Internet marketing
Internet Marketing is a way of promoting your business, products and services online. Your website is your starting point: did you know, more people than ever now rely on the internet to check a company out before deciding to use them? A professional website is a must for any business - even if its just a couple of pages explaining what you do.
Market research
Market Research is extremely important - even for well-established businesses. If done correctly it can provide a wealth of knowledge about your target market, competitors, potential opportunities, and may help improve the way you operate, by identifying better sales techniques, more innovative ways of marketing and more. Please see our research & analysis section to see how we can help with this.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is quite often promoted as internet marketing, when in fact it's just one of the many strategies used. Part of your market research involves identifying key words. These are basically the words people use in search engines to find information, products or services. There is lots of information and many tools out there that can help with this stage. Your key words can be anything from a product or service name, to a word that describes what it does. We include the identification of key words in our research & analysis services.
Website content
When creating your website, it is important to include as many of the key words you have identified within the content: this makes it easier for search engines to find you and increases your visibility on the internet.
The sites most liked by search engines are those with high numbers of incoming links (basically any website that has added a link back to yours). The more professional or well known the 'linker' the better (i.e. from prominent newspapers, government departments, and other sites of authority).
Attracting visitors
There are lots of ways to attract visitors, and more important, those crucial link-backs. It starts with writing good content, and can include auto publishing this content (for example your blog or newsletters) to multiple social and business networking sites, to high ranking blogging sites, online directories and more. There are many free (and paid for) tools and service providers out there that can help with this. We can add this functionality to your CMS so basically any content you publish is submitted automatically to your chosen sites.
Banner advertising campaigns and affiliate schemes are also useful. Basically you place banners on your website belonging to other companies (maybe offering complimentary services to your own) and you are paid each time your visitor clicks the link. You can also offer your own affiliate scheme. Additionally, creating a promotional video or podcast and placing it on your own website, and on some of the top video sharing sites like YouTube can also help increase website ranking and generate those all important link backs!
Offering subscriptions on your website is another way of attracting visitors, maybe sign-ups for a newsletter, an online community or forum. Pay per click advertising is also quite popular, although this might be considered too expensive for a small business as you pay the provider (i.e. Google) for every click – this can soon add up, and there is no guarantee they will result in a sale!
Finally there is Email marketing whereby you send targeted e-mails to your existing customers, or new potentials. Email lists can be purchased, but make sure they are from a reputable company and that the recipients have not opted out of receiving unsolicited mail.
Website analytics
This is particularly useful for measuring the overall performance and effectiveness of your website i.e. traffic volumes, visitor behaviour, most popular search engines used, and performance of key words and phrases - compared to the terms your visitors are actually using. This should be part of an ongoing strategy as it requires continuous monitoring and revising. For example, it may highlight new key words, pages with dead links, or a source used in one of your campaigns that is generating the most visitors and vice versa.
