Subtotal | $0.00 |
You're starting a new venture, and it’s time to bring customers to your (virtual) doorstep. You built a new website, added lots of interesting content, uploaded beautiful photos and videos, and now you wait. But this isn’t the time to take a sit-back-and-watch approach: It takes a bit of hustle to get your website in front of potential clients. In other words, it’s time to engage in some website marketing to introduce your company to a brand new audience.
Website marketing is a specific type of marketing strategy with the main goal of increasing the number of visitors to your website, called your website traffic. It’s not just any visitor, though — your efforts should be aimed at bringing in likely customers who are actually interested in what you have to offer. Here, we’ll take you through some of the most effective website marketing methodologies so you can select and pursue the ones that are best for your business.
Each website marketing tactic offers its own unique benefits. These seven options are among the most successful and profitable for businesses like yours seeking to expand their reach.
Search engine optimization is the art of improving how and when your website appears in front of potential customers when they look up terms, called keywords, related to your product or service. Often abbreviated as SEO, this website marketing tactic is a highly effective one, although it can take many overlapping efforts, as well as some time and a little bit of patience, to move the needle. SEO is a bit different from search engine marketing (SEM), a term that also includes paid advertising as part of a campaign to increase visibility on search engines.
Within SEO, you can divide the necessary work into two main categories: onsite SEO and offsite SEO. Onsite SEO, also called on-page SEO, covers what you do on your website to help make it easier for search engines to read and analyze, such as content writing. Offsite SEO, also called off-page SEO, are the activities conducted on other websites to help boost your site’s visibility, such as link building.
Whether onsite or offsite, there are dozens of components to a successful SEO campaign. Some of the most well-known activities include creating blog posts with informative content on your website. These blog posts should be centered around key phrases related to your industry, building up a library of links to your website from other websites, and a lengthy laundry list of little adjustments and tweaks that add up in a big way over time. However, once you climb to the top, the effort pays off: More than 25% of your potential customers only click on the first link they see in search results!
Pay per click (PPC) advertising refers to a category of online ads in which you pay each time a potential customer clicks on your ad. You’ll find PPC advertising across the internet, including at the top of search engines, banner ads that appear on websites relevant to your potential customers, and even at the top of your inbox. You’ll want the person clicking on your ad to take one specific action when they come to your website through an ad, which is then called a conversion once they complete that action.
To accomplish this, you may want to consider creating a website landing page specifically geared toward collecting an email address or encouraging the visitor to call you. A website visual maker like Site Maker makes the landing page building process a simple one, but there’s still an art to building a page that successfully converts your visitors. Check out Namecheap’s website landing page 101 guide for tips.
PPC advertising works on a “bidding” model where you set a price that you’re willing to pay per click on an ad targeting that keyword. When your potential customer searches for that keyword, the algorithm that runs the advertising platform calculates which ads, and in which order, to show to the searcher. If your customer clicks on the ad, you pay what you bid on that keyword.
Some more popular keywords are more expensive than others, and choosing carefully can help your budget stretch while still reaching likely customers. Select your keywords based on what your audience is most likely to act on. For example, you can expect to pay a lot of money per click on the keyword “insurance,” but the keyword “affordable renter’s insurance New York” will yield fewer, yet cheaper, leads that are much more likely to consider buying a policy through your company.
There’s no escaping Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and the many other social media platforms available today. And if you’ve noticed a product or service mentioned while scrolling through posts or watching a video, you know that social media marketing works. Don’t be wary of its prevalence, however, as there are proven ways to make social media marketing work.
Social media marketing covers the wide range of activities conducted by a brand to promote its product or service on social media. These can include:
Gated content requires your visitors to enter their contact information, such as their name, email address, and phone number, to read the content you’re offering. A white paper that dives deep into a specific issue your company solves, sales documents that detail your product or service’s specifications and pricing, or an ebook that offers helpful information such as a how-to guide are all valuable pieces of gated content.
Gated content is a powerful and effective tool for acquiring leads who are serious about learning more from your company. By taking the extra step of entering their information to read your content, it’s a signal to you (or your sales team) that this person is more than just casually interested in what you have to offer. You can leverage that information to make a direct introduction and begin a fruitful conversation.
Reaching people in their inboxes is one of the most effective ways to reach them. A 2014 study found that email marketing can be up to 40 times more effective than other marketing mediums. In fact, many customers report wanting emails from their favorite brands, whether that’s because they want the latest updates or a surprise coupon.
The success of an email marketing campaign can be measured in a few ways, such as open rates that tell you how many people clicked the email, click-through rates that tell you how many people visited your website through a link in your email, and conversion rates, which measures how many people took the desired action once they got to your website.
Posting compelling and engaging content to your website is an excellent way to introduce your company to new people. Using your blog to publish new content speaks to a variety of valuable audiences who may need a little more convincing to take the next step. You can create content around several pillars, including:
Better yet, content creation is a perfect example of utilizing one website marketing strategy to bolster others. You can create content to help with your website’s SEO efforts, create engaging social media content based on your blogs, add forward-worthy information to your email marketing campaign, or develop thought leadership to help position you or one of your team members as an industry expert. Content creation is truly the website marketing gift that keeps on giving.
Retargeting is not quite a method to reach new customers, but it gives you a second chance to convert prior visitors into clients. A retargeted campaign delivers ads to people who have previously visited your website — which means they are at least vaguely familiar with your company — and tries to bring them back to take action on your site. This type of advertising takes stock of who’s visited your site before but did not convert by filling out a contact form, downloading content, or taking another action.
Before you begin building your strategy, it’s important to understand how website marketing is designed to bring in more traffic, including:
Once your website is ready for prime time, thanks to the intuitive and easy-to-use Namecheap Site Maker builder, it’s time to put your newfound marketing knowledge to work! These seven website marketing tips leverage the power of digital marketing strategy to increase the visitors, clicks, and conversions you need to grow your business. Depending on your industry, your competitors, and your business’s goals, you can pour your energy into a specific tactic or use a combination of a few to maximize your chances. No matter which pathway is best for you, with website marketing, you’re well on your way to bringing new visitors to your doorstep.
From content creation to SEO, here’s everything you need find customers and keep them.
Need help? We're always here for you.