Why Your Website is the Foundation of Your Marketing Strategy.
Wherever you live, think about the foundation upon which your house (or condo or apartment) is built. It’s solid, it’s durable and it’s built to hold the floors above it. Right? The same concept holds true when it comes to your website and your integrated marketing campaign. Your website is the foundation upon which the rest of your efforts are built.
Let’s think about what your marketing strategy/campaign might look like? Integrated marketing as defined by the Direct Marketing Association (or DMA): “Integrated Marketing is an approach to creating a unified and seamless experience for consumers to interact with the brand/enterprise; it attempts to meld all aspects of marketing communication such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, direct marketing, and social media, through their respective mix of tactics, methods, channels, media, and activities, so that all work together as a unified force. It is a process designed to ensure that all messaging and communications strategies are consistent across all channels and are centered on the customer.”
You get the gist…all of your messaging needs to be seamless so it’s super easy for your potential customers, and your referral partners, to ‘get’ what your brand is all about. This all starts with your website and consistently refers back to it, sends back to it (those valuable links embedded in your posts, blogs, emails, etc.) and depends on (drumroll please) yup, you guessed it…your website being that firm and supportive infrastructure!!! Once you have a solid website everything else you do can, will, and should point back or rely on it.
Networking & Email campaigns…
Networking? How and why does this have to with your website being so important? We’re not going to lie here…we believe that even though we’re ‘digital marketing experts’, it always has been and always will be about people and relationship based marketing. After all, what we really do is help our clients understand who their audience is, then we identify the best and most effective ways to communicate with them. When you’re at a networking event and you make a solid connection (vs. shoving a business card at someone and/or having that done to you), you usually exchange business cards and follow up afterwards with a personal email or phone call. (At least you should!) Do you then go to their website, check out and connect with them on their different social platforms? We’re guessing here that they’ll be doing the same with you. Then, we’re hoping you add them to your email database/list, and that you’ll be consistently in front of them so you stay top of mind. Well, a solid email campaign will be (hopefully) sending your audience back to your website for more! That website that really speaks clearly to them about what you do and of your unique value proposition…
Blogging & Social Media…
We often blog, post and talk about the importance of a solid content marketing campaign, and we will most certainly be discussing this in more detail tomorrow on our weekly Facebook Live (every Wednesday at 1:00 we will discuss that week’s blog – among other things)!
So, to sum it all up, do you have a solid foundation? Is your website agile and easy for you to post weekly blogs to? Is it optimized for SEO with the appropriate tags and backend data? Or…did your cousin’s friend at college build your website or maybe your retired uncle from IBM that used to write code? We can’t tell you how many times people come to us with websites that are antiquated, not mobile friendly, not user friendly, not optimized for SEO (AT ALL)…and on and on!
When it comes to investing in your business some things are truly worth the investment and well designed websites are definitely one of them!
Some things to check out like a Q & A blog by Seth Godin on ‘What works for websites today?’. He wrote it in 2013 but it’s timeless! and another great (albeit extremely short and to the point) blog by Seth.