In order to effectively market your organisation over the internet a great website is only half the battle. The other half is making sure people can find the site, and that it’s marketed and visited. tictoc are experts in all areas of website marketing, and in this article we give you some insider knowledge about the ways to market your site.
First off, you’ll need to find out how many people are currently visiting your site. Web statistics, such as those from AWStats or Google Analytics, will tell you the number of site visitors, what pages they view, how long they stay, and other vital information. You can use this information to decide whether you need to increase your traffic, however if you haven’t carried out any website marketing before there’s a good chance your stats could do with a boost.
There are a number of ways that you can increase the number of people who visit your site regularly:
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO ensures your site is technically accessible to search engines, so they can ‘read’ the content of your site and include it in their results pages when someone searches for relevant terms. The key is to appear as high up the search engine rankings as possible, as research from eConsultancy suggests that 81.7% of search engine users will start a new search if they can’t find what they’re looking for in the first two pages.
There are many things that you can do to make sure your site is accessible and search-engine-friendly. Some are to do with technical aspects of the build, and others are about the content you write, the way you write it, and how you label it.
Search engines prefer words in URLs to be separated by hyphens or underscores (e.g. www.tictocfamily.com/free-seminar) so that they recognise the individual words. Keeping your URLs search-engine-friendly is also a good idea (e.g. www.ourshop.com/pink-dinner-plate rather than www.ourshop.com/product_ID?5564291a).
Flash content is invisible to search engines, so if your site is built entirely in Flash it won’t show up at all. Don’t worry if there’s some Flash on your site though, the rest of the content will be picked up anyway.
Things you should think about when you’re writing your content are:
Many people see SEO is an incomprehensible ‘dark art’. Luckily practice makes perfect – we’re practically sorcerers by now. Why don’t you give tictoc a call to discuss the potential for using SEO to market your website?
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
In addition to SEO you might want to consider additional paid-for advertising through search engines.
When you search for a word or phrase on Google, the results that Google returns for free are listed on the left hand side of the page. The order of results will be based on how relevant to the search term Google thinks each website is, which is based on the site’s Search Engine Optimisation. Sponsored links are paid-for listings shown towards the top of the page in a yellow box, and on the right-hand-side.
Make your website a sponsored link by taking out a range of Google AdWords campaigns. AdWords campaigns are an excellent way of highlighting particular brands or products if you have an eCommerce site. It could also earn you a place on the coveted first page of Google results. The important thing to remember when developing a budget for an AdWords campaign is that it isn’t spend that’s important, it’s Return on Investment. It can make sense to spend £4k a month on the campaigns, if you see a £20k uplift in sales because of that spend.
Google AdWords campaigns can be quite complicated, and we recommend that you know exactly what you’re doing, what you’re paying for, and how it’ll work for you before you get started. Of course, you can always pay an expert to manage your AdWords campaigns for you. Give tictoc a shout if you’d like to chat about Google AdWords.
eNewsletters
Once you’ve attracted site visitors you need to ensure people re-visit your site. This is especially true for e-commerce sites, so you can maintain a dedicated customer base.
Sending eNewsletters keeps you in touch with your customers and potential customers. You can choose the right tone in which to address them, and ensure they don’t forget you. You might want to tell them about a special offer, give them free delivery, highlight a new product, or keep them up-to-date with company or industry news.
If you already have an eNewsletter package, we recommend integrating it with your website, so that people can subscribe and unsubscribe directly from there. Take a look at our article on eNewsletters for more information.
Viral marketing
Viral marketing is a technique that uses pre-existing personal relationships to increase brand awareness, or achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales). Viral marketing encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, or images. You could design a cool flash video based around your organisation, and featuring your web address. As the video spreads online more traffic will be driven to your site. For more information on viral marketing possibilities speak to a member of the tictoc team.
And finally…
Make the most of offline opportunities to promote your website. Display your URL in as many places as possible - on your stationery, on van liveries, and on any other marketing collateral you have. Shout it from the rooftops if you have to!