optimum level. Just today, I saw the results of a tested campaign wherein a particular website change that a top marketing professional thought would be in the best interest of a client’s campaign ended up delivering a 10% decline in sales. I firmly believe that all advertising and marketing must  be tested in order to know what works best. There are no professionals who are seasoned enough to second guess the market. Let your prospects vote with their wallet, and make your decisions accordingly.