Marketing, and especially website marketing, is a vital part of a business strategy. In fact – these days, it is a vital part of a business’s ability to thrive and survive.
Imagine you are a piano teacher. I am a parent with a child (let’s call her Newbie) who wants to learn piano for the first time. I sign up for your class, and we are both excited to see this bright new student begin learning.
After a few weeks, little Newbie completes her 4th lesson. And I start to ask why she isn’t a master piano player yet. What would your reaction be?
I think we can agree unless someone is a genius, they are unlikely to master piano in a month.
So, why is the expectation so different when it comes to marketing?
Marketing, and especially website marketing, is a vital part of a business strategy. In fact – these days, it is a vital part of a business’s ability to thrive and survive. Marketing covers so many things, and business leaders often have trouble comprehending where to begin. It probably starts out as a pretty intangible thing. Someone has to guide the marketing plan on a road to the bottom line.
In the meantime, everyone gets a bit antsy.
Ultimately, what the C-suite really wants to see is results, right?
Sometimes, the problem is the goal itself.
You might assume that the result the CEO wants is sales. More click, more buy.
But what if it’s not?
Maybe the real goal is attracting opportunities and leads for your sales team. Or, maybe it’s increasing efficiency, with a better website that serves customers. Or, maybe it is reaching more of the right customers and fixing the funnel so they buy the right product, resulting in less returned product (impacting the bottom line and your employee happiness).
You can do your company a great service by defining your real pain points and goals upfront before you lean in with your web marketing consultant.
We may forget, it takes many skillsets to define your web marketing strategy and execute it.
Your head of marketing may be the more brilliant and reliable colleague on planet Earth. But even Superman still needs a little help.
Many companies have only one or two people responsible for marketing, if that. Those marketing managers might have decades of quality experience behind them. But people can only deliver things they have the skills and time for. A marketing manager probably has to coordinate with many different tools, people, and vendors to complete all of their goals.
Once the marketing department has defined its strategy and goals, the plan must be executed. There are likely to be many facets of the website marketing plan that will require a breadth of resources: design skills, website development skills, email marketing skills, social media skills, website analytics experience, and sales tracking resources.
Coordinating and implementing these things takes time and effort. Done right, the end result will be well worth it.
When it comes to organic search engine marketing, the process is not instant.
Over the last many years since we began working in search engine optimization (SEO), one thing has remained consistent: search engine optimization takes time. Search engines like Google want their results to be trustworthy and quality. Therefore, the effort required to optimize a website properly, building content and reputation online, cannot be done in a flash. Marketers who try to game the system and flood the Internet with empty content and rapid-fire links will only be disappointed. Search engines usually view such tactics as a “spammy” attempt. Both search engine robots and their human staff are increasingly intuitive to faster, less quality marketing efforts.
For this reason, when we approach each SEO campaign for a client, we focus on strategic content writing that speaks to the questions and keywords that the real customers are asking about, and we carefully build high authority links over a gradual time period.
If you keep some patience with your SEO strategy, you will eventually see great results with your site’s search listings edging up in ranking and attracting the right kind of traffic.
