Building a Better Website:
Marketing Strategy Overview
In our first post in this series about website development, we covered 3 Things that Destroy Marketing and Strategy. Let’s go further and talk about some things that can be built right in that actually enhance your website’s ability to sell and help you become strategic in your efforts.
Give your website a voice
The tone of your site is important, but in this case I’m stressing the importance of your website actually having a voice, or ability to reach out to your viewer. Even in the best case scenario, unless visitors are already familiar with your products and services and returning to purchase, many times just reading a great blog post isn’t enough to bring them back.
An RSS feed can bring you to them. Make sure you’ve set up your site with a way for your visitors to be reminded that you offer great content. An RSS feed lets your visitor read your new posts in a reader, like Google Reader or others. RSS comes standard with WordPress sites.
Feedburner offers even more.
Feedburner lets you offer that same content in email or reader. It also sets up analytics that tells you how many people visited each post from the reader. It’s helpful, takes only minutes to set up, and you’ll use it frequently.
Email Campaigns and List Building
Another step to building website ‘voice’ may seem redundant at first, but it really is a horse of another color. While Feedburner offers email capability and basic analytics, it doesn’t offer the kind of detail about your visitor that will allow you to initiate targeted email campaigns. AWeber collects email data from your visitor, makes certain that they have requested the information, and then helps you track their interests so that you can tailor your products or services to things they’ve already expressed an interest in. Very smart.
Here again, your choice of theme matters. AWeber allows you to customize the visitor’s sign up form. It can be any size, but occassionally your theme needs to have customized widget sizing to accommodate the size of the form so that it looks complete. If part of the sign up sheet is missing in another field, your visitor may not trust that their information is secure. Those details build trust, and they need to trust you to sign up. Sign up forms can be re-sized on AWeber to an extent, but iThemes offers several themes that let you customize your widget sizes to your exact specifications, whether a sign up form, picture, or image.
Don’t forget to investigate your Google Analytics.
Your Google Analytics will help you see what impact, if any, your site is having on visitors. It can show you which websites are back linking to yours, how long visitors stay on your page, and how many pages they visited. It’s not the same thing as knowing how many visitors opened your email that was a blog post on your site.
Individual landing pages can be tested with this feature, and can be tracked from page to page so that you can see where your message is breaking down, and where it is successful. This information, used correctly, will help you target very specific visitor interests, and is an integral part of your overall marketing campaign.
I hope you’re beginning to see that although appearance is seriously important to your website, performance and voice are necessary to gain the attention the site will need once it’s built.
There’s more to come in our Build a Better Website series, stay tuned! If you want all this and more, make sure you visit our Website Design page and sign up for the entire Build a Better Website series, en totale.
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This post was very nicely written, and it also contains a lot of useful facts. I appreciated your professional way of writing this post. Thanks, you have made it very easy for me to understand.
Thank you Valentin, we appreciate your comments. Remember, if you ever have any questions that we can address here, we’re happy to do it!