You’ve come up with a marketing strategy and you think it has everything you need to succeed, and to multiply your company’s return on investment (ROI), but have you considered your web design? No matter how solid your web marketing strategy is, if you haven’t built your website to be easy to use and engage such components as SEO and social networking, your marketing strategy may not have the propulsion behind it that you’re looking for. The way you build your website matters more than you might think in the internet marketplace, but there are some key places to start.
1. Using SEO to Your Advantage
One of the simplest ways to advance your company’s ROI right from the start is to work with a website consultant who can help your company embrace SEO to the greatest extent. A website built around SEO will get much more exposure than a website simply cobbled together with generic text.
2. Easy Navigability
A website consultant can also help you with the next key feature of a powerful web marketing strategy: ease of use. It’s much easier to lure inbound browsers in than it is to convert them into customers. When a website is easy to use, someone who is idly browsing the site is more likely to find what they are looking for and stay for more content. If your website is complicated and not intuitive, casual browsers will leave before figuring it out. Poor navigability is one of the easiest ways to lose potential customers.
3. Integrating Social Networks
To build a successful web marketing strategy today, you will need to integrate social media into your main website. This integration must extend beyond simply linking a company Facebook page to your main site. True integration will encourage users to share links between their main page and the business community, often including surveys or contexts, and will generally invite a greater level of customer engagement than simply liking a business page. Consider the variety of social networks as well – for example, would your business fare better on Twitter or LinkedIn?
4. Measures of Success
After you have instituted these measures, how do you know if you have successfully increased your company’s ROI? The first measure, of course, is to determine if you are seeing a significant increase in sales or other leads. Increased sales are the most obvious sign of effective web marketing. Another factor to consider is what new traffic is being driven to the site. Are you getting traffic from new locations or demographics? Is the traffic coming from the demographics you were hoping to target? More important than this new traffic, however, is their level of conversion from visitors into customers. Also be mindful of what percentage of customers begin processing a transaction only to abandon their purchases along the way.
Web design meant to improve ROI is one of the most important investments you can make in your business. By optimizing your website for SEO and engaging it with social networking, you are building the infrastructure for success.
