Digital Marketing: Inform, Entice, Engage

Website Marketing

Websites represent an all-in-one storefront, a display counter, and a megaphone for organizations to communicate in the digital world. For digital and bricks-and-mortar businesses, Websites are a primary channel for communicating with current and prospective customers as well as other audiences. A good website provides evidence that an organization is real, credible, and legitimate.

The variety of online website-building services now available make setting up a basic website relatively simple and inexpensive. Once the website is established, it can continue to be fairly easy and inexpensive to maintain if the organization uses cost-effective and user-friendly tools. On the other hand, sophisticated websites can be massively expensive to build and maintain, and populating them with fresh, compelling content can devour time and money. But organizations can adjust the scope, scale, and resources required for their websites in proportion to their business objectives and the value they want their websites to deliver.

Websites As Marketing Tools

Websites are very flexible, allowing organizations to build the kinds of features and capabilities they need to conduct business effectively. Common marketing objectives and website functions include the following:

  • Providing general information about an organization such as the value proposition, products and services, and contact information
  • Expressing the brand of an organization through design, look and feel, personality, and voice
  • Demonstrating products, services, and expertise, including the customer experience, features, benefits, and value they provide
  • Proof points about the value a company offers, using evidence in the form of case studies, product reviews, testimonials, return on investment data, etc.
  • Lead generation, capturing information about website visitors to use in ongoing sales and marketing activity
  • Communities and forums for target audiences to share information and ask/answer questions
  • Publishing value-adding content and tools for informational or entertainment purposes to bring people in and draw them back to the website
  • Communication about company news, views, culture, developments, and vision through an electronic newsroom or a company blog, for example
  • Shopping, providing tools for customers to research, find, and select products or services in the digital environment
  • Recommendations that direct customers to information, products, services, and companies that meet their interests and needs
  • Sales, the ability to conduct sales and transact business online
  • Capturing customer feedback about the organization, its products, services, content, and the website experience itself

Before starting to build a website, the marketing manager should meet with other company leaders to lay out a common vision for what the Website should accomplish and the business functions it should provide. For example, if a business does not plan to handle sales online, there is no need to build a "shopping cart" function or an e-commerce engine. If cultivating lively dialogue with an active customer community is an important business objective, this capability should be incorporated into the website strategy and design decisions from the outset. The website strategy must be effective at achieving the organization's goals to inform, engage, entertain, explore, support, etc.

Top Tips for Effective Websites

Many factors go into building an effective website. The following table serves as a checklist for key considerations.

Website Element Tips and Recommendations
Domain name The domain name is your digital address. Secure a name that is memorable and functional for your business.
Look and feel A site's look and feel conveys a lot about a company. Make sure your site makes positive impressions about credibility, product quality, the customer experience, etc.
Messaging Messaging and how it is presented can draw people in or turn them off immediately. Find concise, compelling ways to tell your story.
Design Website design is about usability as well as aesthetics. Make conscious choices about how design expresses your brand personality as well as its role in making the user experience intuitive and effective.
Structure Structure the website and organize information so that it is easy for visitors to navigate the site and find what they want.
Content quality To a large degree, the quality of content is what brings traffic into a website (more on this soon). Produce content and organize it so it can drive traffic, move customers through the sales cycle, and generate business.
Content variety Use a mix of professional-quality text, images, video, and other visual content to make your website interesting and readable.
Language Typos and grammatical errors are an immediate website turnoff. Proofread everything with fresh eyes before you publish.
Accessibility Follow basic principles of website accessibility to ensure that people can use your site effectively regardless of device or disability.
Call to action Provide cues for your website visitors about what to do next. Give each page a clear call to action and a path that invites people to keep exploring and moving closer to a purchasing decision.
Analytics Track website traffic and usage patterns using a tool like Google Analytics. Monitor which website pages get attention and which ones flop. Use what you learn to improve how well your website meets your objectives.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Website Marketing

Websites have so many advantages that there is almost no excuse for a business not to have one. Effective website marketing declares to the world that an organization exists, what value it offers, and how to do business. Websites can be an engine for generating customer data and new business leads. An electronic storefront is often dramatically less expensive than a physical storefront, and it can serve customers virtually anywhere in the world with internet access. Websites are very flexible and easy to alter. Organizations can try out new strategies, content and tactics at relatively low cost to see what works and where the changes pay off.

At the same time, websites carry costs and risks. They do require some investment of time and money to set up and maintain. For many organizations, especially small organizations without a dedicated website team, keeping website content fresh and up-to-date is a continual challenge. Organizations should make wise, well-researched decisions about information infrastructure and website hosting, to ensure their sites remain operational with good performance and uptime. Companies that capture and maintain customer data through their websites must be vigilant about information security to prevent hackers from stealing sensitive customer data. Some company websites suffer from other types of information security challenges, such as electronic vandalism, trolling (offensive or provocative online posts), and denial-of-service attacks mounted by hackers to take websites out of commission.