Thursday 8 October 2009

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Leveraging Your Website as the Hub of Your Marketing (Not Marketing in the Dark)

Some sound advice from our friends at Upright Solutions.

This article demonstrates that no matter what marketing medium you use, all road lead back to the web.

You can watch the video below (you will need sound) or scroll past the video and read the article yourself.



I’m still staggered at the numbers of companies who don’t have any tracking on their website.

The one’s that do don’t review it.

The one’s that do review it, don’t know how the information can help them make decisions.

Bottom line, your website is absolutely the hub of all your marketing. I don’t care what you do exhibitions, leaflet drops, networking, direct mail, telemarketing, advertising it doesn’t matter, guaranteed the place every prospective customer will turn next is to your website.

It’s your living connection to your prospective customers. It’s dynamic, changeable and interactive (or it should be).

If you want to maximise that marketing expenditure, don’t let people fall through the cracks.

Website visitors are GOAL DRIVEN. Once they have read your leaflet or seen your company at a trade show they go to your website FOR A SPECIFIC PURPOSE.

If your website doesn’t serve that purpose you may as well not have bothered spending the time and money going to the trade show, because you’ll have dropped the ball.

Back to the idea of website tracking.

‘Web analytics’ as it’s called isn’t just a means of segmenting website visitors into categories according to where they came from (search engine, online directory etc) but with professional help it can also track your offline marketing.

The holy grail of business has always been knowing what activity most influences or generates new business. If we could get a better idea about that we’d make a lot more money at the end of the year.

Web analytics can go a long way to helping us with this.

By default analytics systems categorise your website visitors into three major categories (visitors from search engines, visitors from other websites, visitors who knew your website address).



But there’s nothing to stop you from creating as many categories as you like, allowing you to see exactly how many people where compelled by whatever piece of marketing material they came across.

So the next time you go and exhibit at a trade show or put out an advertisement, spend £10 on a new domain name that relates to what you are advertising such as ChristmasChocolatesOffer.co.uk and then forward visitors to that address to your real website.

Because the only place people could have found out that website address is from that particular advert or trade show, later when you review your website tracking you’ll see exactly how many people wanted to know more about your offer.

You can even track how many of those people ended up making an enquiry after getting more information.

We mentioned a couple of articles ago that we do this with our email footers so even if we don’t get through to decision makers when we call them up, we at least know if people are reading our introductory letters and emails and then wanting to find out more by visiting our website.

So stop shooting in the dark with your marketing money and turn the lights on by embracing web analytics.


Until next time keep that Profit Up. Original Post by Upright Solutions - Internet Marketing Consultants
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