Your Website is Not a Marketing Strategy

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As a freelancer or small business owner — a strong website will definitely be the #1 driver of your marketing strategy. But let’s be clear: your website is not a marketing strategy.

As a freelancer or small business owner — a strong website will definitely be the #1 driver of your marketing strategy. But let’s be clear: your website is not a marketing strategy.

As marketers, we understand that websites are the one marketing tool that is understood by a majority of individuals when they are starting out in their businesses. They commission a logo, copy, photography and website customization. They register their domain name and invest in hosting. The website is customized, goes live. But then what?

Whether is custom built from scratch, or simply customized from an existing theme — launching a website is probably the easiest and relatively quickest part of a solid, long-tail marketing strategy.

A 3-6 months, expensive marketing strategy may not seem that amazing when you can hop onto Squarespace and in a matter of days have good-looking site. But there are over 1 billion websites on the internet. Once your site goes live — how does it get traffic? How will people know that your site exists?

[bctt tweet=”#Marketing Newsalert: Your website, without a marketing strategy behind it, means nothing.” username=”alethea_r”]

A website just being live doesn’t mean anything. Not without a marketing strategy behind it. Your website is not a marketing strategy.

Think of a marketing strategy as the high-level rules that direct all your marketing activities — including the creation of your website. A marketing strategy should support your business goals, objectives and mission.

A good marketing strategy will also provide the following elements:

An understanding of your market, your competition and your customers or clients.

A thorough competitive analysis to identify and assess your competition.

A detailed picture of your ideal target customer or the kind of clients who will generate the best long-term value for your business.

Your unique selling proposition (USP), a concise description of the ways in which your product or service is the best at solving your customer’s problems and how it offers customer benefits.

A definition of your marketing goals. Is your goal to create brand awareness, grow market share, increase revenue or something else?

A definition of your marketing mix, which involves making decisions about pricing, promotion, product positioning and place.

A marketing strategy can then become the foundation of your marketing plan — a written record of the steps above including all the marketing activities (website development, social media outreach, content creation, etc) that you plan on executing over the next 6 to 12 months.

Creating a marketing strategy is not an overnight activity. It can take a bit of collaboration, research and planning. But it’s a worthwhile process.  Having a strategic approach to your marketing efforts will give you a better understanding of your business, your market, your customers, and the tactics and tools you’ll need to employ in order to promote your business in a way that makes sense for your services, clients and market.

Be sure to develop a marketing strategy before jumping onto any website platform.

 

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