Internet Marketing For Your Business
There is a lot involved when it comes to modern internet marketing. You may have heard this before, but it’s not enough to simply have a website if you’re not doing anything to promote it. A well built, well optimized website will have a better visitor-to-customer conversion rate than billboards or radio ads. But just like a billboard, where it is makes a huge difference.
A website with poor optimization for Google’s latest standards and for the people visiting the site is like having a billboard in the middle of nowhere. It may look nice, but no one’s going to see it. You’ve got to be in front of the eyes, but internet marketing is about more than simply being noticed.
The core component of any internet marketing campaign is the customer experience.
Colors and fancy graphics may look pretty, but if there’s not a strategy behind how they’re used it’s just fluff that might complicate the user experience. Same with navigation menus and the page layout in general.
This is a frustration a lot of local businesses we’ve talked to have shared: firms they worked with in the past focused solely on building web traffic. Traffic is nice, but even a million visitors a month to your site are useless if none of them contact you or become a customer. Internet marketing is branding as well, not just a customer lure.
A website built to convert will pass all the following:
- Is it easy for a visitor to quickly find different services, get the info they need, and make a decision?
- When visitors land on the front page, is there a coherent message that guides them toward an action? (i.e. page elements aren’t competing with each other.)
- Is the page content well-written, genuinely informative, and geared toward helping readers make a decision?
- Is the site truly responsive? (i.e. displays well on all devices.)
Sites that do all of these things well will have much greater success than those that don’t. These aren’t simply suggestions; they’re crucial to an effective internet marketing campaign.
Why is the customer experience so important?
At the end of the day, the customer experience is the only thing that will equal a new customer or a referral. You can rank for your core keywords phenomenally, maybe even better than all your competitors. Even though the first 3 spots on Google tend to get 70% or more of the clicks, that doesn’t guarantee that once they’re on your site they won’t leave.
We don’t know about you, but when we search for things we’d much rather land on a clearly organized site that just answers our questions with no BS. What that says about them as a company, how they treat customers, and what they value are far more important than whether or not they’re #1 on Google. You’d probably drive a few extra miles to visit a grocery store that’s always clean and courteous to avoid one that, despite being closer, always means a bad experience. The “convenience” just isn’t worth it. It’s the same in web design and internet marketing.
Sure, ranking well is still a consideration. After all, no one can appreciate your site if they can’t find it. But making getting more traffic the primary goal is not serving your bottom line. You need to know how many people called you because of your site, went to your contact form, or visited you directly via click-to-navigate options from the site.
We have a commitment to telling your story.
Having a knowledgeable staff of internet marketers helps, but that never means we dictate to clients what they should be doing. In most cases, no one knows the soul of the brand better than those in the company. The approach to all our web services begins with candid conversations with business owners to learn about what makes them different, how they value their customers, and what sorts of questions and challenges those customers have.
Every design, every page of content, and every keyword is chosen to align with those factors. This leads to a design that conveys a consistent message on any device, sets the company apart, and makes decision-making while on the site as easy as possible.
If you’re looking to strengthen your internet marketing efforts by building a more focused website, contact us for a consultation. We can assess your specific needs and see if it’d be a good fit. If it is, you’ll have taken a huge step toward attaining the business your website can garner.