How to Make a Website a Primary Marketing Tool

Digital marketing is important for any business, but it is also crucial to understand what the components of your digital marketing strategy are to be able to use them correctly. In addition to that, you can also use some of these elements as the foundation for your plan. Here is how to make a website a prime marketing tool.

#1 SEO

Search engine optimization or SEO is the way you customize your website and the separate elements on your website to be more suitable for search engines. If you don’t use SEO, you can expect your website to be far behind the websites of your competitors, so it is absolutely necessary to start working on perfecting your site. Some of the main SEO tactics include:

  • Keywords in Text: Firstly, you will need to use relevant keywords in the content you publish no matter what kind of content it is (e.g. articles, product descriptions).
  • Visuals Optimization: Alt tags and other elements should be added to make images visible for search engines just like your text is optimized with keywords.
  • Plugins and Code: Plugins and code can be used to further improve your website by adding different features and options (e.g. social sharing buttons).
  • Backlink Profile: Much like internal linking is used for navigation, building a backlink profile is essential for improving the reputation of your site.

#2 Blog

You will be surprised by how effective a blog can be. Even if your website doesn’t usually get much attention unless you launch ad campaigns, your blog will definitely generate a lot of traffic to your website as long as it is attached to the site in some way and you publish content regularly on your blog.

Once you create a blog on your website, you will need to decide what you will be publishing there. More often than not, these will be articles and blog posts. What is the industry or niche your business operates in? What products or services do you sell? Where do your customers come from? What are your customers like?

After you answer all of these questions, you will have an idea of what these people are looking for, so you will be able to understand what topics will be interesting for them. Then, you will need to create articles and blog posts covering these topics and using relevant keywords in this content.

#3 Discounts

One of the best ways to attract attention to your business is by hosting a giveaway or a contest, but what if you don’t like either? Besides, a website is not the best platform for giveaways and contests (they are usually done on social media platforms). Instead, you can have sales, offer special deals, and provide discounts on selected products or services.

Sales can help you attract new customers who probably wanted to try something new and considered your brand before but didn’t purchase anything because they felt your prices were too high. If the sale is done during the holidays, your potential customers could also be the ones looking for gifts to buy.

Special deals and discounts, on the other hand, can help you with customer retention. You can send out discounts and special deals via email to those who have already made a purchase from you. Of course, your new offer should be related to the products or services they bought from you to be relevant to them.

#4 Navigation

A part of making your website your prime marketing tool is the user experience you provide to your site visitors. This means that they should be comfortable while looking through your website and finding the information they are looking for. Consequently, navigation is vital in this sense and will need to be taken care of.

To put it simply, navigation is all about internal linking. Does your website have tabs with all the main pages of your site? Do you link to your own content within your content? When you reference a certain page or piece of content on your website, do you link to it or do you simply state it?

If you really develop your internal linking, your navigation with significantly improve and you will notice that your site visitors will be clicking through your site more often rather than leaving it immediately after viewing one particular piece of content. This, in turn, improves your metrics and moves your website upwards in search rankings.

#5 Content

The content of your website might be different from the content of your blog, but there is something they have in common: both your website and your blog content need to have variety. If you create articles, images, infographics, videos, GIFs, podcasts, etc., you will have more chances of getting noticed than if you only create articles.

That being said, all the content you publish should still be of the highest quality. For instance, you could hire a professional writer from a writing service review site like Best Writers Online to write your articles and hire a photographer from a platform like Fiverr to supply you with original photographs.

Think about what kinds of customers you want to attract. Are you aiming for those who will stay dedicated to your brand and make big purchases or are you aiming for those who will only purchase once and not that much? The first group would probably want to stay educated about your industry and will want to consume the content you create.

#6 Visuals

Speaking about content, visuals are crucial for your website. You need to create a variety of visual content to support your articles and become the elements that will mostly attract your audience more than articles do. Here are just some types of visuals you can create:

  • Illustrations: These would have to be created by graphic artists, illustrators, and graphic designers.
  • Photographs: These would have to be created by photographers who take the photographs and then edit them accordingly.
  • Infographics: These would also have to be created by graphic designers, illustrators, and graphic artists. Like illustrations, they don’t necessarily have to be realistic.
  • GIFs: You can create these by yourself by using online GIF makers. Alternatively, you can have illustrators create these.
  • Videos: Animated videos will need to be created by animators, but you can film real-life videos yourself by purchasing the necessary equipment and writing texts for your videos.

#7 Branding

Maintaining consistent branding might not sound like something important for your website, but it is actually an extremely important element of any digital marketing strategy that ensures that your business becomes recognizable even when your potential customers are not exploring your site.

You need to use the same tone and style of language you use everywhere else. It should sound the same on one page of your website as it sounds on the other page of your website. Likewise, this tone and style should be the same on other channels you use for marketing such as your social media profiles, your emails, your messenger marketing, and so on.

#8 Marketing Integration

Speaking of other channels you use for marketing, you need to ensure that your site is properly integrated. Of course, you can make your website the center of attention when it comes to digital marketing, but you still need to remember that there are other channels and other platforms too that you should be using nonetheless.

You need to have social media sharing buttons throughout your website to allow your audience to share your content on social media. And, of course, link your social media profiles throughout. Similarly, make sure to link your website on your social media profiles.

You should also integrate your website into your email marketing campaign by linking from your emails to your website (especially if you create landing pages for the products you are promoting in your emails).

#9 Mobile-Friendliness

Many of your customers will be using their mobile devices to search for what the information they need which means they will be accessing your website from a mobile device like smartphones, tablets, and so on.

This is why you should create a mobile version of your website that will be suitable for such devices. If your site visitors use a smartphone and get the desktop version of your website, they will be extremely underwhelmed and maybe even disappointed by the fact that they are seeing a small version of your desktop site rather than a mobile version that fits the screen and is more comfortable to view from a device like that.

#10 CTAs

Last but not least, don’t forget to include calls to action or CTAs on your website. These should be placed both in your content and in different parts of your design, but make sure that they are not too annoying and don’t appear too often which can work against you rather than for you.

What CTAs do is that they help you encourage your audience to complete a particular action you want them to do. This could be anything from subscribing to your newsletter to watching your video to buying your products or services. As long as it is a particular action you want them to complete, it can be put into a CTA and used throughout your site (e.g. “Check out the video below to learn how to use our latest foot cream!”)

Final Thoughts

To sum up, transforming your website into your prime tool for marketing is fairly easy if you follow the steps in this article and focus most of your attention, time, and efforts on your site rather than other channels you use for digital marketing.