Boston
E-Marketing Strategy
How can I make more money from your web
site? blue widgets
How do I get more site traffic?
What is e-marketing?
How to I market my small business website?
By developing a strategic online e-marketing campaign.
If you have a business in or around the
Boston area and need to get your web site noticed, Oak Web Works
can create and implement your e-marketing strategy. E-marketing
is simply marketing for the Web. It's function is to get more eyeballs
looking at your business website.
There are countless way to increase traffic to your site. Oak Web
Works delivers. One of the aspects that sets us apart is our all-encompassing
approach. We can suggest numerous appropriate way to increase traffic.
But we can also implement the strategies, no matter what they are,
and no matter what technology is needed. Creating and implementing
a Boston e-marketing strategy is an art as much as it is a science.
However, getting more traffic is only
part of the battle. You need to get qualified traffic to
your business website. And once quality, potential customers come
to your site, you then need to have an effective website that converts
this traffic into qualified leads, and ultimately leads. So it is
worth investigating exactly who you nat to drive to your website
and then create an e-marekting strategy based on this target audience.
It is also worth reviewing your website
carefully before you implement an e-marketing strategy so you are
sure to convert new site visitors into leads. There are many ways
to do this. Click here to read a white paper about our one-to-one
e-marketing approach for your website and marketing campaigns.
Business Website Marketing
Here are a few of the things we can do
to drive qualified traffic to your site, increase brand awareness
and create more sales for you:
- Strategic link development
- Internet exploration to discover
where to place your link
- Search engine optimization
- Article writing help and submission
- Newsgroup and forum "buzz"
building
- Newsletter development
- Email marketing
- Banner creation and placement
- Flash movie development
- Forum creation
- Site traffic analysis and reporting using WebTrends
- Site traffic analysis system setup for your company
Learn more about all
our e-marketing services | Learn
more about our e-marketing strategy
An E-marketing Strategy Story:
Eddie the Erroneous E-Marketer
Poor Eddie the e-marketer has been plagued
by errors in judgment all his life. From always picking the longest
line at the toll booth to buying lots of dot com stocks right before
the bubble burst, he constantly struggles with making the right
choices. From disagreeing that a car really needs oil changes every
three thousand miles to insisting that the eight-track is going
to make a comeback, Eddie bumbles through life perplexed. One area
that particularly suffers is his e-marketing efforts.
You see, Eddie recently got himself a
new website for his business. Unfortunately, he’s been trying
in vain to turn it into a vehicle for getting leads and making sales.
He’s confused. He’s dazed. He thrashes about lost in
a maze. Although he at least understands the importance of e-marketing
for driving traffic to his site, he’s like a hamster running
on a wheel, wasting energy and getting nowhere. Let’s take
a look at a few of the more typical e-marketing errors Eddie regularly
makes.
Treat the Web as a different
medium
The other day his business partner, Betty, showed Eddie a recent
half-page ad they ran in one of their industry’s magazines.
Eddie, excited at how pretty the pictures were, wanted it up on
their website pronto. Did he alter it in any way before they posted
it to the site? Did he add a specific call to action hyperlink in
it? Did he optimize the large print graphics so they would download
fast in people’s browsers? Nope. He just took the ad, as is,
and posted it. Eddie has never been able to grasp the idea that
traditional marketing and e-marketing, while related, are not the
same thing. What works in print doesn’t always work online.
Why? Different mediums require different approaches. Look for Eddie’s
static magazine ad in his first TV commercial, just the motionless
ad on the screen for thirty seconds. Riveting.
The Web is interactive. Site visitors
can click buttons, fill out forms, or post immediate comments in
forums or blogs. When Eddie was having his site built, he really
just wanted to have a way to talk about his business. He wanted
to tell the world how great his company was and the exciting history
of its formation. This is called brochure-ware. It’s just
taking a company brochure, posting it online and adding a few links.
To say that Eddie is underutilizing the Web is like saying the ocean
is mildly wet. The Web is extremely powerful and businesses have
a choice of taking advantage of its power, or just scratching the
surface with simple brochure-ware. It’s similar to buying
a tank, climbing in and lifting the hatch only to shoot spit balls
at the enemy. If you have that kind of power, use it.
Ask your customers what they
want
Since Eddie doesn’t really grasp the interactive nature of
the Web he guesses what his potential customers want and need. One
day in a meeting Eddie was scratching his head, staring up at the
ceiling and saying, “Gee, if there was only a way to figure
out what our customers want, a way we could get in their heads,
and a way to reach enough of them to get a really clear picture,
hmm . . . ?” Thankfully, a timid but sharp junior associate
raised her hand and suggested that they just ask their customers
their opinions and needs directly, and do it online where they could
ask a whole bunch of them.
Eddie jumped at the idea. Finally he
was going make the right choice, albeit aided by a junior associate,
but the right e-marketing choice nonetheless. They created an html
form with forty of the most important questions he could think of
and posted a link on their homepage called “Customer Survey”.
Offer incentives
Only three people ever filled the survey out, and that was it. Eddie
was dumfounded. What went wrong? He was hoping for hundreds. The
problem was that Web users are not patient and generally don’t
like to fill out forms, especially long ones. Even more importantly,
they don’t like to do something for nothing.
If you were jostling your way through
a crowded store in a big rush and a bored teenage clerk asked you
to fill out a survey of forty questions but wasn’t offering
anything in return, how likely would it be that you’d do it?
A more effective approach for Eddie would have been to narrow down
his list of questions to four instead of forty, and offer a coupon
for 10% off any online purchase in return for filling it out. If
you want to create leads using your website, offer something for
free and require your visitors to give you a bit of information
first. They’ll be much more likely to respond if they get
something they perceive as valuable in return. Give the people what
they want, an incentive.
Regularly study your website
statistics
Another area that Eddie seems to miss the e-marketing boat is in
analysis. He doesn’t have time for looking at all those pesky
Web statistics. He can’t be bothered with analyzing the number
of visitors who come to his site, or how they got there, or where
they go once they’re there. He’s rendered blind to his
e-marketing campaigns’ successes and failures. It’s
like always ignoring your checking account balance and then despairingly
wondering where all your money went each week. What’s worse,
because he ignores the numbers, he has no useful information to
help plan his next campaign. Numbers help in life.
A jumbo jet is off course 90% of time.
It reaches its destination successfully by constantly checking the
data on its exact position and continuously making the appropriate
adjustments until it lands on target.
Likewise, an e-marketing objective can
be best reached by analyzing the data and making the necessary modifications.
For example, if your target is a thousand visitors a week, then
look at your website statistics and learn where the majority of
your visitors are coming from. Discover what type of site, link
or search engine is doing a lot of the referring. Then adjust your
time and budget accordingly.
It’s been rumored around the office
that Eddie sometimes locks himself in his office and counts his
new website’s hit counter, prancing around in jubilation each
time the counter goes up by one. Yet he hates to hunker down and
look at all the numbers, all the visitors, all the referrals, and
then conduct a meaningful analysis to help understand the past and
better plan for the future.
Since Eddie hates looking at his site
statistics, he has no idea how well his last email marketing campaign
went. He sent out five thousand emails to a rented list and then
asked his sales people if they got any more phone calls that day.
It’d be like a television network executive asking his employees
if they happened to see their neighbors’ TV sets on the night
before to determine if the new show did well. Hey Eddie, I have
an idea, check your Web stats for page views and you’ll know
exactly how successful your email was!
Poor Eddie the erroneous e-marketer,
is he condemned to sub-par performances in life and business? If
he tries to learn from his mistakes, if he starts to treat the Web
differently than print or any other medium, he’ll start to
see results. If he uses more of the Web’s power and potential,
tapping into its interactivity and offering easy ways for his site
visitors to communicate with him, and if he offers incentives to
motivate his visitors to take action, then maybe, just maybe, he
may not be doomed after all.
Unfortunately, after choosing the longest
line at the toll booth again, his car’s engine seized from
idling and poor oil maintenance. So to pass the time waiting for
the tow truck, he popped in an eight-track cassette, flipped open
his cell phone and purchased some more Enron stocks.
Jason OConnor
Copyright 2004
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