Marketing a Website
So, you finally got your own website in hopes to achieve a goal you have. Now what? Having a website domain is just the first step of many on your new to-do list. Of course, you have to make sure your website is functioning, has content, good design, and is able to be navigated easily. Right now, your main focus should be on marketing yourself and this website you have created. In order to have a successful brand (personal or professional), you must first understand the concepts of marketing. Look at the broad aspects before you dive in to the nitty gritty of everything. Who do you want your audience to be? What is the end goal of this website? How many viewers/engagers are you looking to have? Why should people visit your website over someone else’s? By figuring out the answers to these questions, you can help market yourself to be more appealing and trustworthy. Ultimately, this will help attract consumers to your website over a competitor by earning respect in the field you are advertising and marketing yourself in.
One of the best ways to understand everything is to create a persona of someone you would love to have as a customer or viewer. Tailor your brand to this specific person and figure out why they would interact with it. For example, my website right now is for photography. My persona is someone who loves photography and art. They would appreciate looking at, engaging with, and possibly contacting me about my work. They are a very vague persona in terms of who they are, but that is the starting point. Dive deeper into their potential demographics and behaviors. This will help you determine how to advertise your website and make adjustments to better fit who you are looking for. Let’s say your website is for a clothing brand and you want to make a persona (let’s call him Jake). Jake is a 22-year-old who loves vintage clothes, inexpensive outfits, and has a history of buying from thrift stores. If you are a vintage clothing seller, then Jake is a perfect persona match for you. If you sell high-end formal wear, then Jake is not the type of person you want to be aiming your content at. Creating a persona helps both you and your consumers coexist in the same space, aka your website.
Designing a Website
Now that you have your buyer persona(s) ready to go, you can now start designing your website for them. You want to make sure the content is valuable to them and pertains to your brand. Without good content, people will not have any reason to visit your website and will not share it either. Remember, the content is the most important part since it will be the first thing consumers will look for. Design is a great aspect, but it is not why your consumers have come to visit and engage with your brand. Once you feel ready, you can start designing to make your website more aesthetic to look at while simultaneously being easy to navigate. You want to ensure people will be attracted to what you have to offer and be drawn to your website instead of a competitor. Usually, simple design is better since it puts more emphasis on the content and makes it easier to comprehend overall. If you want to go out of the box you can, but it may cause setbacks that you do not want in the long run. Pick a simple layout, images, fonts, and colors that would not be confusing or overwhelming to look at. Once you have everything set up, start focusing on the navigation of the website and how consumers will be moved through it. For example, if there is an important image or information you want people to see, it would be to your advantage to put it on your home screen. If it is not that important but you still want people to notice it, perhaps put it on the next page that people will still visit. You can also use captions such as “see more in the contact page” or simply put a link to it. This will help guide visitors to engage with all aspects of your website and will hopefully encourage them to share it with their friends and colleagues.
It is important to remember that your website is made for your consumers, not for your brand. If they do not like what they see or engage with, they will most likely not visit it again and will not have good things to say about your brand. Using feedback from consumers to fix your design (or content) is extremely beneficial for you to do. Feedback, whether good or bad, is great! This shows that your consumers care about what you are offering enough to let you know how they feel. If it is good feedback, you can use that to see where your strengths are and how you can continue to stay that way. If it is bad feedback, then you can see where you might be struggling and come up with strategies on how to fix things. Maybe it is just a misspelled word in a paragraph you accidentally overlooked, this feedback still helps you improve and reminds you to be more careful in the future before you post anything to your website. Designing a website with your personas in mind helps connect with them and gets them to rely on you. If your brand goal is to get more engagement, then you have helped work toward this goal. It may not be achieved yet, but it has helped significantly to bring more consumers to your website. Eventually, with increasing content and great website design, your brand will become more trustworthy and reliable, and your goals will slowly start to be reached.
social media marketing
Let’s talk about social media and how you can use it for your brand. Social media can make or break your company depending on how it is used. You have to know how to market yourself on different platforms to ensure consumers will follow you and stick with you. While you don’t necessarily have to use social media, it will be increasingly harder for you to market your brand if you are not on it. In this day and age, almost everyone has one or more social media platforms where they can access new content from millions of companies around the world. If you are not one of those companies that can be easily accessible, people will not be willing to look for you. According to Forbes, currently 4.9 billion people use social media and have a digital footprint on roughly six to seven platforms. Allowing your brand to use and market social media to your advantage exponentially broadens your audience and increases your chances of gaining millions to billions of new consumers.
You are probably asking how do I know what platform to use and how to market on it? This is up to your brand to decide, but it is highly suggested to use as many platforms as you can to spread awareness of who you are, what you are offering, and how you can fix a person’s problem with your brand. Facebook is the most used platform in the world, but Instagram and TikTok have a younger audience base. Do you want to target to older or younger generations? Why not everyone? By marketing through these platforms not only are you expanding your brand reach, but you are also now in a heavy competition with similar companies and brands.
This is why the marketing aspect is so important. You want to keep your voice the same on all platforms and stay true to what you believe in. Changing the way your brand is seen can either work really well or really bad. Take Subway for instance, they hired Jared the spokesperson and the brand skyrocketed in sales. That was a great marketing move by Subway until it came out that Jared had several child porn charges and was sent to prison. Now Subway has a tarnished reputation and a bunch of their stores have shut down in the past few years. On the other hand, Duolingo uses popular trends that aim towards younger audiences and is not afraid to take risks which has steadily made them one of the most popular companies on social media. Following trends works well since it allows you to connect with your viewers and understand what they find enjoyable in the moment. Don’t forget that you are aiming content FOR your consumers not AT them. Staying consistent is key to your brand and you must make sure it follows consistency on different platforms, your website, and even traditional marketing (offline).
The main goal is to build better relationships with your target audience so that they trust you enough to become your consumers. Social media allows you to do this globally, and helps spread the word about your brand faster than any traditional media would allow. A person spends an average of 145 minutes on social media a day. Aim to become a brand that is not only seen in that time period but is actively sought after by strengthening relationships. Hire a media team to track key performance indicators (likes, comments, feedback, etc.) to ensure the best growth as a brand. These tell you what is good or bad in your marketing and allows you to change the tone of ads, how you respond to viewers, the type of content, and so much more. Social media is a huge advantage to gaining consumers around the world, but only if you market correctly to your audience.
For more statistics about social media advertising, trends, platforms, usage, and other facts, please visit:
Belle Wong, J.D. “Top Social Media Statistics and Trends of 2023.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 7 Aug. 2023, www.forbes.com/advisor/business/social-media-statistics/.
kpis and rois
What are KPIs and why are they important? As stated in the last post, a KPI is a key performance indicator which is used by companies in marketing and advertising efforts. They allow brands to see how well their ads and other efforts are working currently. There are KPIs in both digital and traditional marketing, and usually involve feedback such as likes, comments, engagement, viewership, and several others. KPI.org states that KPIs are used to provide evidence of progress towards achieving an intended goal. This also helps companies see the change in performance aspects over time to compare and contrast to previous efforts of marketing and advertising. Generally, the more engagement with a brand is considered a good performance, but negative feedback is also helpful for brands as it allows them to see what is/isn’t necessarily working for consumers. Some companies do AB tests which send out two different versions of an ad to see which one will get the best feedback. This helps gauge how an audience will react to the content and how brands can stay consistent and up to date. AB tests are not as popular as they once were, but that is mostly because digital aspects are so easily spread online that consumers may see both ads when they weren’t supposed to, which defeats the whole purpose of the test in the first place. Another KPI that is important in the digital age is email lists and consumers signing up/inputting their information to a brand. This is helpful since it allows brands to have more access to consumers, but it also tells them the type of people who are interested in their goods and how they may be able to target to them better.
Sometimes the email sign-ups consumers fill out are completely accidental (for lack of a better word). For example, when buying something online and it asks you if you want a coupon code, you are more than likely going to make an account. You may not even think about it in the moment, but that company now has your personal information so that they can get in contact with you again in hopes to get you to engage/purchase things again. Other people refuse to give up information such as their email but they still buy items, so this type of KPI could be a hit or miss for companies. However, the engagement on a website and purchase patterns would be a better KPI in this scenario for that particular consumer. You may not think companies can track you in any way, but there is always some form of indicator if you have engaged with a brand.
An ROI is a return on investment, which is the most sought after aspect of most companies. We all know companies spend tons of money on their ad and marketing efforts, but they need to know what they are getting out of it in the end. Is it more money? More consumers? More engagement? It can be a little bit of everything, but it is important to know so brands don’t lose more money than they need to. ROI is calculated by using the formula: current value – cost of investment/ cost of investment x 100%. In simpler terms, profit divided by cost of investment multiplied by 100%. According to Business.org, an ROI can be used to value a business as a whole, but more often than not it is used as a determining factor for small business decisions. It “can help you see in advance whether a financial choice on your part will add up to a net revenue gain- or a net loss.” By determining if a business decision will end up causing losses, it may not be worth it. On the other hand, using ROI calculations can potentially increase your brand value and increase the amount of consumers you interact with on a daily basis. Most companies are unable to calculate intangible aspects such as certain KPIs, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t gaining good value in those areas.
Overall, both KPIs and ROIs are great tools for businesses to use to their advantage. Both of them are able to support and/or reject business decisions based on current factors and performance rates. By using them together, companies can virtually improve and gain more resources and assets by determining what consumers want, and how to achieve the goal of giving it to them. Even if you are a traditional media brand, these are super important for you to use. Would you never want to know how to improve? Do you want your consumers to feel left behind and unimportant? Use KPIs and ROIs and your marketing efforts will be ten times better.
Harlow, J. (2023, July 11). What is a key performance indicator (KPI)?. KPI.org. https://www.kpi.org/kpi-basics/
Pratt, M. (2022, November 1). Why should you measure your return on investment (ROI)?. Business.org. https://www.business.org/finance/cost-management/how-to-measure-your-return-on-investments-roi/
Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is very important to companies who want to be one of the first results when searching on the internet. This is almost always free to do, so don’t worry about any extra costs or setbacks in budget. SEO is used to help garner more attention to your website and improve the amount of traffic and engagement it gets. This is done by using specific keywords in blogs, content, and other information that is found on your website. For example, if you google shoes for skateboarding, skate warehouse (a shoe store), is the first brand to come up. This is because they are currently the most popular seller of skate shoes and since they have a high SEO, this means people go to their website first when they search for those keywords. Vans is listed in the number one sponsored section as well, which means that the company paid to be seen first. This is an SEO that can be paid for and is valuable to companies since viewers will be attracted to look at the things they see first and not results that are far down the page. Most companies who pay to be seen are usually those who sell merchandise and goods. They are aiming to earn a profit, and the best way to do that is by paying to be promoted as the best result. When consumers see that a brand is sponsored, it automatically sticks out in their head that it is most likely better since it is actively being promoted by the search engine they are on. As stated before, you do NOT have to pay for SEO in any way, but some companies prefer to so that they don’t have to worry about keywords as much.
Keywords are the most important aspect of SEO since it lets internet users see what a website has to offer before they even click on it. Most search engines give a little description under the website URL with highlighted words that match what was searched for, which is called rich results (Google). This shows consumers that the website specifically mentions the same thing they searched for. This is also an easy way to skip websites that do not show these keywords as it may be a waste of time looking to find what they searched for. If the keywords aren’t shown in the description, then they most likely are not on the website. Remember, content is still the most important aspect of a website. Google Search Central says, “Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site’s reputation with both users and Google, and it rarely comes without quality content.” By ensuring your content is accessible, easy to understand, and aesthetically pleasing, your website will appear higher on search engines since more people will be sharing it to others.
Higher website visibility means more website traffic, which is beneficial in being seen as a brand and allows more access to new consumers and a bigger target audience. If your website isn’t that important for your consumers to see, then maybe SEO isn’t an important aspect in your marketing plan. However, almost every brand today aims for a high website engagement and hopes to be one of the first results on a search engine. Why have a website and not want people to view it? It is up to you and your brand and how you advertise yourself, but SEO is important to use if your goal has anything to do with engagement with your audience. According to Search Engine Land, some reasons you may decide not to use SEO is if you are looking for fast results, have a tight budget, have low demand for products, you are not concerned about competitors, or if your target market doesn’t use search engines. These are a few examples of not wanting to use SEO, but it is important to remember the other side being that the internet and search engines are highly prevalent in society. By using SEO (whether through your own company or by hiring someone), you almost automatically improve user experience and enhance the credibility of your website/brand. Building strong relationships with consumers is the key to a good brand, so use SEO to help connect with your audience and have the added advantage of being higher up in search engine/rich results.
Google. (n.d.). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide. Google. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide
Karpenko, V. (2023, September 8). When your business doesn’t need seo. Search Engine Land. https://searchengineland.com/when-business-doesnt-need-seo-431777
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