Basics to using your website as a marketing tool

It’s no more a secret that a website has emerged as the single most effective marketing tool in the hands of a businessperson today. Through a website, one can effectively tell customers about themselves along with their products and services. The wise thing is to focus one’s efforts on a website to ensure increased internet traffic, which will ultimately lead to increased sales. Here are some of the basic things that will help you use your website as an effective marketing tool.

Old news is no news. This is true for a website also. It is important to update the content on a website on a regular basis. By adding a few new things at least once a week, you can be sure to attract people, who will keep coming back on a regular basis to see what's new. Attracting people is one thing but what is more important is to retain them. To keep visitor’s interest alive, provide them with interesting reading material instead of boring business details.

Care should be taken to make the website search engine optimised (SEO). The content, the images used and even the name of the website (read company) should be search engine optimised! SEO has become an indispensable tool, which ensures thousands or even millions of hits a day. It can be safely concluded that no other kind of Internet marketing can be as effective or is capable of driving as much traffic as search engine optimization is.

When using website as a marketing tool, it is important to go beyond branding. It is important to create a unique logo or image for a website that is memorable and is also able to say much more than words can.

In today’s border-less economy where customer interactions are not hindered by geography and time zones, websites should be made more personal and interactive. Using blogs and being active on various online communities will help you get in touch with customers from anywhere in the world and at any time of day. Your posts will keep you in people’s memory and will help sell your products and services even while you are not around.

For more personal touch, mentioning yourself by name and using pictures is a great way to go about it. It only makes things easy as people like to know there are human beings on the other side of the screen. It’s also a good idea to run your own ads on your site. One can use different ads that link to services and products available on your business website.

One should consciously work towards making their website an authority site on a niche topic. This will help the site getting noticed much easily than when one tries to appeal to a broad audience. By catering to a limited audience, it is easy to attract that niche market. Though its sounds small but remember on a global scene, a niche also translate into millions of people all over the world!

Hottest CEO tool: Blogging

Brands such as O2 and Topshop have been quick to jump on the social networking bandwagon by using sites such as Facebook to target consumers, but a more recent trend and one that carries some risk has been the use of personal blogs as a communications tool.

Last month Waitrose managing director Mark Price, nicknamed the ‘chubby grocer’, launched a blog on the retailer’s website in which he shares his experiences on a healthier eating regime and tracks his efforts to lose weight, as well as arguing for the introduction of tea trolleys to airport immigration halls.

Price’s actions are relatively unusual, as corporate blogging is still in its infancy in the UK. However, it is thought likely that it will become as popular as it is in the US, where practitioners include General Motors vice-chairman Bob Lutz.

Several other brands, including Dell and Benetton, also operate blogs where employees and consumers can interact.
The appeal is obvious. Blogs are a way of achieving vast reach at a minimal cost. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates spoke about the benefits of communicating with customers via blogs at Microsoft’s CEO Summit in 2004.

It had advantages over more traditional communication methods such as emails, he argued, which could be too imposing or exclude potential audiences.

Microsoft encourages its staff to talk to consumers through blogging; it claims that more than 2000 employees use blogs to keep people up to date with their projects.

“It is a great way to communicate with a wider audience,” says Dave Gartenberg, HR director at Microsoft UK. “We are lucky that some of the most prominent bloggers in the world are based at Microsoft.”

Ian Pearman, managing director at Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, which handles Sainsbury’s advertising, believes many consumers will react well to chief executives taking full responsibility through blogging. “It implies the kind of care and provenance that might be expected of a smaller business rather than a big corporation,” he says.

However, this comes with substantial caveats. Unlike traditional advertising campaigns,blogging demands long-term investment by a company or individual.

“Chief executives can’t start a conversation and then stop it on their own terms,” stresses Pearman. “Once the floodgate is open, the responses will keep pouring in and every one will expect a response [from the blogger].”

This was demonstrated in 2006 when Charles Dunstone, co-founder and chief executive of Carphone Warehouse, started his corporate blog at the same time as the company launched its ‘free’ TalkTalk broadband offer.

Dunstone stated that he would “update his blog regularly to keep [customers] up to date with what’s happening” , but as the firm struggled to cope with the demand for its latest offering , leaving thousands of customers angry and frustrated, Dunstone stopped blogging.

Depending on the content, blogs can also invite ridicule, some consumers, for example,might not take kindly to reading how a chief executive spends his big salary on exotic holidays or hear about his daughter’s Pony Club exploits.

Jane McNeil, managing director of digital agency Agency Republic, warns of the risks of using a fictional identity, known online as ‘sock-puppeting’. “The views of the blogger will be seen as the views of the company,” she says.

McNeil cites the example of John Mackey, chief executive of US grocer Whole Foods Market, who was exposed for posting negative comments about rival firm Wild Oats Markets on Yahoo! chat rooms for eight years, under the pseudonym ‘rahodeb’, an anagram of his wife’s name Deborah.

One post stated that Wild Oats management ‘[doesn’t] know what it’s doing’ and he also complimented himself as ‘cute’.

Whole Foods confirmed that Mackey had written the posts between 1999 and 2006, while Mackey himself claimed he had “posted on Yahoo! under a pseudonym because [he] had fun doing it”, adding that “many people post on bulletin boards using pseudonyms”.

Similarly, Asda, owner Wal-Mart incurred the wrath of web users in 2006 when it was revealed that a blog called ‘Wal-Marting across America’, charting the journey of ‘average American couple’ Jim and Laura across the US in a mobile home, spending each night in a Wal-Mart parking lot, had been engineered and funded by the retailer’s PR company, Edelman.

Jim and Laura were, it transpired, a Washington Post photographer and freelance writer respectively.

“Authenticity of voice is imperative,” says Rory Sutherland, executive planning director at Ogilvy and an avid blogger. “It’s not a good idea to have a PR blog on behalf of the chief executive as, ultimately, they’ll be found out, which could be disastrous for the brand.”

If done effectively, Sutherland sees a bright future for blogging as a form of business communication, alongside web-casts and social media, that encourages ‘openness’, and he urges marketers to judge audience size in PR terms rather than advertising terms.

“A blog may only attract 30,000 readers, but those readers are self-selective and often the most influential consumers,” he points out.

©Bennett, Coleman and Co, Source - Times Of India