The Marketing of my site worked! Now what?

Online Marketing can be broken down into a few different areas which all have their place in the online world.

First there is SEO (search engine optimisation) which is perfect for getting visitors to your site. But this is all that SEO is concerned with.

Then there is SEM (search engine marketing) which utilises PPC (Pay Per Click) methods such as Google AdWords to essentially buy traffic on to your site by bidding on certain keywords which your site is relevant for.

After that comes website optimisation which is geared towards really making your site convert. It is solely concerned with making visitors click the right buttons and fill in forms on your site so that you can contact them with regards to their enquiry.

Don’t make them think!

The basic premise with website marketing or indeed any marketing is that you cannot allow yourself to make it too complicated. You have got to always be focusing on the lowest  common denominator and ensuring that your marketing mesages can be understood by whomever that might be in your target market.

This same message hold true once your marketing campaigns have done their job. You have driven users to your site and they have “taken the bait” and asked a question or filled in a form, or whatever action you needed them to take.

Get the balance right.

The place where a lot of businesses fall over and disappoint their customers is in their systems and procedures and indeed their internal processes. (There is marketing relevance here)

Online marketing needs to be concerned with every part of the value chain – from the initial enquiry online through to the final delivery of the product which has been ordered. Each one of the following touch points are critical to ensuring that the customer is happy and comes back to your company again.

Business Process :

The processes  that potential customers and paying clients are funneled through as they interact & deal with your company. If these are not properly streamlined; you might not just have a frustrated customer on your hands, but also revenue might be lost through to customers cancelling orders.

This gets worse from an operations point of view as you might be losing revenue due to incorrect ordering and even poor utilisation of man hours.

Business processes are vitally important to ensure that your company is running smoothly and efficiently. BizAgi is an excellent FREE process modeler.

Business Systems :

The business systems are the touch points that your staff and customers need to interact with when ordering. These need to be periodically assessed to make sure that you are using the correct systems for your needs. As a business, especially from a marketing point of view – a client and potential clients is hugely impatient! If your systems are clunky and take your staff too long to process orders or to source goods to supply, you are going to have to find new clients to service as the current ones are going to leave.

Marketing dove-tails with all of the above as a main function of marketing is not only to attract customers; but also to retain them. Sloppy & cumbersome systems and processes make this very difficult to do.