Did you know that more than 70% of consumers now prefer learning about a service or product through content or articles?

How consumers make their purchasing decisions has moved to the online space. More than ever, you now need to keep your website top-of-mind for you to win over new and return business.

But with overwhelming information on the right way to market your site, how do you tap into the power of online advertising? Keep reading for a go-to guide on how to develop a website marketing plan that’ll work for your business.

What Is Website Marketing?

Site marketing is the total of all that you do to promote your website across the internet.

When you think about site marketing, you are trying to look at ways through which you can develop a campaign to deliver as much traffic as possible to your site. The campaign you choose needs to fit your business’ profile and needs while still delivering relevant traffic.

Why Do You Need to Market Your Website?

On the surface of it, the need to market your websitelooks like a pretty straightforward affair. In fact, it appears so obvious that some firms routinely miss this fact.

However, if you are going to develop an effective plan to market your site, you need to understand what is at stake. Let’s look at some compelling reasons for why you should market your website.

"...you need a thoroughly detailed plan..."

1. Social Media and SEO Aren’t Enough Anymore
When digital marketing was first gaining traction with the broader market, it was near synonymous with social media marketing. Then as more people became familiar with it, it advanced towards search engine optimization (SEO) related marketing.

While those two aspects still exist today, the fact is that digital marketing has many more pillars to rest on. You now have to contend with other areas like affiliate marketing, pay-per-click advertising, and mobile marketing, among others.

Site marketing helps you take advantage of these different channels to generate the kind of traffic and the level of traffic you desire.

2. The Competition Is Fierce
Unlike early in the digital marketing days, when you could wing it, there are more players on the field now. Consequently, you need a thoroughly detailed plan that sets your site before your target audience to stay ahead of the pack.

Furthermore, when you have a plan to market your site, it can help you communicate the vision with the rest of the firm. That way, all team members are on the same page on how to beat the competition.

How to Develop a Plan to Market Your Website

As with any plan, you need to take a holistic view of your marketing strategy to ensure that you successfully incorporate the various angles in play. Furthermore, you need to understand the interrelation between marketing goals, strategies, and tactics that form your holistic plan.

Here are some tips to guide you in crafting a site marketing plan that can fit your business.

1. Assess Your Site
If you have a pre-existing site, you need to take stock of the design elements currently in place. Does it have a hierarchical structure? Is the information about your firm up to date and relevant to the target market you desire to reach?

These are but some of the questions you need to ask to identify the site’s weak points.

Once you know what you should rectify, you can cover that before bringing the world’s attention to your site — to avoid delivering subpar user experience.

2. Conduct an SEO Audit
Your site will, among other things, aim at ranking well, and that’s where SEO comes in. As such, it only makes sense to first deal with making your site SEO friendly before marketing it.

To this end, you should conduct an SEO audit to know what you’re doing right and what you need to work on. The essential elements of such a review include the technical SEO audit, on-page and off-page SEO audit, SEO content audit as well as local SEO audit.

Don’t forget to address rich snippets and schema markups, as these now contribute notably to your ranking.

3. Study Your Target Customer
Online marketing is increasingly becoming cluttered, and to break through the noise, your message needs to resonate with the customer.

Doing the work necessary to know your target customer will help you create a highly personalized marketing plan that allows you to meet their needs satisfactorily.

To conduct a thorough study of the type of customers you should target, you need to develop a buyer persona. It’s the details from this persona that will determine what your marketing plan looks like, ultimately making your site relevant to the customer.

4. Study the Competition
Working smart means taking advantage of every sliver of insight to build your position. When it comes to marketing your site, your competitors can be a useful resource in helping you develop a more robust strategy.

Studying how your competitors are marketing their websites will signal to you what tactics work and which do not. From this base, you can then dig deeper to gain more insight on how to drive your campaign better.

"When it comes to marketing your site, your competitors can be a useful resource in helping you develop a more robust strategy."

For example, when you want to utilize content marketing, you should first look at what your competitors are putting out. The aim here is not to copy them, but to understand what users are responding to and how it’s helping them solve their problems.

Once you study the top-performing content in your area of interest, you can then identify the needs it’s still not fulfilling and set about developing material that performs better.

5. Identify the Most Useful Tactics and Combine Them
As mentioned earlier, digital marketing now covers many aspects, which means you have several tactics to pick from.

Given that your website has its unique objectives, it would be wise to pair the goals you want to achieve with the necessary tactics.

For example, SEO is excellent at delivering organic traffic, but that takes time. If you need your site to begin achieving immediate results, you can elect to pair SEO with paid advertising.

Whether it’s Google AdWords, Facebook ads, or even affiliate marketing, you can stimulate paid traffic to your site. At the same time, your SEO strategy can help draw in organic traffic, providing a blend that diversifies marketing risks you may face.

Grow Your Website for More Traffic

Customers are now turning to the internet to make their purchasing decisions. Thus, your website needs to compete with the many alternatives out there, and one way to achieve this is by developing and executing an exceptional website marketing plan. Combine several relevant tactics in your plan that can deliver a holistic benefit to your site for diverse traffic.

WhatArmy is a team of highly knowledgeable and trusted web service professionals dedicated to being a help desk for your firm’s web assets. Talk to us today for website services that can help you focus on your core business for success.

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