Marketing your business in an online world should be easy, right? After all, how do people look for goods and services these days? They search online. All you should need is sharp-looking website and you should be on your way to pulling in more customers than you can shake a digital stick at.
Let’s say you’re a builder or remodeler in the Indianapolis area. If someone does a Google search for “homebuilders in Indianapolis” your company’s name will pop up, right? Well, I just tried it and sure enough, in just 0.29 seconds names popped up—about 268,000 of them! Unless your name happens to be one of the top two or three, that’s not good news. (By the way, I picked Indianapolis because it’s kind of a mid-sized city with a population of about 835,000.)
While there is no doubt that having an effective and attractive website is crucial to your marketing efforts, limiting yourself to that one activity is a bit like being a one-trick pony. The novelty wears off fast and the pony isn’t very productive. Successful marketing today requires an integrated approach with these essential elements:
SEO: Yes, you need to have a great website, but it needs to be search engine optimized if you want to have any hope of getting found in the vast sea of information that’s available on the Web. It doesn’t matter how great your site is if nobody can find it.
Social media: You need more than just keywords in your copy to drive customers to your site. Depending on your business and your audience, you may want to use social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and your blog to pull potential clients to your site.
Landing pages: Getting people to your site is great, but you want to engage them once they’ve arrived. A landing page is a great way to deliver helpful content to customers and to capture their information so that you can contact them again. Plus, landing pages are much more effective at converting visitors to leads that standard web pages.
Email campaigns: There’s a tendency to think of email as kind of old-fashioned and intrusive. It’s true that email is a terrible way to solicit new business. But a properly executed email campaign is still an extremely effective way to stay in touch with existing customers or leads that have indicated an interest in your products or services.
If you want to increase your overall effectiveness, you’ll also want to integrate your offline marketing efforts (direct mail, print collateral, signage, events, etc.) as well. If you’d like some help in doing that, I invite you to download a recording of our free Builder Marketing Webinar that provides practical tips for integrating online and offline efforts (By the way, you don’t have to be a builder to benefit from the helpful information in this webinar).
Successful businesses today can’t afford to be one-trick ponies when it comes to marketing. Now is a good time to pick up a new trick or two!
