Nine Strategies to Make Your Website a Robust Marketing Tool

 Target audiences that include decision-makers and influencers increasingly use the Internet to assist them in running their businesses.

In fact, more than half of C-level business executives interviewed for a September 2003 study named the web as the most important business medium. This same study, preformed by Internet.com, showed that most study participants noted their time spent with other media—trade pubs, newspapers, magazine, TV, radio—has lessened compared to time spent on the web…and this is above and beyond time spent using email!

According to Nielsen NetRatings, 68% of executives access the web at work vs. 31% at home. Furthermore, executives at work spent 27 hours surfing the net during one recent month vs. 26 hours at home.

Creative Strategy recognizes that the Internet—accessible 24 hours a day from anywhere in the work—has become a primary business information source for today’s business leaders. And, we urge our clients to build their websites for maximum effectiveness and then market them for maximum visibility in the places on the web that their target markets are most likely to find them.

To create and maintain a robust, hard-working website, we recommend the following nine tactics:

One. Choose carefully the keywords and keyword phrases you want prospects to search on when they query search engines. If your kw/kwps are too broad, you’ll get a lot of unqualified traffic; if too narrow, you’ll get no traffic. When crafting kw/kwps, you need to get into the minds of your prospects to understand how they verbalize your company and your offerings. Also check to see what kw/kwps your key competitors are using and borrow those that make sense for your business.

Two. When you create the title tags for the pages you wish to register in the search engines, make sure those same kw/kwps are supported in page content as well. Title tags alone no longer attract search engine spiders.

Three. Examine the websites of your competitors. How does your site stack up in terms of navigation speed and clarity? What’s good about the competitors’ sites that you should take note of? What mistakes have they made that you should avoid? Do you provide adequate, understandable cross-referencing on your pages to encourage prospects to click for more info and stay longer on your site?

Four. Does your website have registration devices other than on the Contact Us page? Offering a product demo or a white paper download to those who register minimal pertinent information (name, company, phone, email) will help generate a leads database.

Five. Look at your current website. How many calls to action have you placed within the content? If you can count them on one hand, you haven’t given prospects enough to respond to.

Six. Have you registered your white papers and other keyword-rich pages in the search engines? These provide another doorway to bring qualified prospects into the site. Have your offered free downloads of your white papers in key areas on the web?

Seven. The Internet is all about linkage and your website needs to be a part of that network. Once you feel that your site is a competitive standalone, you need to make sure it has links back from as many free and low-cost placements on the web as are relevant to your business. Examples include databases, directories, announce sites, and message boards.

Eight. If you are looking for a strong, sudden increase in traffic, you might consider pay-for-placement listings. Examples include running ads on Google AdWords, Overture, and BitPipe. It takes a bit of practice to tweak ads and fee amounts so that you are paying the least for the maximum exposure.

Nine. Once you have a healthy amount of onoing traffic visiting your site, be prepared to track traffic patterns. Knowing which of your outside links is sending you the most qualified traffic will help you decide how to spend future online marketing dollars. Knowing how traffic behaves once it enters your site will let you determine future improvements to your site.

Each of these nine critical tactics requires solid web know-how or web technology to keep your site “sticky,” generate qualified leads, and keep you at the top of the search engines.

We’d welcome the opportunity to see what we can do for your website.

Please call or email info@creativestrategy.com to talk about how to maximize the impact of your site on the web.

©Creative Strategy, Inc. 2004 • 5454 Wisconsin Ave Suite 1655 Chevy Chase, MD 20815 • 301.718.4550