Noticed a drop of in the number of people filling in your “contact us” forms on your website recently? You and half of the companies we speak to! To paraphrase Field of Dreams, web marketing is no longer a “build it and they will come” discipline. Something is happening out there, and as a savvy business, you need to be aware of it.
In days gone by (in web terms, of course, everything runs that much quicker, so we’re only talking say 3 or 4 years ago) you’d build a website, pay someone to do some search engine optimisation on it, and wait for the leads or sales to start coming in. No longer.
Time to go and find your customers
Things are changing, and changing fast. It’s time to start looking at the way you market your company online with new eyes. Because whereas before it was all about marking your territory and getting people to visit you, now you have to go and find them instead.
Your clients, potential clients and competition are all inhabiting different places on the internet to your website. They may even be talking about you there. Are you there too? If not, it is definitely starting to cost you money.
Here’s just a few ways you can spread your wings wider for little or no money. They all are disciplines in themselves, but it’s a good taster of the kind of things you ought to be doing, right now:
- Make more use of your blog. Not got a blog yet? Get one. There is stuff going on in your industry and company, and you should be commenting on it. Post to it at least once a week. Don’t blab on about your products all the time – post useful non-commercial stuff too. (Make sure it has an RSS feed too. This allows people to read it in a digest of all their favourite websites without visiting your site.)
- Start a company group on Facebook. Facebook has upwards of 200 million people using it. It is open of the most popular websites in the world. Tell your friends and family. Get them to join your group. Whenever you have anything to show, say or comment on, it should go on here too. People wear their Facebook Groups like badges online. Get your logo on it, and your clients, fans or colleagues will start attaching it to their own pages. Ask your staff to join up and do the same
- Open and use a Twitter account. Don’t know what Twitter is? Get someone who does to open your company’s account and start posting to it. Set your blog software up to auto-post to Twitter whenever you add something to the blog. Now anyone searching or subscribed to you on Twitter can see when you’ve updated your content without visiting your website
- Do the same for LinkedIn. LinkedIn is like old-school networking online. It is business-oriented, smart and popular. Join up. Take part. Join groups in your area of expertise. Answer question. Contribute
- Join and monitor any relevant online forums to your industry or area. Monitor the posts, and reply when you can help. Again, think non-commercial, and try and be of genuine use. There’s nothing to stop you mentioning who you are, where you work and what you do while you’re doing so
- Comment on other people’s blogs. It’s not enough to write your own blog. Find the popular blogs within your industry, town or niche and comment. At the very least people will start to come back to your blog and subscribe
- Send out an email newsletter to your subscribers at least once a month. You probably won’t have to write any new content on it as you’ll have four new blog posts to link to. And make sure your website´s email signup box is prominent so people leave you their details when they visit. What’s the point of someone visiting your website then going away forever? You want to start a dialogue with all potential customers. Sell them on your email newsletter, and make sure it’s good enough to deliver
Notice the link between points 2 to 7 above? They all happen AWAY from your website. People don’t come to your site every day. But they do check their email Facebook, Twitter, RSS, favourite forum or blog etc. Be there!
There’s another common denominator too. These activities take effort, not a massive marketing spend. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, email marketing, joining in forums and commenting on other people’s blogs are all free, or practically free, services and activities.
Many businesses are becoming publishers
Probably the main thing you need to do (apart from start believing this fundamental shift which is picking up pace and not going to go away) is to get someone within your organisation to start generating the copy for you. The whole strategy about will live or die on what you publish on your blog and what you say away from your website. Good companies are now publishers.
Still think you need to spend loads on a site and SEO? Well to be fair, different sectors have different need and one marketing strategy isn’t right for all, but please believe that this affects you even if you only have a small handful of predominantly business-to-business clients.
There’s one good knock on though if that web position is still your be-all and end-all: Many of the above techniques will benefit your SEO too!
If you’d like to talk more about new ways to improve your search engine marketing in Marbella, why not pop in and see us at Reedus Design? Contact us to book a free consultation.
By Phil Morse