The best place to position your website is at the centre of your marketing strategy. All other channels should drive traffic to it. Promoting blogs, content offers and engaging with potential customers will help you do this. If your website is well-optimised for attracting and converting visitors and contains relevant high-quality content, then it will help convert these visitors into leads and onwards through the buyer's journey with the ultimate end goal of converting them into happy customers.
Social Media channels are critical to driving traffic and engaging with potential and existing customers but unlike social media channels, you have full control over your website and the experience it provides, so use this to your advantage.
So before you design a new website, you need to know where it will fit into your overall marketing strategy, and you'd be surprised at how many companies don't take the time to do this. On the other hand, some companies put a lot of time and effort into having a clear purpose and goals mapped out that are core to their overall marketing strategy. But once their website has been launched, it gets left out of their annual marketing strategy workshops, and they don’t put a plan or resources in place for continuous assessment and improvement throughout the year.
Over 80% of consumers use the internet to find information on products, companies and their services before making a decision to purchase. People want to educate themselves and gather as much information as they can before making a decision. So don't miss out on opportunities and potential revenue. Make sure your website IS central to your marketing strategy and that you fill it with high-quality content relevant to each stage of the buyer's journey.
Start with your annual marketing planning. Your website should be reviewed in detail at these workshops. Key questions you need to answer are:-
- What's my overall marketing strategy?
- What are my goals? Do I have S.M.A.R.T ones? Are they measurable?
- Do I know exactly who it is I am trying to sell to? Who are my ideal clients? What are my client personas?
- What goals within my marketing strategy can our website help us achieve?
- How many leads is my website currently generating? How is it generating those leads? Which areas are generating more leads than others? Which areas are underperforming?
- Are the leads high quality? Are they converting - if not, why not?
- How many leads do we need to generate in order to achieve our goals for the year ahead?
- Are our current CTA’s on our website effective? Are our visitors finding what they need in each stage of the buyer's journey? Has our buyer's behaviour changed? How is our click-through and bounce rates?
- How are we analysing our metrics, and is it efficient?
- Are we reacting to the insights we gain from our metrics? Do we have time and resources allocated to review, tweak and improve our campaigns and website in order to meet our goals for the coming year?
Most importantly, once you have a strategy and tactics mapped out, you need to include regular checkpoints throughout the year to collect metrics, evaluate results, tweak your campaigns and update your website to keep improving your results. The key to successful marketing strategies is implementing an ongoing process of continuous improvement to help you reach your goals. And this must include your website.
In HubSpot's "State of Inbound 2016", 65% of companies surveyed stated that generating website traffic and leads was their top marketing challenge. By having a formal game plan in place utilising your website you can overcome this challenge by implementing a number of different tactics. Make sure you know what channels your buyer personas are on and use those to drive qualified traffic and leads back to your site. (Check out our blog How to Attract your ideal clients to your website if you need some tactical tips on this)
If your website is well-designed and provides your potential customers with what they want in the form of relevant content and a clear conversion path, then it will be successful and play a major part in achieving your goals and increasing revenue.
So it's important if you're a Business Owner, a CMO or a Marketing Manager to ask yourself where your website fits into your overall marketing strategy. If you can't answer this, then it's time to take time out to review where it fits (or needs to fit) into your overall marketing game plan and how it can be used to reach your goals. Positioning your website properly will result in higher sales conversion rates and better customer retention.
If you would like some further advice on reviewing your website, planning your marketing strategy, lead generation or any other aspect of digital marketing, please contact us for a free consultation.
If you are experiencing challenges generating leads and need some tips on how to improve your efforts then download our lead generation guide below.
