Here’s what I want to achieve with my marketing strategy:
- I want my clients to find me on the Internet.
- I want to communicate about my activities or services.
- I want to acquire new customers through search results from Google and other search engines.
How about you?
You have many ways to communicate on the Internet, more or less expensive (time and money): blog, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Business, website. Fortunately, none of these choices exclude others. But in everyday life, with limited time and budget, you can’t always do everything.
Whether you choose one or more for your marketing strategy, it’s best to do it well informed. I will tell you about the best choice: creating a marketing strategy for your website.
Regardless of your budget for creating your site, it’s imperative to think about your web marketing strategy.
Step 1: Define your goal and target
Ask yourself these 3 questions:
- Why make a site? To acquire new clients, to present my services, to create or reinforce my brand image, etc.
- What is the target? Companies, communities, organizations, entrepreneurs, teachers, individuals, etc.
- How strong is my business against my competitors? An approach of proximity, expertise, quality, etc.
The answers to these questions will allow you to define your objectives and summarize in a few words your activity. You can work on a draft baseline, that is to say, in one sentence: who are you?
Think about your customers! User Experience or UX is a strategy that puts the user at the center of your product. At a high level, large budget companies will conduct field surveys (with data acquisition and analysis resources, with UX design firms and experts).
Do not worry if you have little time or budget!
Marketing is more about skills and context. Identify 3-5 types of customers and 3-5 of your skills to define the specialty of your product. Your site should develop only these contents. Stay simple and direct.
Remember: In this step, you must have had defined your purpose. Make a rough draft of the baseline in a few words. It must be simple and easy to understand.
Step 2: Analyze your competition
Benchmarking is a crucial step in your web strategy creation!
Research your competitors:
- Write down the ones you like, and the ones you don’t. As much about their content as their web design, colors, logotype.
- Look how they’re positioned in Google (thanks to a certain home page, a blog post?).
- Consider the flaws of their business model and ask yourself if you can do better.
- Think of the qualities that set you apart from the others.
Analyze the demand with keyword research. For example, with Google’s Key Planner tool.
- The concept: we search for keywords related to the main one.
- The result: we list the most searched related keywords. They will hint at what’s relevant to your business.
- The conclusion: we gather the words that feel are important to our business, and we use them to write our best content.
Step 3: Create a great design
This step is the most important. Use a mock-up to place the words -> the main message and the order in which the secondary messages are transmitted on the homepage and other main pages. Carefully choose the color, typography, and aesthetics of your brand. The result must be a summary of your thoughtful strategy discussed in the previous steps.
In this updated graphic identity, you must visualize your values, your strengths, and your message. All this will have to be represented by the entirety of your user interface.
Once your identity is defined through your wonderful home page layout, you’ll take action and turn the mock-up into a website. This step is called integration.
Remember that your site will have to be responsive. That is, it will be readable, beautiful and functional on all devices (tablet, smartphone,etc).
You can perform tests on your website.
For example:
- 2 different homepages (AB testing),
- analyze time spent on site
- analyze bounce rate
- analyze most read pages
- etc
Step 4: SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a set of techniques used for optimizing our webpages to make them show higher in the natural search results of all search engines.
When integrating content and images into your website, you are actually working on the SEO of your site.
Search engines like Google may seem obscure. It’s not necessarily like that. If your website is coherent and transmits a clear message then Google may already decide to rank your website high. The rest will come naturally- your content will help Google understand who you are and what you do.
However, the competition is tough and we want to do the best we can! It’s best to follow a few principles to get the most out of your website’s potential.
There are 2 criteria for addressing SEO, on-page and off-page. On-page refers to techniques that are applied to your site and its content directly. It’s fundamental for quality SEO.
It’s essential to carry out this background check:
- Contextual and editorial content.
- Use and density of keywords.
- Site architecture and structure of internal links.
- Insert keywords into image file names.
- Meta tags title and description of each page.
- ALT attribute, title and description tags of the images.
- Speed of loading pages. (In particular thanks to the optimization of the cache of the site and the images).
- Robots.txt and Sitemap to facilitate the indexing of the site by Google.
- Mobile and tablet version (responsive).
The results do not happen overnight but if you follow these techniques, you’re well on your way to ranking high.
Conclusion:
Creating the best marketing strategy for your website is not easy but you now have the exact steps to follow. Implement all of these best practices and you’re set for success.
