Three Parts of Internet Marketing
Success online is not automatic. In the early days of the Internet, just having a website was generally enough. Today competition on the web is fierce. Every business should have a website and most do. As a business owner, it has become very difficult to drive quality traffic to your website. Today it takes planing, marketing, and above all else action. Success isn’t going to happen by mistake, we need to create it. Online marketing can be a complex business, but it all breaks down to three essential parts.
Getting Traffic to Your Website
The number one priority for every business website should be attracting the most relevant traffic to your website as possible. I emphasize relevant because search engines like Google have spoiled us. We expect to find what we are looking for immediately. If we do not see it, on to the next site we go.
Where do you get traffic online? Online traffic sources include search engines, banner advertisements, email marketing, online directories, and back links from other websites. Your marketing plan should start here. It is impossible to move on to the other two parts of Internet marketing without traffic.
Once your website is getting a steady stream of traffic you are ready to focus on step two, visitor conversion / calls to action.
Visitor Conversion / Calls to Action
For a business website to be successful it needs to convert visitors. That doesn’t mean it has to make a sale, but there should be a way for customers to take part in a conversion. Let’s define a conversion. A conversion is any desired action that a site visitor takes. It could be as simple as a visitor clicking through to a particular web page or as complex as moving through a multi-step shopping cart to complete a sale. Some other examples are signing up for an email list, leaving comments on your blog, requesting a white paper, flier, or brochure, filling out a contact form, or clicking on a mail:to link.
As you can see from the list I just gave, every business website has opportunities to convert visitors. These conversions should be tracked and your site should include clear calls to action to get your visitors to convert.
Stay in Front of Your Customers
Step three focuses on staying in front of your customers. Once a company goes through the effort and expense of acquiring a customer it is a tragedy when they lose them for repeat business simply because that customer forgot who they bought from or used the last time. This is a common theme I hear from small business owners. The best way to combat this is email marketing.
When you look at the cost of email marketing you quickly see that it is a no brainer. Company’s like Constant Contact make it so easy to send out bulk emails that every business could and should be doing it. Depending on campaign frequency and the size of your email database the cost per email runs under a penny per email address. Compare that cost to the thousands of dollars it takes to run a direct mail campaign.
The Internet gives businesses a great opportunity to reach new customers. By focusing on the three areas of Internet marketing you will have the greatest opportunity for success.
