Why Your Website is Just the Beginning of an Online Strategy
Of course you need a website. But, you need a lot more to succeed.
Your website is a primary location for product and service information for which your customers are searching. Moreover, it should follow the content marketing mandate of customer centricity. That is, your website must reflect an understanding of what’s most important to your customers in the way that you present content about who you are, what you sell, and why your visitors should care.
But, that’s still just the essential foundation. An effective website is necessary but not sufficient as an online marketing strategy. Patsi Krakoff makes this very clear in her insightful post, Why Your Website Is Not Enough (…and never will be, sorry)
Patsi sets a pretty high bar for your social media involvement, especially if you are a small independent professional services provider. But, if you’re skeptical about the need to go behind a basic website, pay attention to the research she cites from eMarketer. They estimate current monthly blog readers at almost 100 million in 2009 with an expected growth of almost 30% by 2013.
As David Tokheim of Six Apart Media (the blogging software company) noted in the eMarketer article: “The lines are becoming blurred between a standalone blog that might be created on TypePad or Blogger or WordPress and blog content that’s created by The New York Times.”
Clearly, the idea of a business blog is no longer a fringe concept. Patsi argues that far from being a fringe marketing method, it should be a vital component of what every business or professional does online. As she puts it:
You probably can get away with just a few web pages for a while. But for how long? If you wait, you’re not creating and building up the body of online content you need in order for you to get "Google juice," and clients won’t find you when they do a search. Your web pages won’t get good page rankings. Your site won’t get found. They will find your competitors instead.
Even if you think that starting a blog may stretch your resources painfully, be sure to read all of what Patsi has to say about why the possible pain will justify the marketing payoff.
For those of you who are already agonizing over multiple social media possibilities and want to know where to focus, check out our article: 6 Reasons Why Your Blog Is Your Most Important Social Media Tool
Trackbacks [0]
There are no trackbacks.
Post Comment
Fields marked with * are required.
Comments [1]
As more and more people use Google to type in your URL, you need a presence off your website to make an impression. Which suggests a strong effort in social media, video sharing sites, articles and commenting.