Internet Marketing Askam-in-Furness

I’ve been speaking to so many clients lately about how effective, or not, their websites are in generating business that it got me thinking about why some businesses are able to use the web effectively to generate leads and why others go no further than just having a web presence.   I think on-line marketing is a much misunderstood discipline – and as yet I don’t claim to be anything of an expert in the ‘on-line’ bit.  But all too often when a business decides it wants a website some of the basic principles of marketing are forgotten and before you know it the web developers (the techies - men in white coats!) have got hold of it and whilst they are bound to design something technically flawless, it may even be well designed graphically.  The question still remains - will it get results?   And there’s the first stumbling block - objectives. 
Knowing what you want from your website   How many of you set clear, measurable objectives for your website before you approached a web developer?  I emphasise the word before because I know any web developer worth their salt would ask you this question as part of their initial discussion with you about your site.    The danger of doing your thinking with the web developer is that before you know it you are looking at the solutions they could deliver before really thinking about the real objectives of the website for your business.   Now - I do understand that not everyone will expect to make sales or generate sales leads from their website (I’d question why not however) – but at the very least you should be aiming to move people along the buying process so that prospects are a step nearer to doing business with you.   Once you’ve set some objectives then you can start thinking about how your website needs to be put together, what information it should contain and then the web developer can start to introduce you to the tools available

Thinking about your web visitors   In any marketing exercise you should think in a great deal of detail about your target market - in this case your desired web visitor.  Think about the type of person they are, their interests, their likely age, occupation, religion, colour, sex – anything that might influence the way they will view your product or is an influencing factor on their opinions.   In business to business (B2B) contexts you need to think about what their business priorities are, who the decision makers are in their organisation and how they might use your website to inform their business decisions.  It is always better to be as targeted as you possibly can – so if you have a product that sells into 3 different sectors – say a piece of IT software that sells to colleges, hospitals and engineering companies – you may need three different approaches within your website for these different audiences &ndash...

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