What is Website Promotion?
Website promotion is a collection of tactics, actions and techniques that serve to drive traffic (visitors) to your website.
Why is Website Promotion Important?
Websites offer a multitude of benefits. For some online entrepreneurs, they are storefronts selling goods. Others earn income through advertising, sponsorships and affiliate marketing. Others are marketing tools in and of themselves, providing information about the business and how to best get in touch for services.
While all these website options work, they only fulfill their purpose if people visit them. If you think of a website like a storefront, that store doesn’t make money unless someone walks in and buys. If a website is like an online magazine (such as a blog), it only makes money if people visit and buy from advertisers. As a marketing tool, websites deliver information about your business only if they know about it and visit it.
Web promotion is how online businesses get the word out about the website. The more targeted traffic (visitors who fit your target market) a website receives, the better the chance of making sales, earning ad income and gaining clients.
How is Website Promotion Done?
There are endless ways to promote your website, and new methods continue to arrive. Websites can be promoted in a variety ways both online and off.
Online Website Promotion
Anything that allows you to include your website URL can be considered promotion including an email signature line or participating in online forums.
Here are a few common website promotion tactics:
- Email marketing
- Blog marketing
- Social Media
- Advertising
- Search engine marketing
- SEO
Offline Website Promotion
Some offline website promotion techniques include:
- Direct mail
- Publicity
- Networking
- Public speaking
- Television and radio advertising
- Newspaper advertising
Best Practices for Website Promotion
The ideas listed above are not the only strategies you can use to promote your website. Because there are so many different ways you can market your website, it can get overwhelming. Further, without a plan your promotional efforts can be a waste of time. As you prepare to market your website, here are few things to do and keep in mind.
- Know your target market.Your goal isn’t just in getting as much traffic to your site as possible. A million visitors means nothing if none of them are interested in what you offer. Knowing and understanding your target market will allow you to focus your marketing efforts on those activities that put your message in front of your most likely visitor in a way that entices them to visit.
- Use search engine optimization strategies, but don’t rely on search engines alone to deliver traffic. Making it easy for search engines to understand, index and rank your site is a no-brainer. It’s free and not that hard to do. At the same time, you don’t need to spend a fortune in SEO services or hours and hours studying SEO. Checking your website stats and keywords every month or so will help you understand how people are using search engines to find your site and other information in your business area.
- Promote where your market hangs out.If your market isn’t on Twitter, you don’t need to tweet. When considering how and where to promote, think about where your market turns to get similar information and resources related to what you offer. This isn’t just other websites or social networks, but also, offline sources such as groups and print media.
- Hook your market with a message that speaks to them. That means opening with a hook that entices and intrigues your market. It should be benefits oriented in that it promises to solve a problem, improve life, or be entertaining. The better your promotional copy, the better and bigger the results on your marketing campaign.
- Track your efforts. You’ll save time and money if you know what promotions are delivering results and which aren’t.
Role of Promotions
Promotion is the voice of your company which send out your brand’s message loud and clear to the audience. Various media platforms can be used to promote your company and brand. They include television, radio, shopping outlets, billboards, magazines, and social media.
Various promotional strategies can be used to promote and market your business depending on the goals, objectives and priorities of your company.
Without marketing promotions, your brand or service would not be able to garner the attention of the pre-occupied customers.
Benefits
Promoting your brand will help you in many different ways:
- Increase brand awareness
- Provide appropriate information
- Increase Customer Traffic
- Build sales and profits
Not only these but promotions will also help your company to introduce products easily in the ever-so-competitive market.
1) Increasing brand awareness –
Promotions help in creating brand awareness. With the help of various media like the television, billboards, radio or local newspaper news, you can spread across information about your brand and company, which helps people to find out more about you and look into your products and make purchases.
2) Segment Identification –
If your promotional and marketing strategy is loosely structured, it might not be successful in targeting the “right” audiences. Having a full-proof and well-thought-out promotional strategy and marketing plan can help you identify different segments of consumers in the market and offer suitable solutions for your clients.
3) Increasing customer traffic –
Also, promotion helps in helps in increasing customer traffic. The more you promote your brand, the more will the customers know about you and your company and the more will they be interested in your products. Promotion can be done even by giving out free samples which works wonders for customers! They try your product and ultimately, come to you and make purchases.
While promotional strategies are very much important, marketers and businesses must take into account a few aspects in their marketing mix plan. It is essential that businesses make use of the right media tool to target their customers. These days, when social media is the most effective tool on the online platform, promotional strategies need to extend beyond radio, television an