As a business owner, you want to see your business succeed. You want to increase sales, get your product into the hands of more people, connect with more customers and increase brand awareness. When we are working on all of these elements, we sometimes forget about the very important part of the business. The website.
Websites can often be overshadowed by social media platforms in our marketing strategies as a way to promote the business. But is that the right platform to rely on? The problem with this, is that you don’t own your following.
Social media owns your following
… and with that knowledge, Facebook is in the power to encourage you to boost your business’ posts! Because, guess what, Facebook need to make money too, specifically from the ads that you are paying to run. And sadly, due to this, we are finding that less and less people who like our pages are seeing the things that we post. It all boils down to money, and Facebook providing a better user experience for the end-user and not our business pages.
It’s not to say to completely rule out social media, as we know this is a fundamental marketplace for driving awareness and converting sales. But, we need to be a bit smarter with how much we allow social media to own our strategy.
Let’s take Snapchat for example, in this fast-paced world Snapchat see the need to release a major update that changed the entire look and feel of the app. The update was so bad that users took to Twitter in a fit of rage, many shared petitions that begged the company to reverse the update and even celebrities got involved. Not only that but investors rapidly pulled out with its stock price at an all-time low.
Why did Snap Chat do it? To alter the way users interacted with the app to give the adverts a priority. Who was at loss? The influencers and businesses who had spent years building a loyal following.
A website as a marketing tool can give you the stability to own your following, and here are a few ways you can do it:
- Blogging
Having a blog section on your site is a great way to build a brand and provide value to your customers. People will look for and follow content they like (the same as they do with Instagram) and will not only end up trusting your expertise, but also can have the potential to become a customer and brand advocate. Figure out something that you can write a blog post about every week, write it, and promote it through your social channels.
- Email list
With the traffic you generate on your website, you will have the opportunity to convert these into subscribers which will be another audience that you own. This email list of subscribers would sit suitably on a cohesive digital marketing strategy that will compliment your social media marketing efforts and you won’t need to pay to ensure you appear in their inbox. Email lists are also a great way by sending discount codes suited around particular public holidays/ events or even on their birthdays.
- Discount codes
Websites are a really easy way for people to apply their coupon codes that you share with them either through email, flyers, social media or during an event and this can be done by setting up a simple function on the back-end of your website. TIP: Use a different coupon code per marketing platform, that way you know exactly what’s driving the most interest.
- Find a wider audience
Because, quite simply, not every one is on social media. Don't forget about the 40,000 search queries that are made on Google every second.
Social media is a powerful tool, but a website is too. If you leverage your different marketing channels appropriately, then you can ensure that you are in front of a new market. Figure out what works for your business and go for it…
S A Y M O R E O N L I N E helps businesses reach more customers online by utilising the digital marketing platforms that your exact target audience can be found on.