Author: Adam Finley | Editor: Cristi Jayo

Is your online presence working around the clock to make your life easier?

We all know how important it is to have an online presence, but not all websites and social media platforms are ‘giving back’ the way they should. If you feel like you’re wasting waay too much time on your website or social, without seeing results, read on & learn some easy ways to boost your online efforts’ profitability!

It’s estimated that around 40% of the consumers search for a brand’s website to get more info 🔎 before making a purchase. So whether you’re a consumer, looking up the latest ✨trending skincare brand✨ or a business looking for a platform for organic marketing, the internet has been a true GIFT to us all, businesses and consumers alike.

That said, if you don’t have a well-built online presence, that factors-in things like SEO, UX, and good brand design, you might be leaving serious money on the table.

Here are some steps to help you create an integrated website marketing strategy that yields great results:

1. Analyze Your Website (Thoroughly)

The first step you can take to optimize your website is to run a thorough website audit using free online tools. This audit, or ‘analysis of your website’ will help you determine the weak points of your website and highlight areas to improve. Go on your site & try to take the visitor's point of view. This will help you analyze the potholes better. Make sure your website features easy-to-read content, and is easy to navigate.

Next up, check the visuals – font size, colors, contrast, imagery. Check these on various devices, screen sizes, and browsers. The visuals should work well across the board, especially on small screen devices like mobile phones –did you know only 60 out of the top 100 businesses have a mobile-friendly website?! Stand-out by ensuring yours is mobile-optimized. Also, remember to note the loading time. Faster loading times can help increase your search engine rankings. 😉

2. Make Your Website Search Engine Optimized

Creating a website that’s optimized for search engines is one of the best things you can do to increase its profitability, yet many businesses continue to overlook this step. Using SEO simply means your website has been created or edited to suit search engines. Using SEO-friendly content on your website helps your website rank better on search engines and makes it easier for people to find you.

Here are some SEO good practices to follow:

• Keywords: Keywords are one of the main components that help to enhance the search engine rankings. Research the best and most relevant keywords that you can use. Think “what would I type into Google if I wanted to find the information provided on this website?”

• Content: Based on the appropriate keywords, build the content around it. Distribute the keywords thoroughly across the content for better results. Try to focus on 1-2 keywords per page if possible.

• On-site Optimization: On-site optimization indicates on-site components such as titles, images, meta description, backlinking and more. You may also want to use photo or video editors, to enhance the quality of your website's pictures and videos.

3. Systemize Content Marketing

This is the third step of your website marketing strategy. Content marketing is an essential process where you create and publish engaging content for your website and drive traffic to it. Here is a rough plan on how you should move to develop your content.

• Decide what type of content you will create (blog, video, audio, etc.)

• Pick the topic you want to focus on. Base it on your audience’s needs and desires (what life they want to live, and how your product/service can help them achieve it)

• Establish a consistent content creation team & schedule (ie. is there a photo shoot or video shoot every month? who’s in charge of motion graphics or video editing? etc.)

• Automate and streamline content publishing as much as possible

• Define which channels you will use to promote your content

• Lastly, have fun with it! It can become a chore, so if there’s a step you HATE and will likely put off, delegate it!

Use this strategy to jumpstart your content creation. Please note: In order to achieve healthy conversions, you should choose relevant topics that truly speak to your target audience.

4. Have an Intentional Social Media Presence

Did you know Social Media is an extremely important part of a well-rounded SEO strategy? Creating a solid presence on common social media platforms is great for attracting steady traffic to your website, but even simply having a social presence tells search engines “this is a real, active, important brand” –so don’t skip this step! For content creation, you’ll want to focus on the channels that are most relevant to your audience. Where does your audience spend their time? TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and Pinterest are all great options to consider. Optimizing your profiles and using the right hashtags is another great way to help people find you. Last but not least, don’t just ‘post to post’ – make sure the content you’re publishing is adding value to your audience, to the point they’ll want to share it or maybe even save it for later.

5. Don’t Forget Email Marketing

Email is NOT dead. Email marketing is actually a great way to build community and capture the attention of your audience and helps drive traffic back to your website when you use effective CTAs (Call to Actions) in your emails. For this of course you need to build your email list first, but if you’re only starting out, don’t be discouraged. Today is a great day to start! (and DON’T –for the love of G0D– buy an email list!)

Consider using a “freebie” or “lead magnet” to attract people to your email list, or “borrow” the existing audience of another relevant brand by promoting your band their podcast, publication, social accounts or email list.

Once you have ANY amount of people on your list, you can start promoting exclusive offers through your emails, and provide exciting incentives to keep your audience engaged with your brand. Email marketing holds a considerable place in website marketing strategies.

6. Paid Advertising Pays for Itself

There’s no surprise that using paid ads can boost your sales and speed up the process of conversion, but you don’t have to do this in a ‘sleazy salesy’ way AT ALL. You can consider promoting popular ‘value’ content pieces, that might not lead to a direct sale, but rather bring people to your email list, where you can later send them offers and eventually lead them to be long-term buyers and supporters of your brand. Who knows? If you provide enough value, they might also share your brand to others and double or triple the return on investment for you. Once again, the key thing to focus on here is providing value first.

Another important thing to note is that –as counterintuitive as it sounds– targeting LESS people, can often get you MORE return on investment. Why? Because instead of setting an extremely wide fishing net, and spending on people that won’t ever be interested in your product/service, you’ll get WAY more bang for your buck if you narrow your audience down, and target only those who are most likely to buy.

7. Wrapping Up!

After developing a proper and worthy website marketing strategy, it’s time to implement that strategy. Allocating teams and resources will help you scale your business and help make your online presence a money-making machine! If you need help from us on any of these topics, don’t hesitate to reach out! 😊