Digital Internet Marketing Systems – Step One is a business website

Business owners and leaders should be carefully examining all items of discretionary spend and evaluate them, line by line, to ensure they have potential to grow the business and can demonstrate unambiguous Return on Investment (ROI).  In some organisations, in times of a downturn marketing and advertising spend gets classed as “discretionary” rather than as an investment necessary to grow the business. The advantage of Digital Internet Marketing over more traditional off-line marketing is that the impact can be more easily measured. An effective internet marketing strategy will enable businesses to increase marketing ROI whilst being able to directly track marketing investments with measurable and incremental results. An innovative business website is at the heart of an effective internet marketing system, regardless of the products and services that a business sells.

In this series of articles we will discuss some of the more important benefits of a business website. The first important benefit is visibility. It is the shop window into products and services and is the online business card. Your company and its products and services need to be visible to your target market. Prospects are actively searching on the Internet for your products and services – especially where the market is local. Recent studies have shown that 80% of buyers rely on Internet search as their primary source of information before making a buying decision. Businesses that rely solely on traditional printed ads in yellow pages, local classified ads and word of mouth are missing a large part of their target market.

As more and more businesses and individuals use the Internet to research products and services before buying, companies must provide online prospects with easy access to company products and service information. Online buyers have now come to expect  24 by 7 access to information. Let’s look at the example of local restaurants where customer behaviour is markedly changing.  It is now critical that local restaurants have a internet marketing system that includes a website to engage and inform customers about opening hours, address, location, driving or walking directions, updated menus, email contact and a phone number so that customers can email or call to make a reservation. More and more customers are planning their restaurant meals online and restaurants without business websites miss out on potential customers.  Trend searches on Google in the UK clearly show a peak in local searches in December and January as customers begin to research restaurant bookings for Valentine’s Day and Mothers’ Day.

All business websites must have clear goals and that support the business’ objectives. As a minimum, companies going online need a domain name that is relevant to their business and an email address with the same domain name. Free email accounts from Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail should be avoided as they dilute business credibility. Also, email from these domains is often blocked by spam filters due to the large amount of suspect emails that get classed as spam.  It is also important to budget for basic website traffic promotion via search engine optimisation (SE0), and pay per click (PPC) and social media (SM) advertising to ensure that the website is visible to online searches and receives targeted traffic to the website.

For the vast majority of businesses, the objective will be to increase sales and grow margin through an improved marketing ROI effort.  A business focussed website then becomes a necessity and not a “nice to have” accessory.  The good news for businesses today is that in the digital age there are a number of affordable internet marketing systems available where the business website is at the heart. The cost varies depending on the level of initial and ongoing support a specific business requires. Having a Digital Internet Marketing System does not always differentiate a company  from its competition, but it does improve visibility and hence the chance to compete for those online customers  that might otherwise be lost to the competition.

Anthony Burke is an digital internet marketing consultant with experience of business development, marketing and the Internet with many large companies – more recently Hewitt Associates, Xchanging and Axa Insurance and several key London Market Insurers. Anthony now runs his own business which is associated with WSI to provide companies with affordable digital internet marketing solutions to enable profitable growth and increase marketing ROI.  He is also a member of the British Computer Society and a registered Prince2 Practitioner.