Charlie Sheen, and a bunch of other celebrities aside. Your website is not about you, well it is; but it should be about your customers, clients, students, members or donors and their needs desires and aspirations.
In the same way internet marketing is not about you or me it is about our clients. These are the folks that ultimately pay our bills when they allow us to provide those goods and services that ultimately meet their needs and desires. Before we worry about the internet technology and services we need to make sure that our internet promotion has a solid foundation in marketing.
Step 1: Who is your audience?
Before we build or upgrade a website we should consider who is the audience? If we plan an event for an audience of 20,000 fans what are we going to do? Is it a sporting event? Where do you find the sports fans? What do they have in common? What are their issues, desires and aspirations? Then how do you get them to drive themselves to the event (your website)?
The basic marketing questions answer how we can connect and satisfy those needs and aspirations. What is your primary market? What is their background, needs and uses. How have you historically supplied them? Then there are secondary markets and influencers. What is the background and the needs or your influencers or recommenders? Before we engage in any discussion of web site design, social media, or any technology it is helpful if you have a profile of your ideal client.
Build a client profile. Saddleback Community church has a profile of Saddleback Sam. This is a composite of the families in the area. Whenever they are considering a new program or offering they consider how this would impact Saddleback Sam. Now reflect on your client profile and how you meet their known needs. This will guide the content that is generated on your website.
Step 2: Your Goals
Define your goals for the website. The website can be platform to say how wonderful you are. Most websites succeed at that; however, they don’t drive more sales, subscriptions, sign-ups or donations. You need to be specific about your goals for each segment of your audience. In most cases you want your primary group to buy your service. There will be a secondary group that you want to recommend your service. You want to make it easy to buy or recommend.
Step 3: The Website:
You can build a pretty website that looks nice, but without content no one will come. In marketing on the Internet content is King – content geared to clients is the real King. It drives search engine optimization and gives your audience something meaningful to consume. You can pay per click, pay for directories and pay for facebook ads – if you don’t have what your audience is looking for they will flee from your website within seconds. The money spent driving them to your website would be wasted.
A lot of money and effort can go into graphic designs to make the website look pretty. Most of that money is wasted if no one shows up. It is also a waste of money to have three or four pretty pages and no meaningful, engaging content for your prospective client. You need to balance the two factors in website design. The look and feel of the website should not drive people away. You need to get a clean, simple, easy to read website design. You need that so your audience can find what they want and enjoy the experience of getting the information from your website. You want them to enjoy the experience so much that they will recommend it to their friends as well as return for more information or to buy or to donate. You will need to spend some money on a pleasing website design, but you need have some cash left over to keep it updated and fresh over time so that your audience will come back for more.
Coming to your website to find information and use your product or service should be a positive experience. It is critical that the casual prospective user to your site can find it fast and find it friendly. It has to be positive experience for them. The look needs to be professional and polished. The user should be able to find the information they need within a few clicks of the mouse.
Step 4: Content
If you want to be found the gold standard is to provide quality content. It makes it easy to be found naturally as well as it has better relevance (and potentially lower costs) for paid traffic. The first thing is to provide quality content and keep it updated. Most business owners or managers personally don’t have the time or energy to keep their website updated so they will need to set the tone and the direction. You need to budget resources so that the content meets you audience needs and it stays fresh or they will switch to another channel. That content can include technical product sheets, operation manuals, repair manuals, case studies, pictures, video interviews. It can include almost anything, in any format, as long as it is relevant to your audience.
Now that we have the relevant content, the next step is to make it visible and ensure that it gets found on the internet. If you are used to the yellow page phone directory users were trained to find the solution to their problem. If there was a leak you would look up plumber. On the internet we would want to ensure that the problem and the solution can be found easily. So we would want to ensure that your plumbing company could be found for local users as well as your company would be found when someone typed in “fix leak” in their favourite search engine.
When you have the content then it becomes easy to find the key words, perform search engine optimization, do the back links, buy pay per click and a host of ‘other stuff’ to make sure that your potential audience finds you on the internet.
Step 5: Social media
Did we say we wanted your clients to come back and recommend the site to their friends? That is the basis of social media. You can spend thousands of dollars trumpeting how wonderful you are, but when your clients tell their friends about the excellent product, service or experience they had with your organization it is worth more than a slick ad in a glossy magazine or a one minute spot during the super bowl. The emergence of Facebook, Linkedin and other social media sites has allowed recommendations and complaints to travel at the speed of light. If the story or recommendation touches a deep longing or need it can go viral!
Going viral is more about Theology, philosophy and Maslow’s hierarchy than it is about technology.
It is more than I can cover at this time in this long over due entry.
Tom Kobelt
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