Getting the most from your website

Getting the most from:Your Website

“In the business world today, all is not quite as it seems�

CONTENTS Contents.......................................................................................................................2 The Opportunity...........................................................................................................3 Web Marketing Tools ..................................................................................................3 Blogging ...................................................................................................................4 Adwords campaigns.................................................................................................4 Banner Advertising...................................................................................................4 Affiliate Marketing...................................................................................................4 Social Networking....................................................................................................5 Database Marketing.................................................................................................5 Extranets..................................................................................................................5 Webinars and internet meetings.............................................................................5 Webcasts..................................................................................................................5 Internet Marketing Strategy .......................................................................................5 Web Marketing Plan ...................................................................................................6 A Critical Decision ........................................................................................................7 Static Websites.........................................................................................................7 Dynamic Database Driven Websites........................................................................8 Web Design Company or DIY ......................................................................................8 DIY Instructions ...........................................................................................................9 So now the steps! ....................................................................................................9 Glossary......................................................................................................................11

THE OPPORTUNITY The Web offers unprecedented opportunities for companies to reach a wider potential customer base than ever before. This does not however mean that you can build a website and expect the world to beat a path to your door. Far too many companies find somebody to build a website for them, put it on-line and then forget about it. A year later they review the results and some bright spark says “told you so, it won’t work for us”.

It’s a bit like building a shop in the middle of a wood some place in the far north where nobody goes and wondering why it hasn’t helped your sales.

Web Marketing is part of your overall marketing strategy and your website is only one part of the web strategy.

For some reason many organisations, sometimes otherwise quite sophisticated ones, seem to forget the traditional approaches to marketing when they come to develop their websites. To use the web effectively you need to start with a good marketing strategy based on a thorough understanding of your market (and potential market).

This article is not about marketing in general but you should not be spending money on anything until you have a clear marketing strategy. You have to know what your product or service really means to your various different groups of potential customers, how it can be differentiated from its competitors, how you should price it, the different channels to market and the different promotional approaches.

WEB MARKETING TOOLS The website is but one of many tools available. It will be the hub or frame but without the use of some of the other tools it is unlikely to do much for you. The other tools include: • • • • • • • • •

Search Engine Optimisation(SEO) Blogging Discussion boards Adwords – Pay per Click(PPC) Banner advertising Affiliate marketing Social networking sites Database Marketing Extranets

•

Webcasts

Your web marketing does not stand in isolation to the rest of your marketing. The primary objective of these tools is to drive traffic to your website which will ultimately convert a prospect to a customer. Simply because there are ways to use the web to drive traffic to your site does not mean you should ignore more traditional ways, every telesales call should if possible collect an email address, every exhibition or conference should be and opportunity to drive traffic to your site.

BLOGGING You can exploit blogs in two different ways; •

•

Host your own on your own domain and if you provide good content, relevant to your industry and add to it regularly, people are likely to link to it. If it is on your domain you will increase your page rank since the search engines like inbound links. If it is on a separate domain you can drive traffic to your site from it.

Find good blogs by others that allow comments. Then comment on their posts and include links to relevant pages on your site.

Discussion Boards can be used in the same way as blogs.

ADWORDS CAMPAIGNS Actually a bit of a misnomer because Adwords is the name given by Google to their service but Yahoo and MSN run similar services. You can select words that are commonly searched and link them to adverts you place on the search engines. These are run on a “Pay per Click” (PPC) basis in that you only pay when somebody clicks on your advert and goes to your site.

Clicks cost from a few pence to several pounds.

BANNER ADVERTISING Allows you to place adverts on other organisations’ websites that, when clicked, send people to your site.

AFFILIATE MARKETING This might include banner marketing but is wider in context and involves a variety of payment methods but simply put it involves “affiliating” with another website that offers synergy with your own and then passing traffic between sites.

SOCIAL NETWORKING There can be few people who have not heard of Facebook. This and other social networks offer excellent opportunities to reach consumers but most businesses are unaware that there are many good business networking sites that can be utilised in a variety of ways to promote their business. If you are a business to business organisation start by taking a look at “LinkedIn”.

DATABASE MARKETING Most will have heard of database marketing in respect of traditional marketing approaches.

The Web offers an opportunity to do it very inexpensively, and the tools available make it easy to automate the process so that once you have established the process it needs very little attention. Follow up emails, offers and newsletters can be delivered at the appropriate times quickly and efficiently.

EXTRANETS Many companies now have an intranet which allows the efficient sharing of information within the organisation. The next step is an extranet which allows the efficient sharing of information with customers or clients. This can be as simple as making Invoices or POD’s available on line to architectural or engineering drawings or certificates of conformity so that each client knows there is a copy of every document that relates to them instantly available.

Such tools can be used to cement relationships and improve collaboration.

WEBINARS AND INTERNET MEETINGS These allow you to conduct seminars and meetings on line. Others can see your “desk-top” and you can even share the desktop with them allowing them to modify documents as a group of you watch despite being hundreds of miles apart.

WEBCASTS We now have internet radio and TV which offer a huge range of opportunities and merit a separate paper in their own right.

INTERNET MARKETING STRATEGY The approach you adopt will depend on your product and market. Which categories do they fall into:

Business to Consumer High Value Repeat Business Instant/Impulse Purchase Personal Relationship

Business to Business Low Value One off sale Considered Purchase Impersonal Relationship

Where your business activity falls in these categories will go far to determining the overall strategy you should adopt.

If your business has a one-off consumer purchased, low value product you will clearly use an entirely different approach to a high value, B to B product that is purchased after much consideration based on confidence in the company. In the first case you will probably focus on reaching the widest possible and greatest number of people where-as in the second your strategy will involve careful targeting and building of close relationships.

Once you have a clear understanding of these issues you can formulate the “Sales Process”: •

How should I lay out the path or paths to my website

•

When people get to the website how will I capture their interest

•

When I have their interest how will I give them the confidence to buy

•

How will I close the sale/deal

•

If they visit me but do not want to buy now how do I ensure they return when they do want to buy

•

When they buy how to I ensure they return to my site for future purchases

•

If they buy online how do I fulfil their order

Do bear in mind that the “sale/deal” could be that they complete an online form requesting a contact or a quote or even that they pick up the telephone and call you. It does not need to be an actual purchase.

WEB MARKETING PLAN Once you have your strategy clear you can begin to develop the plan for implementing it.

The one thing you should bear in mind is that your plan will change as you progress. Success in web marketing requires regular testing and revision of the plan and in many cases you will have to follow an iterative process. Whilst this may seem frustrating it has the major advantage over the traditional approaches; if I built my shop and then discovered it would have been better built another way it would be horribly expensive to rebuild. Even printing several thousand A4 brochures that don’t work is expensive but I can test a web page with no investment in hard copy.

Precisely what sequence you follow will depend on your circumstances but a good outline, after you have followed the initial step of developing a strategy would be: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Produce an initial site Review they key words Revise the site in the light of the key words Check basic SEO Submit your site to the search engines Develop a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign Develop landing pages for the PPC campaign Launch the PPC campaign Initiate the use of the other appropriate tools

Key words – referred to in step 2 – are the words people are most likely to search on. And the richer your pages are in key words the more likely you are to rank highly in search engines. You can research these by using Google’s key word tool.

You could do it the other way round (identify key words first) but trying to write a piece from scratch with the right key words and making it sound good and appropriate is more difficult than editing a piece and introducing key words once written.

As soon as you have published your site you should ensure that you have appropriate analysis tools linked to it. Probably the best is Google Analytics. Do not be disappointed when this shows you that you have no visitors. It takes a significant amount of time for you to be noticed let alone climb up the ranks.

This is one of the reasons we suggest you embark on an Adwords PPC campaign. This will drive traffic to your site which will both push it up the rankings and give you some data to allow you to test your work.

A CRITICAL DECISION You have a couple of choices: • •

You can have what is described as a static site or a database driven site You can ask a web design organisation to build your site or do it yourself

STATIC WEBSITES The traditional website of the past is what we would consider a static site. It contains a fixed amount of pages and the information is presented in HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language).

The content on a static web page will never change unless the change is applied manually and the new version is uploaded onto the Web Hosting Server. The capacity of a static page

is to simply display the information it contains on the screen every time it is loaded onto a web browser.

DYNAMIC DATABASE DRIVEN WEBSITES In such a site each web page is created from data stored in a database as it is requested.

Broadly it requires two components, an SQL type database and a Content Management System. This sounds complicated but actually the interface with the site manager, contributors and users is very simple and has huge advantages: • • • •

Much more functional website Much easier to update New content brings people back to the site and helps in the search engines Can work as a system to allow staff or users to collaborate

WEB DESIGN COMPANY OR DIY If you get a traditional web design company to produce your site they will probably produce a very professional static site. And when you want to change a page you will have to go to them to get it changed; for which you will have to pay. If you are running an aggressive proactive web strategy this will become expensive and time consuming.

You could find a design company that will produce a dynamic site for you. In most cases they will provide the hosting and the accompanying Content Management System. In which case you are likely to be tied to them.

The alternative is a DIY approach. The obvious disadvantage of this is that you need somebody with the expertise and you do not have that person or you wouldn’t be reading this. However, if you can overcome that initial problem you could have: • • • • •

A website that you could update in minutes as required That could be updated or contributed to by a wide variety of people in your organisation (in a controlled way) That could be entirely restyled in seconds That could grow with your organisation increasing in both functionality and size And never be tied to a Web Design or Hosting Company who can dictate prices to you.

The approach we recommend is that you use an open source program called Joomla and MySQL. Both of these are free of charge! Joomla is a well established CMS with much in built functionality. It has a community of developers who have produced 1000s of add-ons most of which are free or very low cost (I recently acquired an employment agency component

that allows employers to add jobs, candidates to scan jobs, up load their details, add CV’s as well as allowing staff to manage candidates and clients – it even works out commission for staff. It cost £35!)

The consequence is that you can move your site at anytime you choose and never be reliant or tied to a web company again.

Of course it still leaves the problem of not having the expertise available in house. You can overcome this in one of two ways: • Get some one to learn Joomla, SEO, Web Marketing, MySQL, Adwords, Google Analytics and copy writing • Ask us to help you

Actually the first of these is not really that difficult and, in fact, if you ask us to help you we will teach most of this to the appropriate members of staff (we do not teach the copywriting bit – probably needs a degree course and underlying flair)

DIY INSTRUCTIONS Below are step by step instructions if you really want to build your own Joomla site from scratch. It really is possible to do it on your own providing you are or have somebody who is moderately computer literate.

We are happy to provide this basic guidance because for many companies – start ups or smaller companies – it will be the only way to afford it. You could do it for about £10 per month or less for the hosting agreement; almost everything else you need is available free.

We think that most organisations would be better asking us to help because we will do it more quickly and help you through the learning curve. Our aim is to provide you with a site that works, is Search Engine friendly and can be updated by you as you require. This means that we will teach you the basics that you need to know to get it right.

SO NOW THE STEPS! 1. Get a domain name. The best way to do this is to find a hosting company and use their services to check out domain names and buy one that works for you. We suggest using www.names.co.uk or doing it through us. Your domain name will cost anything from about £10 to £25.

2. Find a host. Once again we suggest using www.names.co.uk or doing it through us. We actually use Names.Co ourselves and your site will be hosted by them. If you do it direct with them it will cost £7.99 per month for the appropriate package. It will also cost about £7 more per month if you do it with us but we can offer technical support for Joomla and MySQL which they do not. We can also offer additional services such as backing up and it is easier to do this if your site is consolidated with us.

3. Once you have purchased your domain and arranged hosting you need to add a MySQL database to the site. If you have followed our advice about hosting you will find the process is a simple one driven by following the menus and instructions on either of the sites. If you haven’t followed our hosting suggestion then visit the Joomla site or look for instructions on your hosts site. If your host does not have an automated process you will have to download Joomla to your PC and then use an FTP programme to upload it. (If you do not have an FTP program we recommend FileZilla, also available free on the Web) 4. Next install Joomla. Once again, very simple if you have followed the advice and arranged your hosting as suggested. Select the menu item “Scripts and E-Commerce”, then select Joomla and follow the instructions. (The one thing you must not do if you are having the site hosted as suggested is install it to a file directory called Joomla. There have been a number of conflicting guidance note suggesting this. Make sure it is installed in the /web directory.)

5. If you haven’t followed our hosting suggestion then visit the Joomla site, buy one of the recommended books (see below) or look for instructions on your host’s site. If your host does not have an automated process you will have to download Joomla to your PC and then use an FTP programme to upload it. (If you do not have an FTP program we recommend FileZilla, also available free on the Web) 6. The process of installing in this way installs a fully working site with content that explains Joomla. Once you have studied this you can systematically remove the content either by unpublishing it or deleting it through the backend. You reach the backend by typing www.mydomain/administrator and entering the username and password you were asked for when you installed the program.

7. Visit www.joomla.org . There you will find access to the documentation, “Forum”, and vast range of resources.

8. Buy the book “Beginning Joomla” from our bookshop at http://bit.ly/Lm39K . Look under IT SOFTWARE BOOKS. If you want further information or help on your web marketing feel free to contact me personally. Contact details are on the back cover.

GLOSSARY SEO

Search Engine Optimisation. This covers a multitude of techniques from selecting the right keyword, creating XML site maps and entering the right meta tags. The intention is to make the site easily seen and ranked by search engines

PPC

Pay per click. The major search engines allow to place adverts on their sites.

Currently the top three results returned by Google and all the results on the right hand side of a google page are paid for on a PPC basis. You pay nothing unless your advert is clicked and the searcher goes to your site. Clicks cost from a few pence to several pounds

MySQL

MySQL is an open source database program. It can be used in a wide variety of database applications but in this case it is used to store the content of your website until a browser calls on it. You do not need to know how to program it as for most purposes the Joomla CMS is the interface with it.

It would be a good idea to learn how to back it up. It is free! Its main competitor is Microsoft’s SQL Server

FTP

File Transfer Protocol. To transfer data and programs between to computers over the web and place it were you want it requires certain “protocols”. To ease the process there are special programs that allow you to view both computers as you would using Windows Explorer. You can then “drag and drop” programs or data between the two. We recommend FileZilla. It is comprehensive and easy to use. It is also free.

CMS

Content Management System . This manages the content you place on your website. The right CMS will give you flexibility and speed in updating your website and make it a largely non-technical task so the task of updating does not require IT personnel.

POD

Proof of delivery

ŠDavid Willox 2009 David Willox BSc. FInstIB. Email:- d.willox@marketfocus.biz