This Tuesday saw us host our third ‘Why Your Website Designer Is Not Doing You Any Favours’ event. It was hosted by David Roberts and myself, Will Williamson.
If you have come to one of these before, they are a free two hour workshop designed to help small and medium sized business owners understand how to take their online marketing beyond the ‘brochure’ website.
If you missed it, here were the 6 key takeaways:
1. Buying behavior has changed
The way that people buy has been totally transformed by the access we all have to the internet, and it affects businesses in all industries. Whether people are using Google to search for cheaper prices for a product, reading reviews for a hotel, studying case studies from a new business service or checking out a potential suppliers credit record online – the internet has changed the way we buy, forever.
2. We need to move beyond Web 1.0 (the online ‘brochure’)
Web 1.0 was about having a static website showing your products and services, with some company background and a contact us page. And for the more advanced, a news page.
Web 2.0 is about making your website part of your conversation with your customers and potential customers – web 2.0 sites are content rich, audience focused, visual and interactive. This change is about giving your website visitors what they want, when they want it – and it’s about giving you more leads, customers and referrals.
3. You can now automate (and personalise) your marketing
Marketing technology has made it possible to automate lots of marketing activities so you can send relevant emails with links to relevant pages to the right prospects, at the right time – automatically.
When built, a fully formed marketing automation system means you nurture leads and service customers –even while you sleep!
It also means your communication is not only relevant to their interests, needs and buying stage, but they can also be highly personalized. This means you can build a strong relationship with prospects and customers alike, nurturing initial enquiries into sales-ready opportunities, converting opportunities into sales and customers into brand advocates who refer people again and again to your business
4. Just ‘creating content’ won’t work alone
Regular blogging won’t have a business impact unless it is part of an overall business strategy. As David Roberts explained, our motto is ‘strategy before tactics’. Not only do you need to understand who you are writing for and what the goal for each blog article is, unless there is a defined promotion plan in place you risk wasting your effort, getting very few readers and even worse – no new leads.
5. What your website designer WON’T do
Website designers are a vital part of modern marketing – they help create great looking designs, which help give your business the right impression when they visit your website.
However, what they won’t do is to help you develop your marketing strategy. They won’t help you develop a content strategy, or help you understand how to build an audience. And they won’t understand how to create a keyword strategy, or how to plan and execute a traffic plan to promote your content, or how to convert those visitors into leads and from leads into customers.
In other words, internet marketing goes way beyond your website - which leads us nicely to our final point…
6. Most businesses focus on tactics, not strategy
Many business owners spend money on SEO, Pay-per-click advertising, and web design. Some spend more buying email lists to send email ‘blasts’ to. And a growing number are now investing either time or money on social media and blogging.
But very few have joined these up into a single, coherent strategy – they tend to have these tactics each working in isolation.
That is why we always begin working with a client by performing a marketing audit – to review their online marketing in it’s entirety. And it’s why we then recommend having us work with you to develop a strategy first, before making changes to your website, SEO, social media or email marketing.
Overall, it was a day that provided fantastic information (at no cost) and gave the attendees the chance to meet and talk to inbound marketing professionals about how to improve their businesses, as well as network with like-minded people.
So keep an eye on our events page for the next up-and-coming events – and if you prefer to talk one-to-one, we will offer to give you a ‘marketing audit’ for free. This is where one of our team will spend 30-40 minutes with you to critique your current online marketing – your website, your blog, your email marketing, your pay-per-click – everything. It costs nothing and can give you some fantastic insights.
To request this free session, click here.
Article by Will Williamson
