How will you market & advertise your new website?

 

You should be looking into your marketing plan for your new website alongside the site’s development.

Do not underestimate the importance of marketing websites as the internet simply has too many websites for anyone to find or care about your site unless you bring it to their attention.

If you’re not going to do this yourself you should have a dedicated marketing person that you must sit down with and brainstorm a plan.

Although you may not know the best way to market your website, you do know a lot about reaching your customers.

Together, you should develop a list of ideas, a set of action items, and a budget.

Offline marketing – This refers to all media that’s not on the web, e.g. leaflets, business cards, mail outs, radio, TV etc.

All of your offline advertising should always include the company’s web and social media addresses.

Online marketing is any effort to spread the word about your company that uses the Internet to reach people, grab their attention, and hopefully, at some point, get them to buy from you.

Online marketing has a distinct advantage of having access to the measuring tools so allowing you to ‘keep score’ of how well your campaign is going and see in real time who is responding to your message. Another unique part of online advertising is the trend toward content-based advertising, where the ad itself is entertaining and informative, and not purely a sales pitch.

Some online marketing methods:

SEO – Search Engine Optimization – SEO is the process of optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing – Search engine marketing is the paid cousin of SEO.

Instead of optimizing your content and promoting it a lot to eventually show up as a top result for organic search engine results (which can often take a few months to happen even if you do it right), you can pay your way to the top. And since it’s the first thing searchers see on the page, you’ll likely get a lot of hits to your site. But you also pay for each and every one.

Content marketing – content marketing is all about providing timely and relevant value to your audience. The first step to doing that is knowing your stuff and making it interesting enough to grab the viewers’ attention.

So, why do you need content marketing? Because content marketing is SEO.

According to Google, content is one of the top two ranking factors. The more amazing content you create, the higher the chance you have of bringing in new traffic and leads from organic search.

Types of content – Infographics, blogs, podcasts, videos, audio bites, e-books, posts, status updates.

Pay-per-click advertising (or PPC)– is exactly what the name suggests. You pay for each click that you receive on an ad that you create.

It's similar to search engine marketing, but it isn’t limited to Google and its competitors. Most social media networks let you create ads that integrate naturally into their feeds, allowing you to pay for clicks to your website.

The most popular platforms for PPC advertising are Google AdWords and Facebook.

For example with Facebook, you can pick a specific audience, eg. You could target women in Erina, NSW between the ages of 19 and 35 who like Ed Sheeran. Yes, it’s that specific. You can set a budget based on how much you’re willing to pay per click. Facebook will then serve your ad to your audience in their Facebook news feeds, sidebars etc. When people click on your ad, Facebook will redirect them to your page, which can be part of your website or any URL that you define.

This way, you can get people to buy your product, read your content, or signup for something that you designate.

Social media marketing is where you use one or several social media channels to engage with customers, build relationships, and then send them to your products and services.

Instead of seeing social media as a distribution channel where you push out the content that you created on one platform across to all of the others, try to tell stories that match the context of each platform.

Organic Facebook reach is nearing the end because there is so much going on with ‘paid’ advertising. Due to the rapid fading away of organic Facebook reach, it’s not the best way to be looking at moving forward with as part of your strategy.

YouTube also offers many ways advertisers can reach a targeted demographic. You can either buy an in-video ad that plays before a video starts or as a pop-up during the video. You can also pay to promote your own video by purchasing keywords (words that people may enter into a search field to find your company, product, or service).

Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people's (or company's) products.

It’s a kind of referral marketing where you share profits with fellow marketers in exchange for promoting each other’s products.

Email marketing – And finally, there’s email marketing, which some already consider old-school. But it’s still one of the most effective channels. Once your customers have given you permission to contact them, you can email them at any time, providing value and asking them to buy when the time is right.

That’s what email marketing is all about: Directly communicating with your audience and customers.

Email trumps lots of social media platforms when it comes to engagement. In fact, you’re 40 times more likely to gain a new customer through email than through Facebook or Twitter.

Plus, email is a good, long-term method of contacting prospects.

Think about the last time you changed your email? Generally people keep their email accounts for a long time.

You can already guess how big online marketing really is and how big of a space each of these individual categories fill.

As daunting as this sounds, it’s an essential part of having an online business to invest the effort into having a good effective and clear marketing/advertising strategy to grow your audience or business.

We hope you have enjoyed our series on TECH TIPS, feel free to look back at our Blog for future reference as you move forward with your venture – Good luck!