What Next For Your New Website

Posted by bruce in Small Business Marketing | 2 comments

Earlier this week I had a few things come up that made me think about some of the failures of small businesses after they receive a new website or start a new social media presence on Facebook or Twitter. I got sidetracked and could not write the post but a very timely post by Mark Fulton at DotSauce.com fit nicely with my thoughts as well. The post also reminded me of my post I did awhile back concerning offline marketing tips for promoting a website.

When presenting to small businesses we online marketers tend to focus on talking about driving traffic through SEO, PPC, Social Media, and other methods that drive targeted web traffic to the customers, hopefully, quality domain name.

Although businesses like Amazon.com can focus the majority of their marketing online local businesses have different needs and in many cases a good portion of the traffic to their website will come from offline marketing methods.

Many of these local businesses are new to promoting on the web and have a perception that they need not do anything to promote their website once it has been turned over to them. I cannot tell you how many times I have witnessed customers pay real money for a new website but visit the business month after month and never see their domain name on their business cards, menus, t-shirts, or billboards.

What a missed opportunity. Most consumers will NOT remember a phone number or address. A phone number is really 10 words, a website can be as short as one word. Which are you going to have a better chance of remembering?

It is important that small business owners remember that, yes their web development partner should make sure their site is properly optimized for the search engines, but unless they are paying a marketing company to handle all their marketing promotions, that they treat their domain name as they previously treated their phone number or address. They can provide more information on that domain name than they could possibly provide on a business card or an ad in a newspaper or billboard. Use those methods to drive people to your prime real estate on the web, your website.

We at LocalTek make it a point to help our customers understand holistic marketing and making sure customers promote. As much as we do our best to help our customers it is typically less than a 50 percent ratio that take advantage of the FREE ways to promote their website in the places they are already paying for.

With more people using mobile phones and search everyday it is important to keep your online brand in front of them, let them search for your website and cut your competitors off at the pass. Your online marketing does not stop once the website is handed over, no matter what web development company you are working with, the ability to attract customers only starts with the website hand off. Making sure your website continues to work for you is part of a holistic marketing approach that continues like any other marketing that you may be doing.