Every minute, 571 new websites are created, 2,460,000 pieces of content shared on Facebook, and 278,000 messages tweeted (Source:). Having a sharp, professional, website with eye-catching graphics and exciting text isn’t enough these days. With so many websites and brands vying for attention on the Internet, online success demands a comprehensive strategy.
The strategy that you develop for your website should begin before your site is developed. The best-laid plans begin with knowing as much as you can about who your customers are and what they need. Only with this information can you create a website that can answer any questions customers might have before they ask, then make it easy for them to buy what you’re selling. Such a website will also help you identify and communicate your qualifications, uniqueness, and differences from your competitors. Through advanced planning, you can carefully target specific customers and tell them exactly how you’ll serve their needs and create goods, services, and shopping experiences tailored to your market.
Once your website is developed, you need to focus on generating powerful social signals that will propel your site up the ranks in Google. Using the following 12 steps, you can develop a winning strategy to build your brand, increase your presence on search engines, market effectively to your visitors, and retain and grow your customer base.
1. Define your brand.
A brand can be easily recognized. It has special attributes that differentiate between similar businesses or products in a category. For a brand to exist, a market must be aware of the business, have a positive perception about it, and have a reason to associate with its products and values.
2. Build your brand.
A brand’s presence and appearance must be compatible and consistent with its identity. If you sell off-road motorsport parts and accessories, your website should not use paisley with daffodils. Similarly, content developed about the brand must be believable and use language aligned with your target market’s education and cultural background. Focus on building and communicating areas of differentiation in your company culture, product offerings, service levels, and pricing that that your customers will value.
The strength behind any brand is its power to communicate with customers. The power of a strong communications strategy will differentiate your brand from its competition, give customers a reason to talk about your brand, and generate repeat customers. Strong communications skills also makes brands appear more professional, which leads to greater success.
3. Name your site strategically.
The domain name of your website should be short, memorable, easy to spell, and related to what you sell. Using relevant words to make up the domain name is an important ranking indicator. If your business plans to cater to clients in a particular city, use the name of the city in your domain. Purchasing a domain name that still has some ranking power and has been previously been used can also be advantageous.
4. Design for visual impact.
Across your website, collateral and social media properties should have a consistent look and feel that can be easily recognized. Use the same fonts, colors, and layouts on your website that you use in your print literature and social media properties. Finally, invest in the creation of a professional-looking, recognizable brand logo.
As to site design itself, remember that simple is better. Use only what is needed in terms of images and graphics to improve your central message and communicate it quickly, clearly, and attractively.
Strive for clutter-free pages that offer balance, and use white space and font sizes that are easy to read. Finally, design your pages for mobile devices, and focus onAccelerated Mobile Pages. Your navigation should be consistent and intuitive.
5. Develop and fine-tune onsite content.
The content you develop for your site must be unique, interesting and targeted. Your content should be created so that the most important information is “above the fold,” or near the top of each page.
In addition to providing relevant, high-quality information related to your products and services, ensure your website contains must-have pages, such as about us, contact us, maps to your offices, your blog, and a publications page. Once a page is created, optimize it for search engines with title, keyword, and description tags, in-page headers, and alternative text tags. Include text links to reference products, services, and other items that have additional content on other pages. Add clickable calls to action anywhere a visitor might be ready to act.
Use Google’s Webmaster Tools to review traffic reports and identify pages with higher than normal bounce rates. High bounce rates may signify the need to improve the content with relevant search terms.
6. Generate social signals.
To place well in search engine rankings, a site must generate social proof signals, such as inbound links within a blog post, user engagement with your content, time spent watching your YouTube videos, number of quality comments, and social shares on blog posts.
Most experts agree that other social signals, such as retweets, likes, and pins offer little or no direct ranking impact. While Google+ might have some impact, it’s probably limited to a personalized search perspective, and only when individuals are logged into their own Google accounts. Therefore, site owners should focus on generating a rich mixture of links from a diversified set of highly authoritative websites.
7. Include metadata for pictures.
It’s amazing how many paid content writers fail to include metadata in the pictures they use on websites. Copyright information, source URL, keywords, descriptions, and author information can all be stored in an image file. This information, which is also read by Google, is an important part of SEO that should not be overlooked.
8. Develop mailing lists.
As an online marketer, e-mail lists are one of your most powerful customer retention and generation tools. People who sign up for your opt-in e-newsletter give you permission to market to them regularly. As you develop an e-mail list, design your collection method to incorporate a “double opt-in.” A double opt-in means that instead of directly receiving a welcome e-mail, you receive a second chance to either opt-in or decline first. That means that if you go to a website and sign up your friend, your friend will receive an e-mail that basically says, “Are you sure you’re the one that opted-in, and do you still want to do this?” ESPs especially love double opt-ins because they provide a higher level of security that prevents your list from being used for sending spam.
Be sure that email list subscribers from all sites go to the same master list. Different mailing lists don’t do you much good if you have to create a separate newsletter blast for each one.
Looking for some tips on the best ways to get your site visitors to join your mailing list? Check out these real examples.
9. Create an e-mail newsletter 130.0 / 439.
E-mail newsletters may sound like an old-fashioned idea. However, they offer one of the highest click-rates at one of the lowest cost-per-lead of any type of marketing. Setting up an e-mail newsletter campaign is easy. Take advantage of any number of email automation applications and services to collect e-mail addresses, develop a professional looking e-mail message, distribute your message to subscribers, and analyze results.
When developing an e-mail campaign, be sure to address the 6 pillars of communication. By including these pillars in designing your message, you will ensure that your message is communicated strategically, accurately, and purposefully.
Once you send out your e-mail newsletter, remember to post it to your blog, Twitter, and other social sites. Doing so will ensure that Google and other search engines will index it.
10. Create accounts on the “Big 4” social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube).
Because each social media site is different, make special thought and effort to develop posts. The goal should be to craft each post so that it supports your brand with useful promotional and informational details.
When setting up accounts, take the time to upload a “cover” photo or graphic. This cover should have a consistent look and feel with your website and other social media sites. It also allows you to brand your page beyond your profile picture and contribute to an attractive, appealing user experience.
At the very basic, you should develop and maintain the following:
- A Facebook page. Regardless of how you feel about Facebook, you still need a presence on it if for no other reason than its easy proximity to hordes of potential new customers.
- A Twitter account. People who dismiss Twitter are not aware of how to use it for promotion. It’s extremely powerful for attracting new fans and keeping your current ones instantly informed.
- A YouTube channel. Videos are such a major part of any company’s online presence that you really need your own branded channel to exploit them successfully.
- A Google+ page
- A LinkedIn page
In addition to these sites, look at other networks. Many social networks that your audience might use are available and deserve your consideration. Two are Pinterest and MySpace.
11. Develop your social media sites.
Develop your social media sites so that all of them feed viewers into your main site. The key is to make sure that any viewer on any site is aware that you have a website and knows that it’s the main repository of information about you.
Regularly update social media sites with fresh content. Maintaining them with fresh content and attracting new followers requires substantial time and investment. Eventually, you may reach a point of diminishing returns.
You can’t be everywhere at once. Even if you could, it would take so much time that you’d never have any time left to run your business. To meet this challenge, take advantage of online media broadcast applications that make posting updates more efficient. An application like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite allows site owners to streamline the process and save time.
12. Get third party help when you’re overwhelmed.
At some point, social-media management gets too complex for the business owner or entrepreneur to maintain, and third-party help is needed. This is usually a good thing, since you’ve progressed to a point where your enterprise has grown so big that you can’t keep up. Furthermore, hiring a company that specializes in social-media management can keep you current with new tools and techniques that you might not be aware of. Even when outside help arrives, remember that you’re still the one that drives the bus. Be sure to take part in all strategy discussions, but leave the actual facilitation to the company you’ve hired.
Having a sound social strategy is the key to successful promotion.
