Here is a seven step marketing preparation plan that will take your website to new levels of maturity and enable powerful marketing campaigns to be launched with confidence and ensure a measured increase in sales...

1) Basic Review:

Getting Organised / Current Market Status / Current Marketing Strategies

By knowing where you are in your business arena, your current marketing spending and what you are actually achieving in extra sales, this will help to give you a solid platform from where to start.

If you’re looking to grow your business, you’ll no doubt already have several marketing initiatives such as advertising in yellow pages and other directories, telemarketing, magazine adverts, flyers, events and exhibitions. Some work well, some not so well. Some attract good customers, some not so good. Some are quite profitable, some may actually make a loss.

By reviewing your current marketing strategies, you’ll find out which ones work and why. If you’re working to a budget and put a stop to the failing strategies, you’ll benefit by saving time and money. You’ll also have the opportunity to divert your investments into exploring many other marketing possibilities such as your website.

2) Goals and a Purpose:

Customer Analysis / Planning / Setting objectives / How to measure success

By analysing your existing customer base, you’ll increase the efficiency of your marketing by tailoring it towards your top 5 customer types. By knowing where your business comes from, you’ll create effective localised campaigns tuned to their requirements.

By adapting your marketing quickly and efficiently, you’ll soon determine the best way to get the right response. By targeting your best customer types, the results will bring a marked increase in response levels. With a website and a managed marketing campaign, you’ll be able to change your marketing as often as you wish. Compared to traditional methods, making these changes on your website will be a fraction of the cost.

By getting down to the fundamentals and working out your primary motivating factor for wanting a website, you’ll benefit from clarity and purpose in the solution.

Determine your primary motivating factors for having a website. Below are few suggested reasons for having a website:

• Marketing:

  Understand your market, measure your enquiries, tailor your marketing strategies

• Visibility:

  Reach more customers, get more transactions per customer

• Branding:

  Be recognized

• Credibility:

  Reassure customers that you are the right choice

• Communication:

  Newsletters, forums, polls build a client community

• Education:

  Tell customers all about what you do

• Commerce:

  Sell online through a secure website

• Customer Service:

  Help your customers with on-line services

• Organisation:

  Intranet tools to integrate distributed organisations

Understanding your customers is fundamental to all your marketing. By knowing how your customers think, and what they are actually looking for, you can present yourself in the best possible light.

By making your entire marketing strategies customer centred, your plans will become focused on achieving the above factors. Your objectives will be to deliver a solution that meets these requirements and find ways to measure their success. By providing the information your customer needs in order to relate to your business, you will benefit from talking to your customers in their language. A website is the only practical form of marketing that allows you to do this.

3) Content:

Collecting ideas / Images / Case Studies / Features and Benefits

By collecting ideas from related industries, competition and even ideas that you personally like, you will build a portfolio of ideas to create a clear way forward to how you want your website to look.

Images and photographs, including 3D graphics need to be collected and organised in order to relate to your ideas.

Excellent ways of getting your message across to your customers is by creating powerful case studies. Here you can link your products and services with a real life situation and explain the features and benefits with a great testimonial that outlines exactly how you stood out from the crowd.

4) Mission Statement:

Restyling and Branding / Search Engine Optimisation

The purpose of this step is to explore the reason why your business exists and what you stand for. Knowing this, your branding and image will become clear, and the Keywords and phrases that are important to your business will define your position your arena.

With a new concept design with homepage and page restyling for your website, the site will benefit from a new level of coherence and allow for scalability by managing the positioning of modules such as news, events and products and services to be added in the next steps.

Search Engine Optimisation is a long term process and requires fundamental analysis of the semantics behind your business. Being found on the search engines is not just about finding the best Keywords, it’s about talking in the same language as your customers and ensuring that the important aspects of your business are expressed so that the search engines know what you do.

Starting a search engine optimisation campaign now will bring in the benefits in about 3-4 months time. With careful planning, this will boost your future campaigns by bringing in more visitors to your website.

5) Platform improvements:

Content Management / Forms / News & PR / Events Calendar / Forum

By upgrading your website platform, you can add scalability by allowing modules such news, event calendar and forums. Each module can be added individually and integrated to give new layers of functionality.

Any enquiry forms you require will be reviewed and improved to sharpen up the current sales process. Improvements in capturing customer details will be incorporated in order to assist your marketing strategies in the later steps.

6) Marketing:

Direct Response Marketing / Prospect Funnelling / Newsletters

If you build a marketing hub, you’ll get to see where your marketing efforts are actually working and what kind of prospects you’re attracting. You’ll see how you’re attracting cold prospects, prospects who may have heard of you from a flyer or a magazine advert or some PR, and prospects from referrals and repeat business from existing customers.

By funnelling the range of prospects into your marketing hub, you’ll be able to deliver a visibly coherent message. All your marketing activities should be reflected on your website. Your prospects will no doubt be led to, and review your website, from any PR, advertisement, or promotion you do. You’ll manage the state of your prospects buying position and turn them into customers. What better reason to have a website than for it to be your marketing hub: a place where all your prospects will visit to learn more about your business.

Using your website as a marketing hub, you can improve your prospect funnelling by using direct response style marketing techniques. These work by highlighting the benefits that actually interest your target customers and asking for immediate action by giving a reason to call such as including special offers and deals.

By introducing a regular newsletter, your direct response marketing strategies will encourage your customers to find out more and check out your latest offers.

Measuring your marketing strategies requires careful planning and thorough follow through for all enquiries. With a website, you can measure the success of all your marketing strategies by creating landing pages – a page setup for a specific campaign. Your performance can then be tracked with a powerful web-stats package that generates reports on number of unique visitors, individual page visits, visit duration etc.

7) Promotion and Action

Once your website is fully functional and integrated with your marketing strategies, your business will run with stronger coherence. Regular marketing reviews will ensure your plans are executed in a professional and organized manner. With structure to your campaigns, you can be confident in the return on investment.

Maintaining your campaigns to match the growth and direction of your business will be monitored to produce the right message to the right customer base. If you know your target audience, and your website is tuned to attract them, then you can confidently take the next step in marketing your organisation to a wider audience.

In today’s business environment, without an e-business strategy you will be losing not only growth opportunities, but critical time in the race to beat your competition. Your competitors will no doubt already have a website and marketing strategy, how would you feel without one?

Combining the maintenance and marketing support for management and implementation of these steps, we suggest a monthly payment plan whereby you and Netflare work closely together to get the right result in a timely manner. Once these steps have been implemented, we will review the level of maintenance required in order to keep this at optimum performance.