I’ve been working with a client recently who desperately needs more business. They are in a service oriented business where consumer demand is high and so are expectations.
Although I know they need to support their marketing strategy with social media marketing, they’re also facing a few of the most common problems businesses have today such as getting the proposition right in the first place.
Every business needs to identify and understand their core proposition. Without that understanding how can you pass your proposition on to your core market? How can you apply marketing strategies that work?
This client, like most others these days has a website that has been put together by an IT group instead of by a content writer and designer and, as in almost all of these cases, the website doesn’t work as it should. SUre, technically it’s fast and clear but it defies the basic Google rules such as identical page titles which Google explicitly penalises.
The images are too big for most average browsers 17″ screens, the site is over 2 servers increasing it’s chances of crashing, sub navigation is not obvious, there are no tags or header tags, no POS page or call to action, no registration has been done, no RSS feeds or social media support, no blog to give it a human face. In short, this client probably paid a lot of money for very little return.
This is typical when clients don’t really have their proposition fine tuned.
If you intend to use social media make sure your message is honed, clear and simple with a great big call to action. Call me, fill in this form to subscribe, press here and we’ll call you, whatever it is – put it in!
First and foremost – get your content right.
Secondly – give your website some support. Websites don’t stand alone, they live or die by the amount of traffic fed to them via the search engines and backlinks. You need to employ social media marketing tactics to encourage the search engines to rank your site higher and you need to ‘converse’ with other blogs and site owners to obtain the backlinks you need to drive that process.
Third – don’t miss out the audience you’re aiming for. Profile against your niche proposition and target minutely using Facebook or another such social media tool.
Last – speak to professionals. It’ll cost you a lot more to redo the job that should have been done right the first time around than to pay for a quality job upfront.
Online marketing is a powerful tool when used correctly.
