A lot of businesses take strategic planning pretty seriously. They’ll schedule annual planning meetings in which they lay out their goals, objectives and budgets for the year. They’ll hold quarterly review meetings in which they review their progress and make necessary adjustments.
When it comes to their marketing efforts, however—and specifically their websites—many small- and mid-sized companies adopt a Field of Dreams approach: “If you build it, they will come.” They don’t think strategically about what is arguably their most important marketing tool of all. They just blindly “wing it” and hope that customers will find them on the Web. And then they wonder why their online efforts fall flat.
First of all, your brand is about much more than how you look. It’s about being the right fit for the audience you’re trying to reach. It’s about meeting the specific needs of your audience with your specific goods and services. Should your website look good? Sure! But it’s more important that potential customers figure out quickly whether or not they’re in the right place. This doesn’t just happen. You have to be intentional—strategic—in setting up your website to address the specific needs of your audience.
Second, your customers need to be able to interact with your site. Just visiting your site—or even pausing to read some content—isn’t enough. You need to engage your audience. You want to get them to interact with you—to talk to you. But you have to have a strategy to make that happen.
Finally, you want your website to generate leads—and ultimately customers. Someone who lands on your home page isn’t a lead. Someone who views several pages isn’t even (necessarily) a lead. Someone who says, “Tell me more” is a lead. What’s your strategy for moving someone from being a visitor to being a lead?
To do those things in today’s online economy requires new thinking. Your website can be an incredibly powerful marketing tool. But it means developing an inbound marketing strategy that pulls prospective customers in to your website. If you’d like a more detailed look at how that’s possible (and 84 percent of companies that adopt an inbound marketing strategy increase their number of leads within seven months), we invite you to download our free Inbound Marketing 101 e-book.
Do you have to develop a web strategy? Nope! You can just blindly wing it. But you won’t like the results you see later.
