Developing a suitable web strategy
Do you actually plan your web strategy for your online prescence yearly? Do you create an annual web strategy and review every month? If not, here are some ideas to ensure your website stays top of your mind throughout the year and you develop an effective web strategy.
Undertaking a website audit
A website audit is a comprehensive overview of your website. Think about all the areas of your site, which work and don't work. Question the function and role of the site (ie Brochure site or E-commerce).
A website audit is an easy way to organise website maintenance with your web developer. Here are some questions to ask yourself and/or your team members.
- Is your site cross browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari) and cross platform (Mac or PC) compatible?
- Does your video or audio stream successfully?
- Does the site load all the images and flash correctly?
- Do your visitors stay and transact or do they "bounce"?
- Does the site crash with too many users?
- Is the navigation logically organised?
- Is the site accessible?
- Is the performance or speed of the site fast?
- What content generates leads?
- Does the site look old or tired?
Getting regular feedback on your current site from friends and work colleagues is also recommended.
Social networking strategies
Given the rise and popularity of social networking sites, do you have a web strategy for maximising the opportunities in this rapidly growing market. Do you or your Managing Director have a profile on Linkedin, Facebook or Google+ to network with possible clients online and generate leads.
Blogging
Does your website have a blog? There is no doubt that blogging allows businesses to easily communicate online with shareholders, customers and the public effectively, efficiently & transparently. Three elements to your corporate blogging web strategy should be initially who will blog? how often? and what about? Also think about how you can promote your blog.
Search Engine Optimisation
How does your website rank in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing? Does your competitor out rank you when search for relevant terms and phrases? Developing an SEO strategy can often be complicated, as they are often customised to not only the website, but the audience the site is being delivered to. Ranking in the top ten can mean the difference between sales and no sales. A good start is to implement a basic SEO package , then develop a more advanced program of website optimisation as time goes on.
Competitor analysis
The competitor analysis is a very broad overview of not only your direct competitors locally but is there a competitor overseas that has the same product of service as you. Can you learn from these foreign competitors? Do they have features which could be easily replicated or better still improved upon? Where do your competitors appear in search results? Better still should you be subscribing to their email news and RSS feeds?
Email marketing
Modern style direct marketing at its best. If you don't already have a mailing list, then start developing a web strategy to build a few. Three mailing lists you should have are clients/customers, potential clients/customers and a media database. A good place to start is building a subscribe form directly off your website. We use and recommend Mail Chimp for our email campaigns.
Competitions
Competitions and giveaways are a great way to drive traffic to your website and grow your mailing list. Depending on your type of business you might want to giveaway one of your products or buy a prize depending on the aim of the competition.
There is a great deal of evidence that shows if you do a major giveaway, as opposed to a much smaller prize, the response rates are much better. Have in your mind why you're doing the giveaway. Is it to increase subscribers, promote your RSS feed or promote the product you are giving away.
Referral programme
Major brands are now adding affiliate marketing to their overall online marketing strategy in order to compliment typical paid advertising on the internet. Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting an online retailer of products or services via a network of websites who endorse and promote the offering to their audience. Typically this could be via email, graphical advertisement or blog. Recently there has been growth of using videos as the promotional vehicle.
Online advertising
- Do you currently do online advertising?
- Could you generate more traffic and customers if you started online advertising?
- Do you do flash/graphical advertising or textual advertising?
- Should you be advertising on networks other than Google Adwords?
- Does your adverting actually work?
- Is the call to action clear and concise or is it misleading?
- Should you be increasing or decreasing your budget?
- Are you generating leads via your online advertising or just doing branding?
- Are you advertising on keywords where you already have good organic search rankings?
There are plenty of advertising networks on the web, many targeting specific niche markets.
Website statistics
Do you have the intelligence behind where visitors come from and how long they spend on your site? If not, you not only need to implement some sort of statistics package, but you need to learn about how to interpret the results.
Popular packages like Google Analytics allow you to create goals which allows you to measure the path of a user from when they come on the site to when they purchase a product or fill out a form. You can also get daily reports emailed to you each morning so you can monitor your sites performance.
What's your Web Strategy?
Do you have a web strategy in place? If the answer is no, then you need to talk to us.