Websites are amazing tools for ensuring the success of your business. However, they are merely tools. All tools have a specific purpose that helps get the job done, but they remain useless until you actually pick them. While websites aren’t entirely futile without a bit of legwork, they won’t provide you with the benefits that they will when you have a marketing plan in place.
Using your website as a marketing tool
Hopefully, you’ve put in the work to optimize your website during the building process. This means doing things like:
- Honing in on your target audience
- Doing keyword research and incorporating it into the content
- Using proper headers and header tags
- Updating meta descriptions
- Building a site map that focuses on user journey and sales funnels
- Optimizing your website’s loading speed, responsiveness, and overall usability
And more. If you’re still in the building phase of your website and you’re looking to prepare for what comes after, then these are key things you’ll need to consider.
However, if you’re ready for the next phase, here are some ways that you need to use your website to make all of that pre-work worth it:
1. Perform ongoing keyword optimization
After your website is launched, you may find that it’s not as optimized as you originally thought that it would be. One thing about SEO is that it takes some finessing before you’ve finally found the perfect formula. Making changes to keywords, headers, and internal/external linking every couple of months will help you find your sweet spot.
Another way to increase your site’s searchability is to incorporate a content strategy. This strategy will include elements like social media posting, blog sharing, and email marketing.
2. Collect data from your website
It’s hard to know if your SEO work and other efforts are successful if you’re not collecting any data. Various solutions are available to help you find the insights you’re looking for, and it’s important to consider traffic, behavior, or performance. Some of these tools include:
These are just some of what is available—learn more here.
3. Social media marketing
While this isn’t using your website directly, you will, ideally, be driving traffic from your social media account(s) to your website as organically as possible. It can also be through the use of paid advertising. Either way, you should be active on social media with CTAs ushering your followers to your brick-and-mortar location or to make a phone—or to the website, if nothing else.
Some strategies for social media include:
- Finding the right platforms for your audience
- Utilizing a content calendar so you can be consistent with ease
- Performing A/B testing to nail down the right kinds of posts as well as the best times to post
- Interacting with your followers
- Creating content that’s fun and engaging rather than sales-y
- Boosting the right content and purchasing ad space
Check out some of our other articles on social media marketing!
4. Paid advertising
In addition to social media ads, you should invest in different types of Search Engine Ads. There are a variety of ads that you can choose to implement. What you choose will largely depend on things like what platforms you want your ads to appear on and what type of audience you’re targeting.
Check out this article to learn more about what your options are.
Working with The Cultural North
While there are still several other marketing efforts you should consider when preparing the marketing phase of your plan. If you don’t have the capacity to put in all of this work in-house, then consider partnering with us, a Duluth-based digital marketing agency.
Contact us to learn more!