Promoting your website
Not promoting your website and your domain name? It’s like keeping your best sales and customer reps hidden in a back room.
Many organizations make the mistake of assuming that, if they build their website, somehow just come to it. If only that were true! Like anything else, you must promote your website if you want people to use it.
You should seriously promote your website almost like it is one of the products or services that you offer.
Offline promotion:
- Create a logo and icons in different sizes, shapes, and colors.
- Create a QR bar code that contains your website name, web address, and other information
- Use the logo, icons, and QR code prominently in all your communications and marketing materials:
- Print materials such as business cards, business forms, catalogs, flyers, newsletters, stationery, announcements, invitations
- Outgoing voice mail messages and email signatures
- Presentation materials such as handouts, posters, PowerPoint templates
- Signage, decals, window stickers, company vehicles
- Newspaper, magazine, radio, and TV advertising, and coupons
- For restaurants: carryout (and regular) menus, table tents, and placemats
- Advertising specialties such as pens, magnets, mugs, calendars, bags
- Wearables such as shirts, uniforms, caps
- Computer screensavers and mouse pads
- Have colorful stickers, labels, and tags printed. Apply them to other print materials and to your products, bags, and shipping containers to draw added attention to your website.
[pullquote style=”right” quote=”dark”]You wouldn’t keep your best sales and customer reps hidden in a back room, would you? So why wouldn’t you put your website out there for everyone to see 24/7?[/pullquote]
Online promotion:
Just like in the “bricks and mortar” world, you can use a variety of techniques (such as those above) to draw in customers. However, once you get these customers to your site, you must assure that their experience is a good one for them. Otherwise they will not take the actions you want and will not return to your site to give you another chance.
Here are some ways to your website can add value for your visitors (and, ultimately, for your business).
- By providing them with a central place to get all of their information about your business, your products and your services
- By providing information that they can expect to be accurate, up-to-date, complete, reliable, honest, and trustworthy
- By providing information that is interesting, relevant to their needs and interests
- By providing links to relevant and related information beyond your website
- By providing them with information that is organized and sequenced to help them select what they need
- By responding to common pre-sale questions, concerns, objections
- By showing them the benefits of your products
- Through comparison of your products/services to competing ones
- By providing information on how to use your products and services:
- instructions, manuals, care and maintenance, tutorials, additional related products and services, tips, advanced uses and novel applications
- self-help service and repair, troubleshooting steps
- disclaimers, terms of service, safety information, product limitations
- Company policies such as returns, upgrades, gifts, service and repair, warranties
- Loyalty bonuses, frequent buyers, preferred buyer discounts, web-only coupons
- Illustrations or video demonstrations
- Product registration for warranties, purchase tracking, service or reorder reminders, etc.
- Advanced notice of new products, upcoming sales
- Contests, drawings, competitions to win/earn products and other rewards
- Newsletter/email list registration
- Contact with other users of your products and services through online discussion
- Examples of how others are using your products
- Feedback, suggestions, requests
- Through online user-to-user forums, discussion boards, submission forms, polls, surveys, questions and answers, Frequently Asked Questions, etc.
- Acknowledgement of, and response to, feedback
- Contact information
- Best ways to make contact
- Emergency service, hotline, after-hours contact
- Directory of contacts for different purposes (e.g., sales, service, parts, billing)
[message type=”custom” width=”100%” start_color=”#FFFCB5″ end_color=”#F4CBCB” border=”#BBBBBB” color=”#333333″]Bottom Line: If you are NOT promoting your website, you really need to ask yourself why. If it’s because your site does not tell your story, you need to make some changes. Update your site yourself or find a professional who has the technical, creative, marketing, and communications expertise you need. If you haven’t done a major reevaluation or makeover of your site in 3 years, you should consider doing that now. There are many new tools and technologies that make it easier, more effective, and less costly to keep your site up-to-date with fresh content so you can get better business results.[/message]
Added Value Web Services, LLC