6 Stages To Creating An Effective Website Marketing Strategy

A website marketing strategy is an important part of an online marketing strategy to attract new customers and build relationships that lead to loyalty and advocacy. There are many tools that will help you achieve this and with a well laid out plan, you will create effective website objectives and strategies that help you meet the needs of your customers.

Your website is your most important platform on the web and it is where you will build relationships with your visitors. Your other platforms include your social media pages like Facebook and Twitter and other listings where people get to know about your products or services.
However, none of these are as important as your website to your business, because you have more control over messages, customer service, promotion etc.
So here are some stages to consider for your website marketing strategy:

Research

The first thing to do is to research your potential customers to find out who they are and what their needs are. This will help you to create a website experience that matches and exceeds their needs and lead to greater profits and ROI for your business.
There are many free research tools that you can use including keyword tools that help you estimate the demand for your products and to understand what your prospects need.
Your research findings will help you to create a blueprint of your website that focuses on your core services, and depending on the industry you are in, it will help you to layout the structure of your site.

Create

Your findings combined with your website blueprint will help to create the website that you require. So you can now work on content which is a major part of your website marketing strategy and this covers:
• Website text
• Images
• Blog posts and articles
• Website navigation
• And many other features

It’s important to pick a web developer that understands your vision and has worked on similar website projects as yours.

Design

Your developer should be up-to-date on the latest designs and should understand the importance of such features as mobile responsiveness. They should be able to advise you on the best website platform to use, and not just one that they use for many other clients.
For example, WordPress is the platform of choice for 23% of websites and it has many capabilities that far exceed other platforms. You have access to thousands of plugins that turn your website into a well-oiled marketing machine and it is easy to install with one-click setup.
So this is one platform you should consider and your web developer should have lots of experience designing for it and implementing it too.

Publish

Now that your website is ready to publish after a redesign or new build, you should consider creating a news-worthy article in the form of an online press release to raise awareness.
You should hire or employ a copywriter with expertise in writing website content. This will pay huge dividends because they will create effective messages that match your business needs. When content writing is done well, it creates engaged visitors who return for more and they promote your website to their circles too.
Again, you should have a content strategy in place to publish regular blog posts, articles, case studies and others to gain more exposure and encourage interest in your offers.

Promote

Besides the online press release to garner some interest at your launch, your website marketing strategy should include details of how you will promote it to your prospects and bring in lots of sales or leads.
Nowadays, you have many options to promote your site on sites such as Bing and Google with their Pay Per Click (PPC) programs and Organic traffic sources. Initially, you can launch PPC campaigns to start receiving visitors to your site, while you work on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to bring you free organic traffic.
Social Media on Twitter mainly is another way to promote your products and services. There are many other platforms, however you should concentrate on as few as possible to focus your efforts, build a large following and create expertise on that platform.
Another effective promotion tactic that can form a key part of your website marketing strategy is email marketing. You should build an email list of customers, fans and regular visitors that you can market to, with discounts and offers. Email is effective because these people have shown a high level of trust and interest in signing up to receive your messages

Report

Now you should consider the reporting of your website sales, visitors, visits, bounce rates and so on. My favourite tool and the best by far is Google Analytics because of its many good features, easy-to-use interface and free version that has all you need to empower your website.
Analytics is easy to implement and within 24 hours you will have reports based on visits to your website. No website marketing strategy is complete without accurate reporting with a web analytics program like Google Analytics.

Summary

Your website marketing strategy is an ongoing process that requires constant refining. When done right you will achieve greater visitor satisfaction and this will be reflected in your engagement metrics such as bounce rates, conversions, time on site, average page views in Analytics.
Download my free online marketing strategy template to plan your website online marketing campaigns