How to find the right web marketing company for your business

Marketing can be a bit of a mind field to many business owners. You may have a number of companies approach you stating that they can offer you the best service and that you are not taking advantage of marketing opportunities that could increase your business substantially.

With all this information it is very easy to get overwhelmed and end up investing in something that is not going to offer a great return on investment.

When looking for a marketing company to work with, I would always recommend searching locally to start with. The marketing company will most likely have a good knowledge of the area and possibly the competition and will be able to advise you accordingly. Be sure to try and get recommendations or read reviews on a company and ask to see examples of work and results they have gained for other clients. Make sure you understand what they can offer and find out how they track and report progress to you as the client, to allow you to monitor the success rate of any campaigns which they are running on your behalf.

Branding when using online marketing

When it comes to marketing your business online or offline it is essential that you get your branding in order. Research has shown that constant branding influences a buyer’s decisions and gives the confidence in the service or product that you are offering. With online marketing there are many different avenues you can go down such as having your own website or using social media sites. Whatever forms of marketing you do, ensure that your branding is consistent throughout. This means that you use of your logo, strap lines and colourways are consistent and recognisable.

Branding is something that is usually built up over time and is not just the way your logo looks etc, it is more about your whole company ethos and the way in which you want your business to come across. This can be reflected in your logo or strap lines but they only make up part of it.

 

Why is it so important to have a responsive website?

Websites can be the profile of your business. Often it is the first thing a customer may see and therefore can make a lasting impression. Research shows that many customers how many of been considering using a company or buying from them take their business elsewhere if they do not like the company’s website.

When designing a website it is vital that it looks and performs and a number of platforms. There are so many different types of devices such as desktop pc’s, laptops, mobile phones and tables that a site needs to be able to work on all of them to accommodate every one. Luckily many of these devices use similar rendering techniques but you will need to be aware of limitations within different browsers. A responsive website should be able to detect what type of device is being used and display the content accordingly. This will give the user the best experience.

 

 

 

Updating your website design

If you have a website and it has not been updated for many months or years, then you may consider a bit of an overhaul. Websites, like many things in the technology world, get stale with time and become out dated. A website is a portal to your business and often works as a kind of showroom to allow you to showcase your products and services to people all over the world. This is why it is important to stay on top of your game and offer the visitors the best experience possible.

It may be that your site is functioning really well but you want to add more colour to it, or update the font types used for example. Or alternatively, you may be happy with the way it looks but want to add in more functionality and services that may be useful to the visitor.

When carrying out website updates, be sure to have a good back up of your site and make sure that you have planned in the changes you will be making prior to starting.

 

 

Mobile compatibility

So many of us now use our phones or smart devices to browse the internet and view websites. If you have a website then it is vital that you make sure that it works on all of these platforms to ensure you are reaching everyone possible.

If your website is not mobile compatible then you need to either have it updated to ensure that it is or you need to build a standalone mobile version of the site. If your website has been built using an off the shelf content management system then you may be able to add a plugin or additional feature that will automatically create a mobile version of your website for you. This way if you add or amend any content to your existing site it will then update the mobile version without you having to remember to go in and do it separately afterwards.

Checking competition and traffic

When you are looking to market any business online you need to start with a list of keywords and phrases that you want to get your site ranked for on the search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Deciding on these can be tricky as you cannot just pick a list off the top of your head, you need to carry out some research. You need to be realistic about the phrases you chose if you are serious about getting ranked for them. For example, one word keywords are extremely competitively as are certain areas such as London or Birmingham. When choosing your keywords have a mixture of long tail (3 or 4 word phrases), location based keywords and more competitive keywords. You may find that very quickly you can rank highly for the long tail and certain location phrases, but the others may take more time and more content to start to show up where you want them to in the results.

 

 

Revisiting your call to action’s

Every website has a purpose, usually that purpose is to generate enquiries or to generate sales directly from the site. For this reason, you should have call to actions on your website to guide your visitors through to carry out these tasks. For example, if you want people to contact you for a quote for an extension on their home, then you may add a call to action on the home page saying “For a no obligation quotation, click here.”

Many websites have call to actions but not all of them work as they should and often they even put visitors off altogether. Research has shown that if a customer can’t find what they are looking for within the first 30 seconds of landing on a website then they are likely to leave. With this is mind it is vital to spend some time looking at all your CTA’s and establishing if they are attractive, are worded correctly and click through to the right page.

 

Analysing your traffic sources

When carrying out any sort of online marketing, it is vital to track the performance through some sort of analytics package that will tell you the sources of the traffic. If for example, you have recently started doing Pay per Click advertising then you not only want to know how many people clicked through to your site but also what they did when they got there. If you are finding most people leaving on the first page then you may be attracting the wrong sort of traffic.

There are a number of traffic sources such as referrals, paid for, organic and direct, and some of these can be drilled down in to further. For example, referral traffic will possibly include social media referrals as well as referrals from other websites. If you are paying for Facebook advertising, it may appear in some stats programs as a referral visit rather than under the paid for option, so you really do need to spend some time investigating each source to see where the traffic has come from in order to accurately assess your marketing.