Marketing Made Easy

There is a conventional wisdom out there in online marketing that places great emphasis on web traffic. The concept or belief is that copious traffic will mean copious sales. Not true.

Traffic used be called “hits” and then eventually as the web became more humanized we started realizing that actual humans visiting was the important metric and we now track “absolute visits” or people. This hasn’t alleviated the fixation on traffic, but clarified what traffic is. Good.

So dominating Google rankings for your “keywords” is great, if and only if, the people looking for the information, products or services you offer are searching those keywords. That’s step one.

Step two is that these people then actually convert to customers in whatever form that takes, making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, whatever.

Knowing your keywords is logically the first step that is all too often botched or not targeted enough. In other words, you can rank for the wrong keywords, get tons of traffic, and your bottom line sees no change at all. Be sure to target the right keywords.

Remembering that driving sales is the goal, not just driving traffic, will keep your eye on the prize and not divert you into a meaningless numbers game.

Well, maybe not literally so, but if you are serious about marketing, you are probably serious about business, which means you have a plan. This business plan, with its goals and objectives, includes a marketing plan, with its marketing goals and objectives, these are your web site road map.

If you want your site simply to be informational then this won’t apply to you necessarily. A web site can be a “gravestone” advertisement like you see in the back of magazines, like a book, static, unchanging, read it or not.

More importantly, your web site can be so much more, a critical component of your corporate or business objectives, your marketing goals, your marketing plan, and can help get you there. You want your web site content to communicate, to speak to your customers, to elicit a reaction, a reaction involving action, the call to action.

Once you’ve done your research, discovered who your prospects are, gotten them to your site, you put yourself in the mind of your prospects, and give them what they want, in specific steps, leading the way to the ultimate objective of the site, to meet your corporate goals yes, but in the short term, to provide your prospects with the information, service or product they desire, your products. Without this specific plan with specific prospects your web site will be fishing in the wrong pond, catching, if anything, the wrong fish.

Keep your web site project well connected to your overall business goals and the web will become the anchor of your business, providing the tools and conveniences your prospects, and you, want and need.