Web Design – Marketing Via the Web
The way people find information now is quite a bit different than 10 years ago. This may be obvious to most people but many businesses have not responded to this challenge. Your website is your main marketing tool now and your web design is critical to successful marketing.
The consumer consumption of media has changed dramatically. Over 41% of media consumption is now done online versus offline. As a business, if you are not spending at least 40% of your marketing dollars on web based marketing campaigns then you are falling behind. E-Marketer reports that in 2010, internet based advertising will surpass newspaper advertising to become the leading advertising medium used by marketers.
This gets back to how people find services on a local level. They don’t use the yellow pages anymore, they use the internet to search for those for services. They then visit 5-8 websites and evaluate if those are companies that they would consider doing business with and then they call them and ask for quotes. When they search for those services, does your business show up on the first page of Google or Yahoo where you have a chance to participate in the consumer evaluation? If not, then you are not even in the game.
If you are fortunate enough to get a visit to your website then your site must now sell your company to the visitor. They are going to compare you to your competitors site and decide who they want to continue with. Does your website stack up or is it 5 years old with a dated design with poor usability? This is where web design comes into play.
The stages of our internet marketing system are as follows:
Discovery – Determine the target market and available traffic
Build targeted traffic – People that are searching for your service
Convert traffic to leads - Get visitors and then convert visitors to qualified prospects
Measure results – Track visitor behavior on your site with Web Analytics
Adjust tactics – Improve conversion rates by testing improvements
Repeat - Continous improvement in web design marketing
Discovery:
Discovery is doing the research to determine what are the important keywords that people search for your product or service. Targeting keywords that don’t have much traffic is a waste of resources and does not improve your website performance. Discovery is also analyzing your competitors to determine how strong they are in the online world. You’ll need to jump over them for important keywords to grab visitors.
Build Targeted Traffic:
Next you need to get more visitors to your website. That means using the right combination of Pay Per Click advertising and search engine optimization to increase the targeted traffic to your website. You only want people that are interested in your particular service to come to your site.
Convert Traffic to Leads:
Once you get traffic you have to convert it or you’ve wasted your money on traffic generations. This is where web design is so important. A poor design will tell your visitors that this is not a company that I would do business with. Spend for a little for a cheap website and that’s what you get. The website is a direct reflection of your company and it should reflect the professionalism and commitment that you have for your business.
The web design must make it easy for your visitor to convert! How many site you have visited and then left in frustration because you couldn’t find what you wanted. Don’t let this happen to you. A conversion friendly web design is our specialty.
Measure Results:
How do you know what your conversion rate is? How many visitors came to your site and what keywords did they use to find you? These are critical questions and you can’t make decisions about your business without this data. The way you find out this data is with web analytics and you must have this on your site to find out what visitors do when they get to your site. With web analytics you can determine what pages people like and don’t like, how long they stayed and much more. Without web analytics you can’t measure success.
Adjust Tactics:
After analyzing your web analytics, you can make changes to your online campaigns. If people are leaving certain pages in droves you can make changes to those pages to and see how people respond to those changes. In other words, testing changes to improve the performance of your website is how you improve and grow your business.
Repeat, Repeat:
Once you’ve gone through the cycle you keep repeating it. Nothing is static on the internet and neither is your website. Google and Yahoo are constantly changing their search rules so you have to adjust too. Your competitors change so that’s why you repeat the process and continuously improve your business.
Harry Milton is an internet marketing consultant in Santa Rosa, California and has been helping businesses find more customers and increase their marketing ROI. WSI Netconcepts is a Santa Rosa Web Design and Internet Marketing company serving Sonoma, Napa and Marin.
Author: Harry Milton
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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