When designing a new website you’ll want to make sure to analyze your messaging and content first. View our article on ‘Content Messaging for Your Website’ to find out more about this. Below is a guide to help you develop, upgrade or create a new website for your business.

Content and Messaging:

Be sure to develop high quality content for your website and answer questions that your ideal target audience is looking for:

• About You
• About Your Business
• Your Credibility (Testimonials)
• Your Warranty or Guarantee

Video:

You have 3-5 seconds to make an impact. Video is a great way to get people a lot of information in a short time. (make sure it’s a high quality video)

Design:

Ensure your website design is clean, easy to read (not too fancy of font), not overly designed (keep colors simple). Make sure your homepage has key content directly in the line of view for the user without having to scroll. The viewer needs to be interested right away or they will leave.

Conversion Points

Include a call to action. What do you want people to do when they get to your website? ‘Call now’, ‘Insert your email address’, ‘Fill out this form’, ‘Download this’. Why should they do what you say? Make it enticing!

Mobile Friendly

Make sure that people can view your website properly on their mobile device. *No Adobe Flash* or programming languages that don’t play on mobile devices.

Do you need a specific mobile theme for your website that’s different from the desktop version? Depending on your industry you may need a ‘Call Now’ button to be the first button they see on the mobile device.

Social Integration

Is your business going to be heavily marketing on social media. Maybe your conversion is to get people to like your page from your website if your sales cycle is a long period of time. Or if your purchase price is large. Allow the ability for people to subscribe to your updates to bring them back to your website. Maybe a app contest is in order? Like us on Facebook to enter our draw to win.

Internet Marketing

It takes 5-7 touch points for an average purchase or sale to take place. How will you retain your website traffic in order to increase conversions? I mentioned social media, what about email marketing?
Email marketing is often over looked by how active people are on social media. Depending on your clientele, email marketing may be a more effective route. When given the permission to send people marketing emails it converts higher than social media marketing.

Landing pages:

Creating new pages on your website for a specific advertising niche and or catered to one conversion goal are called Landing pages. You want a website visitor to ‘land on this page’ from advertising or direct search and take action. (Usually fill out a form, download, or call.)

Remarketing:

You can target people via Google or Facebook advertising to come back to your website and make a purchase. Consider these options as a way to increase the touch points in your sales process.

You can see the importance of your web marketing planning during the stages of creating your website. If you plan on hiring two separate companies, this can add to the costs (one to build the website, one to do the marketing). Be sure to think this through before deciding on building your new website. ROI Web Hosting offers both web design and web marketing, this helps save companies money and headaches of dealing with two separate companies for your Internet marketing efforts.

Contact ROI Web Marketing today for your free consultation on Internet marketing success.

I’m not going to tell you that you have to be on social media.

I’m not going to tell you that you are missing out. I’m going to tell you that based on these factors, you can better decide whether social media marketing is for you:

• What type of business model and structure is your business? Business to Business? or Business to Consumer?
• Do you sell products or are you service based?
• How much resources or funds can you dedicate towards social media?

Then you can decide whether you should be doing social media marketing and which channels you should be focused on.

But before we get into social media, let me explain something. Your website is your most valuable marketing tool for your business. Before heavily promoting your business page on Facebook, ensure that your website is up to date enough that you feel that you can convert business if someone is to visit it from your Facebook page. After all, when someone has decided to check for more information about you or your business, they will visit your website. Do you feel your website will convert visitors into buyers? If so, begin social media marketing to attract website visitors.

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are the most popular social networks for businesses. Google+ is another popular social network but we won't refer to it in this article. It’s better to do one social network exceptionally well than to have more networks that are just okay.

Facebook

Exposure:

An excellent pool of social butterflies and entertainment seekers sharing and liking various cool and interesting things.

Facebook is the biggest social network. If you are business to consumer, your target market is on here. You’ll need a business page. This is different from a personal page and it allows you to advertise, which is a key component to gaining exposure and traction on Facebook.

Advertise:

Facebook advertising can target demographics (male, female, age groups) interest groups (such as fitness or nature), geographical areas (cities, countries, radius Km distance from a specific city).

Generate Leads:

There are several different ad types available. The most popular are, 1. Page Post Engagement, 2. Increase Page Likes, 3. Clicks to Your Website, 4. Remarketing. 

Facebook is a popular website where visitors aren’t usually ready to buy right away. It takes time to build trust with visitors by actively posting and engaging your audience. Consistency and tracking your campaigns will help you be successful.

Twitter

Follow & Keep Informed:

An efficient way to communicate your business news, promotions, new product launches, opinions, build relationships or general banter in 140 characters or less.
Users can follow your tweets to keep up to date on what’s happening in your business very easily.

Build Relationships:

You can in a professional manner send a quick tweet to a business colleague or various colleagues to thank them for a great meeting and tell them you are excited to be working with them.

Connect:

Think of twitter as a way to text message (like you would from your phone to their phone) to a business address or person. This message is received on their account whether they are on their computer or have Twitter set up on their mobile device. Their response is then a text message back.

Twitter can be effective for events or announcements of product releases in a timely manner. It can also be used as a support tool where users can send you a tweet asking a question and when you answer it, you’ve answered it for many users that follow you as well.

Twitter is a tool for businesses to build their brand, gain exposure, create interest and attract website traffic and conversions. You can search and find various users based on a variety of search options or keywords and choose to follow them, tweet at them or send them a direct message.

LinkedIn

The ultimate business to business social network.

There’s a type of aura about LinkedIn where people don’t just post what they had for lunch that day, it’s mostly business-related on LinkedIn.
For most of LinkedIn’s existence, they’ve been all about your personal profile. Recently, they’ve added company pages and allow you to post as your company. People can then follow your company's posts as well. Your staff can add themselves as employees of the company and link their profiles to the company page.

Advertising:

LinkedIn has advertising options available to target specific profiles or job titles and display ads to those people. There are mixed reviews on the results so far but if you are looking to recruit someone to join your team, this may be an angle to target specific people to get your company noticed.

LinkedIn can also be used as a lead generation tool. You can direct message users or ask to be introduced or connected from someone else in your network. The more connections you have, the more people you will be able to contact unless you purchase LinkedIn Premium.

Publishing:

Another feature of LinkedIn is the ability to publish articles via LinkedIn Pulse. Only select profiles are allowed to publish posts (you can apply to be an author). This works just like a blog does where you write an article and upload an image, preview and publish. When you post an article there’s a notification that goes to everyone that you are connected to and tells them that you’ve just published an article. People can then click on the link to view your article as well as like or comment. Views are tracked to see how many people read your article. Publishing articles is a great way to give information about your industry or what you do to gain interest and exposure as well as to enhance your profile and brand as an expert in your field.

Contact ROI Web Marketing today for your free consultation on internet marketing success.

Here’s a simple guide to follow which should give you an endless amount of easy to write content for your social media marketing or blogging efforts.