Internet Marketing Foundations
In order to establish a brand empire and make digital waves, you need to begin with the heart of the beast.
Internet Marketing Foundations
In order to establish a brand empire and make digital waves, you need to begin with the heart of the beast.
The perfect marketing mix is a complex beast to tame. There are a lot of arms to pin down; all of which both affect performance of other areas while simultaneously functioning independently. It’s almost like decoding an overly-wordy sentence (ha!). The only way we humans have figured out how to overcome a complex beast is to cut it into pieces, salt the hell out of it, and digest it one tasty meal at a time. Today, we’re serving up the first course of this internet marketing dinner, which sets the tone for every course to follow: the Website and why you should start with a website.
Website in a Marketing Context
What is a Website?
Though it may seem a nonsensical question, have you ever actually thought about the semantics of what a website is? According to the Oxford Living English Dictionary, a website is a set of related web pages located under a single domain name. What this means is the blog article you’re reading right this moment is one of the web pages that combine to make up the Addis Enterprises website. The question of what a website is rarely arises, but in order to leverage any tool to our advantage (and beat the other hungry bastards out there), we need to better comprehend it than the competition.
Why is Starting with a Website Important to Your Business?
A website is the most important component of your business’ online presence. In the words of a presenter at a Grow With Google event here in Lansing,
“Your website is the only thing in your marketing matrix you absolutely own.”
Your website is essentially the real-world equivalent of your office or store. You own that property. That is your physical domain with which you can reorganize, remodel, tear down, rebuild, paint, or anything else you want and no one can tell you otherwise. The other marketing mediums, traditional or new, have a say in terms of how your brand or its content is presented.
For example, if you set out to create a TV commercial, a billboard ad, and social media posts to represent your brand, you have some serious limitations in terms of establishing your brand. There are very firm lines in which your brand can even be creatively represented. A TV commercial typically limits you to 15, 30, 60, or 90 seconds. This is enough time to get a quick story in, it is not necessarily enough to gain the attention of and inform a consumer. A billboard has specific dimensions in which it must be designed. The billboard also has no more than 10 seconds to get the message across the the consumer. If we talk social media in general terms, your brand has the ability to relay messaging by text, photo, or video. However, in the context of social media, the audience attention span is extremely short; not the situation where someone is delving deep into information to make an informed brand decision. Let's not forget the biggest branding block in all of these mediums:
Someone outside of your organization can say "No" to you.
How a Website Fits Into Your Marketing Plan
Even in the past decade, marketing has changed entirely. In marketing, we learn consumers today are different from those backwards savages who survived in a time before the internet (and whatever the hell Snapchat is). Before the internet, consumers saw an ad on TV or in a magazine, purchased and tried the product in the store and then made an evaluation of the experience. In the past couple decades that consumer has evolved, so that he or she knows more about the product or service in question before even walking into the store. Google calls this the Zero Moment of Truth.
The Foundation of Your Digital Brand
In the digital world, potential customers might come across any of your digital marketing efforts. You put a great deal of tentacles out there in the form of social media posts, SEM ads, and engaging videos on YouTube. In the end, every one of these tentacles is pushing toward the same mouth:
Your website.
Generally, your website is the final stop where a consumer is converted to a customer; the last step in the customer path before stepping foot in your office or store. As we’ve established, your website is the real-world equivalent of your store or office. Just as your store or office makes an enormous impact on how consumers will perceive your brand, so too does your website. It is the only place where you can display what sets your brand apart with absolutely no constraints.
The Crux of the Marketing Funnel
A poential client may see your website at various times throughout the funnel. When first encountering an ad of any kind, it is likely they'll take a look at your website (after all, that's the goal, right?). Just as momma always said, first impressions are extremely important, but it is not your website that is vital at that stage in the funnel; it is the landing or web page.
So why do I say the website is the crux of the marketing funnel? Particularly from a B2B perspective, companies do not take steps toward 5-6 figure decisions based upon a landing page. Though one of your tentacles may have prodded someone to look at a web page, it is quite likely the people sanctioning the decision to do business with you are going to require more than just a pretty landing page to move toward doing business with you. There is likely to be a lot of discussion about you before ever reaching out to you. And as you will not be present for a single syllable of this discussion, your brand and business needs to be able to speak for itself across your entire website.
Where to Start
I believe a great deal of successful people I've never met have the same saying: Start with the end. Evaluate the strength of your website in terms of reflecting your brand's message and ideal. Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media, and digital video are all essential arms of your digital branding beast and vital internet marketing resources, but each one of these tentacles is useless if they have nowhere to direct the big fish they catch. Each arm of your marketing can only be as strong as the heart of the branding beast. You can spend as much money as you want advertising and directing traffic to your website, but it is all wasted if the heart of your digital branding fails to move and inspire others to believe (or better yet know) you're top notch. In order to ensure the strongest foundation on which to build a lasting brand, it is vital to ensure your website is blowing potential customers' expectations out of the water.
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Keywords
- Web Design
- Digital Marketing
- The Internet
- Branding
- Marketing