As a small or medium-sized business, you know that a strong online presence is the key to success in today’s marketplace. But what are the best ways to achieve this? Here are some tips for creating a winning web strategy for your small business. Implementing these changes may seem daunting at first, but our marketing agency can help make the process easy and effective. So what are you waiting for? Start boosting your business today!
Developing a web marketing strategy: where to start?
Small business owners often find themselves overwhelmed by the number of online marketing channels available today. It can be difficult to know where to start, or how much to invest. But don’t worry, our marketing agency is here to help! Web Strategy is here to help small business owners create a successful online presence through effective web marketing. Whether you’re just starting out or not.
Definition of a Web Strategy
A web strategy is a detailed plan that specifies the actions you need to take to improve your business’ online presence through web marketing channels. In business, a web strategy is a long-term plan that helps you reach your target customers online. This can be done through a variety of means, such as search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing and email marketing. A well-designed web strategy uses all these channels to help you reach your target market where they spend their time online. Imagine, 28% of small businesses don’t have a website. By creating compelling and engaging content, you can attract users to your site and convert them into customers. Web strategy can be complex, but it is an essential part of doing business in the digital age.
There are 6 distinct steps in developing a web marketing strategy:
Do a market analysis (internal and external)
Choose the right platform for your needs
Think about optimizing your website to encourage conversion
Deploy an SEO strategy
Consider creating paid advertising campaigns in CPC
Ensure re-optimization based on the decision making process of your consumers and users
Do a market analysis (internal and external)
Marketing in general always requires knowing your competitors and yourself before making a decision. This is also the case for the Web strategy. Here, you need to take a close look at your business to understand what exactly you are offering and how it compares to what others in your industry are offering. This will help you determine your unique selling proposition (USP), which is the thing that sets your business apart from others.
Internal Analysis
To make the right decisions, you need to know what’s going on in your business. Analyzing the current situation will help you do this and provide valuable information for future strategies or tactics, if they are worthwhile at all! Ask yourself these questions: What can I capitalize on? My strengths need to be utilized as much as possible while maintaining competition from other companies; likewise, weaknesses need to be addressed so that we don’t end up losing too many customers because they are not competitive due to a lack of enthusiasm for innovation, upgrades, etc.
Organizational culture supported by management could be one of the most important elements. It will be difficult to succeed with your digital strategy without their support to put in the necessary effort and their willingness to experiment.
External Analysis
As a business owner, you have no choice but to look at what’s happening in the online marketing space. This step is essential in determining the opportunities and directions that will help your business grow.
When looking at competitors’ sites or blogs, it can be helpful to know how their strategies differ from ours, as there may still be areas where our product could beat them! To do this, do a PESTEL and a BMC.
P.E.S.T.E.L for an optimal web strategy
PESTEL analysis is a framework that can be used to analyze and monitor macro-environmental factors that may impact your business. This tool provides a snapshot of your current business performance against potential future outcomes based on different scenarios identified by this system – for example, if changes were made to another country’s marketable product offerings, how might that affect us? SWOT models provide comprehensive information about a given situation, allowing us to know what could happen before the situation deteriorates.
BMC
The Business Model Canvas is a strategic management model used to develop new business models and document existing ones. It provides visual graphics with elements describing the businesses or products value proposition, infrastructure (such as technology), customers, and finances to help companies align their businesses by illustrating potential trade-offs; this helps them make more informed decisions about what they do well enough to become successful businesses if they are developed into something entirely different but still profitable!
Choose the right platform for your needs
Optimizing your website isn’t just about the content it contains, but also about things like speed and adaptability to different devices, like mobile.
You can choose between three main families of websites:
- Destination pages (a single web page)
- Showcase websites (without transactions)
- The online commerce websites (e-commerce)
There you will find proprietary software, for which you have to pay an annual fee, private sites, managed by individuals like you; these options offer more control over the features added to their product in exchange for an ongoing monthly payment (for example, WordPress). The third option would be to use a large cloud-based system that offers low prices through economies of scale, but at least at first, this choice can seem overwhelming because there are so many services offered in each category!
Here are a few platform choices to help you through the process:
WordPress
Shopify
Elementor
Webflow
Lightspeed
Think about optimizing your website’s customer journey to encourage conversion
The customer journey is a widely studied marketing concept. There is no set definition in terms of the stages in this process, as it varies across industries and even companies . One article that comes up often when discussing customers’ experiences with their products or services is Lemon and Verhoef (2016). They refer to these experiences as the “customer journey”. Their work focuses on how consumers move through different touchpoints while making purchases over time, which helps them identify patterns along the way.
In the world of customer experience, it’s important to understand that everyone has their own opinion on what constitutes a good experience. As such, you’ll find that there are many different methods and techniques used by marketers who want to help deliver great customer interactions. This means that segmentation is essential if we want our messaging across channels (such as social media) to impact sales!
In the study by Zomerdijk and Voss (2010b), service providers indicate that customer experience is at the core of their services, which must be proactively shaped to stay ahead. The article also points out that companies only think about perfecting their product offerings, but neglect to focus more on creating a customer journey for the people who use your business; this will also improve what customers receive from you!
Think omni-channel
Google has identified micro-moments as the most critical touch points for customers.
Micro-moments are the moments when we turn to our phones to perform whatever action is needed or desired in the moment. These micro-second encounters with digital marketing have become an integral part of defining today’s customer journey, as they provide a hatchling moment – where customers can enter information about themselves into Google products like search engines and the Maps app without leaving their device (Google 2015)
This allows businesses to access not only the products people use, but also the frequency of certain tasks in each user’s browsing history, giving brands more information than ever about people who might need help identifying new opportunities from this valuable data source.
Deploy an SEO strategy
Organic traffic is the lifeblood of many online businesses, so it’s important not to overlook it. SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results, and it is an important part of generating organic traffic. There are many factors involved in SEO, including on-page optimization, off-page optimization, and link building. It can be difficult to track, but the rewards are worth it. Organic traffic can account for a significant portion of your online revenue, so making sure your SEO efforts are effective is essential. With a little effort, you can ensure that organic traffic plays a major role in your online success.
What is SEO?
SEO or natural referencing is the art of positioning a site, a web page or an application in the first results of search engines, without paying them. It is a key digital channel in your web strategy. SEO consists of applying certain techniques to favorably influence the ranking algorithm used by search engines to position their search results according to certain criteria. Generally speaking, SEO consists of optimizing the various elements that make up your site (content, structure, ergonomics, etc.) so that it meets the expectations of Internet users and, above all, those of Google’s algorithms. SEO is a continuous process because Google’s algorithms are constantly evolving: what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. Therefore, SEO must be considered as a long-term strategy and not as a one-time operation. Finally, SEO is only one element of your web marketing strategy and should not be considered in isolation but as part of a global approach.
Search engine results can be classified into two main categories: paid results and organic results. Paid results are those that are displayed as a result of an advertisement, while organic results are those that are displayed based on the search engine’s algorithm. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing a website to improve its ranking in search engine results. There are a number of factors that contribute to SEO, including the use of keywords, the quality of content and the structure of the website. By optimizing these factors, companies can improve their position in search engine results and increase their visibility to potential customers.
Consider creating paid CPC ad campaigns
SEO and Adwords are two very different things that can complement each other well, or work independently of each other. SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs), while Adwords are the sponsored ads that appear in those same SERPs. Depending on your goals, you can use both SEO and Adwords, or just one or the other. If you want to reinforce your presence on certain keywords, promote a specific offer or test a new market, the implementation of several Adwords campaigns will be necessary. Defining targets and geolocation, choosing keywords, designing the message and adjusting the CPC are the main elements of a mix that, thanks to its extremely precise targeting capabilities, can bring you excellent results! However, if you are most concerned with improving your long-term visibility on organic search engines, then SEO should be your priority. Either way, both SEO and Adwords can be effective tools for driving traffic to your website.
Ensure re-optimization according to the decision process of the consumer and your users
Re-optimization is the process of making changes to your business to better meet the needs of your consumers and users. By constantly re-evaluating your decision-making process, you can ensure that you are always able to meet the latest demands, thereby increasing your revenue. In today’s ever-changing marketplace, flexibility and adaptability are essential to staying ahead of the competition. By regularly re-optimizing, you can ensure that your business is always ready to meet your customers’ needs.
Track key performance indicators (KPIs) to understand how your users react and always optimize your web strategy. Let’s think about these KPIs:
- Bounce Rate
- Impressions
- Conversion Rate
- Abandonment pages
In short on the web strategy
Conducting a market analysis is essential to understanding the internal and external factors at play in your industry. Once you have this information, you can choose the right platform to launch your web marketing strategy. It’s important to think about optimizing your website for conversion once it’s up and running – this might mean making sure it’s mobile-friendly or adding relevant call-to-action buttons. Once optimized for conversion, deploy an SEO strategy to help your site rank higher in search engine results pages; also consider creating paid CPC ad campaigns. If you need help putting all these elements together, our team of experts is here to help. Contact us today to start building a winning web marketing strategy. You can contact us whether you are in Montreal or Gatineau!
