How to Market a Website

How to market a website

In order to successfully market a website, marketers will need to focus on some basic and critical factors.

This post is an effort to help webmasters with tips and techniques . I am hoping it will help some of you who are new to this domain to understand how to market a website. I have taken up and explained three critical marketing aspects in this post.

The Technical Aspect

The technical aspect is to do more with the  quality check on all the technical aspects of a website such as, the download speed, internal and external links, image download speed, html & scripts, mobile usability, and various other aspects such as navigation.

The webmaster must ensure that the website  is not only attractive, it is functional too, by functional i mean, user friendly and delivering what it is supposed to deliver.  It requires the marketing team to work closely with the design, and development team to ensure that the website objectives is communicated clearly and is understood by all.

2. It is essential to have a Google webmaster account.

The webmaster account is one of the most helpful tools to get information on the technical aspects of your website as well as various other useful information.

The Marketing Aspect

Along with focusing on the technical side of the site, it is recommended that the marketing team works on a strategy to promote the website on-line.

There are two factors to this:

1. The on-page optimization:

The first is to focus on optimizing the site for visitors and search engines (and this is where SEO steps in, in its full form). Quite a bit of the internal optimization is addressed in the “Technical aspect” where some of the SEO elements are taken into account, however, a lot of optimizing happens on the content (both textual and visual), and it is a continuous process. Some of the key questions that needs to be answered at this stage are:

a. How to present content in the most attractive way.
b. How much and what to write
c. How to present content such that it is persuasive and results in maximum conversions
d. What to and how to link internal content.
e. And much more

2. The off-page optimization:

a) This is the part where marketers work on a strategy to increase the visibility of their website. A marketing mix is usually opted for and typically it comprises of strategies for social networking, search engines, PR, and others based on the business objective. An
example would be something like the below-mentioned mix but is certainly not limited to this only:

A Facebook page, a Pinterest account with boards dedicated to various products and services, a twitter account, local listings in Google, and to give the visibility of the website a real boost, the PPC advertising options of Google and BING is added in the mix, email marketing. These are some of the basic stuff that is usually done along with a fair bit of PR which would include publishing news articles.

Behind these strategies the focus is on understanding what the audience wants and then delivering it.

The Analytics aspect

One of the most important aspects of measuring the performance of your website is the analytics part. And some of the stuff (there is much-much more, this is just a sample) that you can unearth are:

How is your website doing?
Who are your visitors?
Who is referring your pages?
Are the number of visitors increasing?
Are visitors engaged?
How many are new visitors?
Are there returning customers?
How many are converting/What is the conversion percentage ?
Are people dropping out at the last moment?
How well did a particular campaign do?
Should the PPC advertisement be continued or optimized to drive better conversions?

Analytics will provide a ton of data, marketing will need to analyze those and come up with strategies based on the data, and apply those on to the website, and repeat this process over and over again.

For the social networking sites and for almost all the campaigns, there is a need of complete involvement, in addition to following potential customers and answering queries, marketers will need to be alert on the requirements of the target audience and get potential customers engaged by providing updates, informative content…

Behind the entire promotion effort there is one thing that is most important, and that is the alignment of the objective of the business with all these three critical aspects.