Online advertising has grown to become a leading segment in the Indian advertising industry. Online media is catching up with the target audience of most brands because the internet is a fast-growing, easily available medium that is accessible to everyone. And that’s exactly why I will be doing a series of blog posts that cover different aspects of online marketing right from social media and SEO to paid promotions, and websites.
This is a first of the series and I’ll call this the ‘Quick Shot.’ It covers all the aspects that I will be including in my further posts. Consider these posts as a series of executive summaries of crucial areas that you need to act on while managing your company’s website and online presence. Because it really doesn’t matter how many rupees you spend on your website; if your target audience doesn’t visit and stick around, your money is wasted. So read on, stay tuned, and stay updated!
- Traffic and Ranking Analysis: There are many tools you can use to get information and track visitors, so you can analyze their behaviour and plan your digital marketing strategy accordingly. Google Analytics is one of them. You can choose to with their server based logs and analyse in detail the behaviour of visitors on your website. It will tell you which pages your visitors spend more time on, which pages don’t get traffic, etc. So you can even judge if there are any trends and patterns that emerge. These insights can be very useful to plan further activities.
- XML Sitemap: It’s a good idea to have a sitemap because a sitemap is a clear, concise, and complete representation of your website and the information your target audience can access on it. A sitemap allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL. It can also be used to ensure that a search engine is aware of all the web-pages within a site. This will help your Search Engine Optimization efforts.
- Search Engine Friendly Content: When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, content is king. So you need to make sure that the content is legitimate for users as well as search engines. Use a proper structure for your website, with effective and correct use of header tags like h1, h2, bold text, etc. This will result in search engines preferring your website to others on search engine result pages.
- Staying in Touch with Existing Clients: As one of the obvious sources of revenue, it is important to stay in touch with your existing clients and ensure that they are updated about your products and activities. Since they have interacted with you before, they are more likely to do so again. You could even give them a better deal or some privileges to ensure that they stay loyal to you.
- Have a Plan and Set Specific Targets: Setting specific activities and targets for your business will give you a benchmark to compare your performance against. It will also help you analyze your current presence with respect to where your best returns are coming from, where you are going wrong, what is your target audience responding best to, etc. You need to set new tasks to maximize the effectiveness of campaigns and continuously monitor them in order to reach your desired objectives of your digital marketing strategy.
- Embrace Multimedia: Adding multimedia (videos, webcasts, podcasts and webinars) on your website is an effective way to sell yourself to prospective customers. Multimedia ends up being more interesting and interactive for the target audience and can result in them spending more time on your website.
- Google PPC and Facebook Advertising: Whether you are measuring success by registrations, or unique visitors, leads, orders; a proper PPC management strategy can get you flexible solutions to get you the responses you need, i.e. ‘bang for your buck!’
- Get Sociable: By being social, having a presence on relevant social media platforms, and a sound social media strategy in place; you can target a wider audience, improve business reputation and client base, expand market research, and execute ads and campaigns that target a niche, specific audience. This is an ideal platform to communicate directly with your audience members, listen to what they are saying about you, and respond to their concerns. It’s about building a meaningful relationship.
Which of these topics are you looking forward to reading the most? Do you manage your website on your own, or have a digital marketing agency handle it for you? If you have any thoughts on any of the topics, I’ll be happy to discuss them with you in the comments!