Maintaining your online presence through economic recovery

In the current economic climate marketing, like most else in your business, has to achieve more with less. So, resist the temptation to neglect your website. As in past recessions, the businesses that make the right marketing moves will emerge from the economic downturn in a stronger position.

One of those ‘right moves’ according to the experts, is to keep up your marketing efforts. Your website should be playing a major role in this so business owners need to take a close look at how they can improve the effectiveness of their website to attract visitors, hold their attention and sell to them.

Remember, internet marketing is always cheaper than other media. Here are some thoughts on how to expand and improve on what you’re doing on your website:

Improve search listing position

Search Engine Optimisation is the art and science of developing page text, keywords, metatags and subject headings that will get your site listed high in a search engine’s results page. If you haven’t already done so, then now is the time to invest in hiring a web developer to optimise your site. It’s worth the cost of some professional advice because SEO is the cheapest form of internet advertising and really contributes to conversion rate, but it can’t be done by guesswork. Web developers have the knowledge and the tools to do it right.

SEO can also align your website to current customer concerns by introducing words like ‘discounted’, ‘cheaper’, ‘low prices’, ‘sale’ – words likely to have increasing resonance with cash strapped consumers. You can make changes like this by adding and/or modifying pages on your website and have them available almost immediately.

Improve stickiness

Keeping people on the site long enough to get them involved and searching your offerings is a battle. Some proven ways of keeping their attention include the freebies on offer, the attractiveness of the webpage, and how easy it is for them to contact you and get questions sorted out right away.

Free Reports (aka White Papers) can be offered no strings attached or as an incentive to an opt-in subscription to your email newsletter. Create them as Word or PDF documents so people can download and print them to read at their convenience.

Landing pages have to be visually attractive to visitors so start with the basics – do the colours, fonts, graphics and layout make each page easy to read and present the information clearly? Introducing rich media such as video can provide a very powerful way of promoting a product. A blog provides an informal way to update people on what’s happening with the company and get feedback from visitors that may be useful to creating the right product for them or the right marketing message to appeal to them. Rework your marketing copy until every single webpage is a perfect sales letter. Constant improvement of your copy will mean better conversion and better search rankings.

The pulling power of individual pages can be fine-tuned by running experiments on them to determine which layout, offer, creative and copy combination delivers the most actions for your business. You’ll know if it’s working or not by analysing the statistics from the website. This means looking at the numbers and the flow of visitors on your website. Are the majority of visitors coming to just one page and then leaving? Are many visitors starting a shopping cart but then abandoning it? The answers to these questions will help you and your web developer to make the necessary changes to your website in order to continue improving it and increasing the ROI.

Make it easy for visitors to contact you

Listing your email addresses and phone number on the website is fine but an online contact form provides an immediacy that removes the opportunity to forget or lose your contact details if shoppers have to put it off until later.

Michael McKerlie’s background is in business and IT consulting. He has been heavily involved in the development and delivery of RAN ONE‘s world class solutions and training programs, as well as undertaking consulting assignments and directing the RAN ONE machine. As a speaker Michael has delivered presentations, training and speeches to over 20,000 people.