We have started a series of blogs on different aspects of digital marketing strategy.  Over the next few weeks we will look at some of these in turn. Today we start with websites, as this is often the first thing that comes to mind when planning a digital marketing campaign.

When designing a website, it is essential to consider carefully the purpose(s) of that website.  This sounds obvious but can often be overlooked in the excitement of the design process!   Do you want your website to inform existing customers or attract new ones – or both? Is your website going to use Web 2.0 technology to enable two-way interaction between you and your current or existing customers? Web 2.0 websites could involve, for example, features such as blogs, wikis, and customer login areas in your website. These aspects of creative digital marketing are all excellent in themselves but you need to ensure you have the resources to keep the information on them current and interesting. It’s not just written content that can make it or break it for a website, putting considerable care into choosing the right layout, website fonts, colours and making use of footers can all help to make visiting your site a pleasant experience for users! Having worked with various clients over the years on websites, we would highly recommend usability reviews before you make the decision to rebuild your site. These reviews can often help identify key areas of improvement, such as site navigation, and pick out elements that should be added to the site. As mentioned in last week’s blog, your website also needs to be optimised to maximise its effectiveness. This means that your website needs to contain the kind of keywords that a typical user would type into a search engine if they were looking on the internet for a product or service such as yours. It is possible to research which keywords these are likely to be and then to ensure that the content of your website contains such words at the right level of frequency. These steps will ensure that the URL of your website would be returned by a search engine and not be overlooked. Keywords can also be built into “behind the scenes” parts of your website such as headers, descriptions and tags. This whole process is called “search engine optimisation” (SEO) and aims to ensure search engine hits for your website. There are other strategies that you can use to increase traffic to your website. You need to ensure that your website is listed – and preferably linked to – from the websites of any and every related organisation. There is also a lot you can do in terms of Social Media Marketing to attract traffic to your website and in next week’s blog we will explore the different ways social media can be used as part of an effective digital marketing strategy. For further information or advice on any of the above topics why not take a look at our past blogs here!