Marketing on the Web

It’s no hyperbole that web presence has become the most vital marketing strategy for small businesses. Yet, it remains one of the most daunting projects for the untrained. There is so much to know from the myriad of coding languages to the aesthetic decisions behind website design. We are going to attempt to clear up some of the technical fog. Keep in mind, this will by no means be a step by step guide on how to build your web presence. We are only trying to make things a bit clearer. This week, we will lay some groundwork on some of the more important aspects of digital marketing. We will be expanding on these and a few different topics in the coming weeks. Without further ado, let’s get started!

The first thing we want to cover fits right at the beginning of your foray into the interwebs, right next to website creation. Web analytics. Web analytics is what makes the internet truly great (from a marketing perspective). Analytics software tracks an enormous amount of data from the location of the visitor to how long they spent on each page. There are obvious advantages to this, mostly notably knowing the demographics of consumers before they even become your customer. There are several website analytics software solutions out there right now. The best, and most accessible is probably Google Analytics. It is a free service that you can attach to your website to track your visitors. Google has done a great job of making an incredibly large set of data easy to understand and manipulate. For more information and instruction, Google has put together a great series of videos explaining how to best use their software here. We also recommend going on and exploring around yourself at analytics.google.com.

Analytics programs are great for gathering data, but for there to be data to gather, you need to have visitors! We have talked previously about the importance of social media activity in your marketing plan. It can be a great way to drive traffic to your site, but by itself it only scratches the surface of web marketing. The two most useful web marketing strategies are social media advertisements and a strong SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plan. Social Media ads are superior to many other advertisement channels for the precise targeting they offer. On Facebook’s ad platform, for example, you can filter viewership down by insane demographics. We can create ads that will only be viewed by men between the ages of 25-30 in individual zip codes of Denver, Colorado who are like Craftsmen power tools. It maximizes your ROI by making sure only your target market sees your ads. Beyond Facebook ads, SEO can kill two birds with one stone. It helps your website appear higher on search engine results pages (SERPs), and provides guidelines to make your website user friendly. We will go more in depth about SEO next week, but know in many cases, it is the most important thing you can do for web presence.

We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of web and digital marketing. We will go as in depth as we can, but there is only so much we can do on a simple blog. Web marketing is such a vast subject, corporations and marketing firms dedicate entire departments to its study and execution. We offer web marketing, management and site creation as one of our major services at Encite, and we like to think, as an ad agency, we do it pretty well. We are excited to share with you one facet of marketing we are very passionate of!