Website Marketing

Websites Are, First and Foremost, Marketing Vehicles

What do you want your website to do for your business?
How do you want your website to fit into the rest of your marketing?
Who and where are your current and potential customers?
What products/services are you selling?
What benefits do you provide to customers?

If you are clear (and not “spinning” yourself) when answering those questions and others, you can choose among three general types of websites (and there are infinite variations within each type) that, in turn, depend on your own business and marketing goals:

Basic Brochure Website
Information Commerce Website
E-Commerce Website

1) Basic Brochure Website

Prove to your market audiences that you are viable, successful business (and your web presence minimally reflects the success of your business).
Be a simple “white pages” listing of your phone number, address with contact basic information.
Provide an enhanced “yellow pages” listing online—and an online option for accessing your best, most current company, product and service information.
Help “brand” your organization and complement/coordinate with other marketing messages and initiatives.

2) Information Commerce (I-Commerce) Website

Brochure site plus some or all of the following goals—

Generate quality prospects for follow-up by Sales by 1) providing enough compelling, current content of value that encourages people to trade basic contact information 2) enabling people to find your site via search engine optimization techniques and 3) capturing key contact information.
Create ongoing relationships with your prospects—by getting them to come back to your site (because of the quality of your dynamic, compelling content).
Be an ongoing sales asset tool enabling Sales to show (and not just tell) people more about your products/services online in person, via email, etc—and speed your sales process.
Recruit employees or contractors.
Find/inform investors/investment capital.
Provide market research with employees/prospects via surveys etc.
Enable 24/7 real-time, web-based communications/collaboration with employees to increase employee efficiency.
Enable 24/7 real-time, web-based communications/collaboration with customers to increase customer satisfaction, retention, up-sell opportunities, and administrative efficiencies.
Collect information from clients (as part of a product/service they’ve purchased).
Deliver digital information and e.g. product updates quickly and efficiently to customers.
Advertise others’ products/services and generate additional revenues.
Other TBD.

3) E-Commerce Website

In addition to Basic Brochure and I-Commerce site goals—

Sell products and services directly online by credit card or other automated mechanisms (and/or handle online financial transactions).

Why Websites Can Be Great Marketing Vehicles—if done correctly:

More and more people turn to the Internet more often to find information about products/services—and buy them either offline or online.
Search engines are getting better at ranking relevant sites (but still have a long ways to go)—and “pay-per-click”. SEO is offering companies even more opportunities to get their sites ranking highly.
Audiences that use the Web are looking proactively (vs. passively looking via many other marketing initiatives).
You can provide 24/7 access to your information and products/services.
You can automated components of your business processes online functions (e.g. purchasing, checking product/service status, customer support, etc).
You can provide dynamic content that can (and should) change regularly.
Websites can complement your other marketing efforts, and you will get better overall marketing results by coordinating your site as a key component of your ongoing marketing initiatives.
You can compete with the “big boys” online—even globally if you want—without having the size, track record, or huge marketing dollars that might be necessary in your industry.

NoSpin Marketing Specializes in Information Commerce & E-Commerce sites

If you have modest “brochure-ware” only objectives for your new or revamped site, that’s OK, but you can save yourself a lot of time and money by simply purchasing a “template” type website—and doing it all yourself. On the other hand, if you want to take a big step with your current site—need a Information Commerce site or E-Commerce site—you’ll need a professional marketer who really knows websites and a top-notch website designer. NoSpin Marketing will provide the marketing and business know-how services for your website (and other marketing outsourcing service) —and will work with a designer on staff, another designer you choose, or my website design partner, InfoAdvantage.

Your Homepage is Critical

You can’t be too clear about who you are, what audiences you’re talking to, and what value you are providing (and pointing people immediately to them) starting on your homepage. Your homepage is 5 to 10 times more important than any other page on your site. See my own NoSpin Marketing Homepage Blueprint Planning tool and Instructions that I use as a tool to plan homepages and develop/revamp complete websites.

Some Website Marketing Basics:

Check out my Debunker newsletters and the 2003 series of articles I wrote the Nashville Business Journal:

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