Over the past few years, most small businesses have come to realise that having a website is no longer a “nice to have”, but an essential part of promoting their company. What people fail to appreciate however, is that to have maximum impact, the website is only one component in a broader digital marketing strategy.

There is no point investing in a brand-new website unless you are also thinking about how you will get people to visit that site, and this is where the marketing strategy comes in.

Digital Marketing Strategy components

Using a combination of various elements in parallel will help to drive highly targeted traffic to your site from a variety of different sources. Some of the methods available include:

  • Content marketing – Writing articles and blog posts for your site gives you the perfect opportunity to educate your customers, answer their questions and tell them what is going on in your business. It will also help to boost your site ranking in search engines which will bring more traffic to the site.
  • Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – SEO involves optimising the content and other elements of your site performance to make it more likely to rank highly in search engines like Google. It also involves building links with other reputable sites to boost the credibility of your own site.
  • Social media – Sites like Facebook and Twitter offer the perfect platform for you to interact more directly with customers. It can also help to turn happy customers into your best promotors, as they “like” and share your material.
  • Paid ads – Platforms like Google Adwords let you pay for advertising space, meaning you can drive targeted traffic to your site very quickly. The pay per click model means that you only pay a fee for each person who clicks on an ad and lands on your site, which is a very cost-effective way to buy advertising space.
  • Email marketing – By building an email list, you can send special offers to clients, and email them about other promotions or developments in your business. This helps to turn customers into repeat customers, hence driving up your revenue.

The final key to digital marketing is understanding stats and analytics. There are many tools such as Google Analytics that make it easy to track where your traffic is coming from and how well your campaigns are performing. This gives you all the information you need to gradually evolve your website and marketing strategy over time, continually improving the performance.
Getting started

Most small businesses lack the in-house knowledge and expertise to build a digital marketing strategy themselves and therefore often execute poorly or don’t do it at all.

Learning about all these things takes time and can be a distraction from day to day running of the business. Therefore, more and more businesses are turning to industry experts who can help them get up and running quickly and then maintain the strategy for them on an ongoing basis.

If you’d like some guidance on building a website and putting in place an effective digital marketing strategy, don’t hesitate to get in touch.