If your website is a showroom and your pages salespeople, web marketing is everything that you do on the internet to pull the customers in. There is no point in a site that no-one knows about or visits. Even the best salesman can't sell without a prospect to sell to.
Most people who use the internet are engaged in one of five activities: selling, entertainment, correspondence, research, or shopping. Your customers will usually be among the last two groups. Researchers are looking for information. If you can provide it, they could become your customers. Shoppers know what they want, but are looking for a supplier.
Researchers and shoppers both use search engines, directories, vertical portals, e-zines and web forums to find the sites they want to visit.
Publicise your business, products or services in as many places as possible (and as are economically justifiable) to make your potential customers aware of your existence, and direct them to your site. But this is only the first step to successful web marketing.
Putting up a signpost is no guarantee that anyone will travel the road. You also need an enticing message to suggest that the journey will be rewarded. With often fewer than 20 words available to you to sway the decision, it takes experience and skill - and testing - to get your prospects to follow your directions.
Have you ever wandered up and down the aisles of a supermarket, only to find that the item you were looking for was at the opposite end of the shop from the 'obvious' places where you expected it? A great many web sites are like that, because what seems a logical layout to the designer may be anything but that to the visitor who knows what he wants, but can't find it.
The difference between websites and supermarkets is that customers rarely bother to waste their time looking, and almost never ask for help.
If a visitor doesn't find what he wants, or an obvious button to click, within a very short time, he or she is off, out of your site, back to the search engine, and clicking on the link to your rival. (Some experts give you seven seconds!)
An essential part of web advertising is to ensure that customers following links to your site end up on pages specifically designed to show them what they are looking for, or at second best, to reassure them that it is there. The advertising and the web site are a team.
... our experience of marketing on the internet can drive paying traffic to your business. Email us or call us today for a free discussion about what you want for your business.