An internet presence is essential for almost every business. It legitimizes the company and gives an overview of the products and services the company offers. Too often, the opportunities to look beyond the simple "online brochure" concept are missed. It's important to leverage a website so it becomes a central part of the organization's marketing plan or customer service experience. This can include online order processing, informational content, customer support, and possibly forums and blogs to create a community around your business.
We call this process online strategic planning.
For example, a large part of your business day is spent answering the phone to give information that your customers should have been able to find online. Part of the website planning process is to take an in depth look at these calls and decide if this information can be placed online. Sometime this can be as simple as regularly updating your site in response to these calls, or as complex as building links to inventory databases and online calculators relevant to your business.
Next, you'll want to drive traffic to your business. Enhanced content such as blogs, informational forums, etc, will attract a lot of attention from the search engines and your rank will climb. While enhancing your search engine ranking is certainly important, you may find that there are other "under the radar" methods to drive traffic. This can include social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, participation in outside forums and blogs relevant to your business, and smaller trade specific indexes.
Online click advertising such as Google Adwords is also a way to drive traffic. This works well for many, but must be carefully monitored and adjusted since it can be fairly expensive. We've found that it works fairly well for product based businesses, and less successfully for services.
In some cases, a website may not be the best venue for you, especially if branding is not a concern. For example, business working with rare goods and antiques may find that eBay is a better choice. Sales on Amazon can be another possible venue if you are offering a product in a category that they allow. Both of these venues are great for discount/closeout brand name goods.
Social Network Marketing
Social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) are an excellent marketing venue for many types of businesses, especially those that need to keep regular customers informed of upcoming events and new items. An example of this would be a restaurant posting evening specials or a speaker announcing a lecture calendar. Art galleries could present examples of upcoming exhibitions.
We can work with you on your strategy, either in a fully hands on role, a la carte consultation or by personal training in specific areas.