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Marketing and Promoting your Web Site - a board perspective
Objective:
Encourage more, relevant visitors to your website, to
promote your business.
By:
Making it easier
for prospects and partners to land on your web site whether they are looking for it or
searching
on a related topic.
The
Paper:
I
wrote this paper and published its original version in the late 1990s based on experience I had
had in promoting two commercial web sites (one B2B and one retail) and higher
level experience in seeking to encourage companies with whom I worked to
better market their web sites.
Success
can be:
Wider
relevant market exposure for limited extra cost and effort.
Introduction
As a
chairman and as a non-executive director on the boards of TMT and other companies, it is interesting to
occasionally ask questions on “what is being done to market / promote the company’s
web site?” Clearly there are TMT
businesses that are highly web based and have clear answers but this paper is
more addressed at a less web oriented company’s use of their web site as part of their overall
promotion and communication. When I
ask board colleagues “what is done to maximise the number of relevant people
who will visit the web site?”, often replies are related to the elegance of
the site design and content and to the publication of the web address in printed
materials such as letter heads, brochures and advertising and as email footers.
While
each of these topics are important in exploiting a successful web site there are
many other techniques concerned with promotion in the web and too often they
have had a low priority and even in medium and small companies have no
visibility at board or even business level.
This paper focuses on the use of web based promotion of professional
business web sites and will cover both retail and focused B2B businesses.
While
not a common NED topic it is worth checking that this is a field well addressed
by your company and with an appropriate integration of business and technology
expertise. This paper aims to
help non-executives better appreciate the topic and help in their questioning on
such company activity.
Objectives
Customers/Buyers
Potential
buyers
Decision makers
Decision influencers
Advisors
Investors
Potential employees
whether
these individuals and organisations are directly visible to the company’s
sales and marketing team, or not. The aim is that decision makers and direct
influencers should be positively aware of the company and never have a friend,
colleague or business acquaintance saying
“who?,
never heard of them”
While
this paper is written in terms of communicating with prospects and customers the
same thinking can be and should be applied to shareholders and other
stakeholders. The objective is to
make it easy for them to find the company’s web site whether they know of its
existence and need help finding the site, or are using search engines/directories,
or topic directories or seeking the site of an associate or competitor with
an interest potentially served by the company.
Remember the web potentially reaches relevant parts of the market and decision
influencers that you have not yet considered as such and which your direct
communications do not reach.
On-Line
Marketing the Web Site
The
broad content and elegance of the web site is important, but that is reasonably
well recognised (if not always applied) and therefore not covered in this paper.
Another topic of note - but not covered here is the creation of a web site in
a form that
is easy for the business to maintain up to date.
The company can promote its web site through leveraging other
communications (e.g. making sure the address – url - is well publicised and
included in all relevant documents, emails, advertisements and publications).
While important that is not online which is the focus of this paper.
On
line web promotion can include pro active approaches such as banner
advertisements on other sites and proactive emailing and more passive processes
involved in gaining access from others researching a relevant topic. This
paper is mainly about the latter and focuses on the valuable techniques than can
be economically applied by most businesses rather than on high spend solutions.
While NEDs may not be expected to be familiar with all the web jargon,
some is used below to help you in raising and testing awareness in those who
should know.
If we are to attract relevant potential viewers when they are on the web we need to consider how we address the process at two levels.
First
at a business level
The
first aim is to understand one’s target audience and how they may be searching
(explicitly or implicitly) when we seek to have them steered to our site. Who
are the targets in the range of decision makers, recommenders and influencers?
What are the topics, keywords and key phrases that a searcher may use that is
relevant to lead to the company. Are
the potential key words and phrases too general (e.g. “software”) leading to
wasted hits and poor (competitive) search engine rankings or too focused (e.g.
“
Are there key words/phrases that might help those who remember a related fact but forget the company name, e.g. a location, a product set?
The selection of such keywords is business rather than technology based and may need some research and experimentation as well as initial input from the company’s marketers and sales team - not just technical web designers
How do each of these key words/phrases best relate to the web site or part there
of? E.g. a search for “City
Shirts”, may be better to be directed to XYZ Retailer’s “Shirts”
page rather than to their company home page.
What
are the company’s priorities for different key word/phrases?
Budget levels and objectives?
Secondly
at a technical level.
The
practical application is concerned with techniques and actions to gain a high
search engine rating in most relevant search engines and registration in
relevant trade and topic directories. (The
latter is often supportive of search engine rating and thus has a use even if no
prospect accesses the site that way).
The
content of the site is important for both the target audience and for search
engine rating. Setting the best
approach for search engines is somewhat search engine related.
However important common areas are:
Data
visible to most viewers:
Use of key words and phrases in the text relevant to the search targets
for that page, use of alt key wording (words that appear when the cursor is
moved over a picture) to enhance the above, use of extra text – usually not
viewed as scrolled well down to support the above.
Partially
hidden data
-
Hidden data by use of doorway pages to enhance search engine appeal. This is more advanced and means most users cannot see what you are doing. For example some suppliers provide a service focused on selected keywords held in a doorway page that enhances search engine appeal through heavy cross referencing in the doorways across its client base. This can be particularly helpful where the viewer centric approach of the web site design creates a fine site but one that is not search engine friendly. Equally with time such techniques can be invalidated by changing search engine practices,
Leverage
on Associates, subsidiaries, sister and parent companies
Encourage
all relevant sites to cross reference to your site.
This increases ratings in many engines as well as directly generating
some traffic. The doorway above works on this principal.
This can be reinforced across multi sites that the company might own.
Proactively register with all geography and topic directories. This
latter step is mainly manual but in some areas can be very effective.
When
contributing to conferences most speakers insist on their company name being
included in the conference literature, but should we not ask for the web address
to be included especially on the conference web site.
The same may be considered for published papers including web published
papers.
Search
engine registration
Register
the site and selected pages (as alternative entry points) with as many search
engines as possible. Increasingly
engines charge but wide cover can still be achieved for a modest sum.
Even with small sites this is best done through an automated service,
perhaps enhanced manually. Recommended
frequency seems to vary from weeks to bi monthly.
There are many offering this service and a sample of those those seen
(but not all tested) include:
Achieving Results
Any
on line web marketing can be measured in three parts:
Have
we progressed in relevant search engine and directory registration?
That is: are we registered under relevant key words in “important
search engines” and how close to the top of the list do we appear?
Page x is of limited use where x is much above 1.
Are
the hit rates on our site increasing?
Is
the rate of relevant
hits increasing?
The
first two are straightforward to answer but the third needs addressing with
time. Initially monitoring hit rates
and their link to marketing activity validates the gross attention gained.
There seem to be no simple solutions to judge the quality of hits without
encouraging registration. However
there are tools to determine the probable sources at a company level.
Following
the application of active on line marketing of a site, alongside its printed
promotions, I have seen substantial measurable improvements in the first two
measures and extrapolated improvements in the improvement of quality hits.
In one case it was possible to determine from enquiries directly from the
web site and many enquires through other routes whether the enquirer had visited
the site.
Asking
the Questions
For
the non executive director, the first step is to identify who in the board takes
a real responsibility for this field of promotion.
Beyond that much depends on the organisation.
However it is important to determine whether these forms of promotion are
being used and whether there is anyone within the company with relevant
responsibility and with a good understanding of the options and their use in the
business. If third parties are used
to access their particular skills or tools is there someone internally who
understands the topic sufficiently to manage them? Finally
is an extended use of these techniques of potential value in the business?
I
raise these questions here because the answer in businesses is often not as positive as one would
like.
Copyright: David Tebbs Associates
V D3 Dec 2008
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