Your Online Marketing Hub
Last Friday I discussed your local marketing hub and today it is the turn of your online marketing hub. Local marketing offers a choice of hub, although circumstances are likely to limit the choice. However, for online marketing there is no choice, only one online marketing hub.
If you are marketing locally, your online marketing can be your marketing hub. However, it is more likely that it will support an in-person hub. Why? Because being able to market in-person is a big advantage and so most businesses will support their marketing using online methods but not wish to make them their main approach.
So, what is your online marketing hub? It is, of course, your website. Whether it is a massive online shop, with loads of details about your products or services or a single landing page (not an approach I would always recommend) it is your marketing hub. Why? Because things feed into it and it has outputs.
Inputs
You want to drive the right visitors to your site. The right visitors are people who are interested in your business or cause. The website will then convert them into supporters (of various kinds) or customers. So, here are a few ways of getting traffic (visitors) to your website.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
This is the first thing people think about when planning how to get traffic to their website. It is really important if you are marketing nationally or globally. For local marketing it is less important because there are other methods that are equally if not more effective.
I keep seo ticking over but do not put a great deal of effort into it. I want to be able to use seo in the future if I need to and so I pay some attention to it now with expecting it to make any significant difference to my business.
Social Media
I include under this heading the major social media platforms, eg Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, Google, YouTube as well as any side effects where a contact online might recommend my site or one of my blog posts to friends. It’s all social and all media.
The main thing to remember here is with the platforms, use them to drive visitors to your website. Do not rely solely on your followers, friends, etc. There are lots of reasons for this. The main one is that people who sign up on your site are likely to do so because they are interested in your offer. On social media there are often other factors at play.
In the early days people started to build business empires on social media and then there would be a rule change and they lost everything. This is perhaps less likely to happen these days but it is still the case that these platforms don’t belong to you and so a rule change could jeopardise your business or cause. This does not prevent you from using things like Facebook Ads to promote your offers, but use them to get people to visit your site.
Direct Entry
This is where someone copies your url into their browser. They will have your url from your in-person marketing. This may seem somewhat old-school but it can be the most effective way to grow your lists online.
These days this approach can be surprisingly high-tech! Now it is possible for people to reach your website and join your list from their mobile. So, you can stand over them while they do it, although it may be best to give them some space.
Outputs
When visitors arrive on your site you want them to effect a conversion. Broadly there are two main outputs.
Email Lists
If someone signs up to your email list, they can receive reminders to return to your site. So, you could add email lists to the “Inputs” list, I suppose. They are the most effective way to keep in touch with your supporters.
Some people think email lists are out of date and prefer to use social media. Don’t. Email is far from out of date and is the most effective way of maintaining contact with hopefully large numbers of contacts.
There are loads to say on this topic because it is really important not to be too irritating but this is enough for now.
Sales
Yes you can actually sell things through your website! If you do make sure you add the customer to your email list.
Don’t forget sales do not always imply exchange of cash. A sale may be a signature on a petition, an email to their MP or a commitment to attend a meeting or demonstration. Whatever it is be sure to offer clear instructions about how to do it!
This is a brief overview to show how your online marketing hub can work. I’m always happy to write at greater length. Ask if there is anything. Or comment on your favourite input or output approach, especially if I’ve missed anything!