As with any investment, it is important to try and constantly monitor your web marketing and the effect it is having on your business. Some business, for example, those that only sell online, may be able to monitor their web marketing very accurately. If they see an increase in traffic to the website and sales then they will know that their marketing is working. But other businesses may find it a little more difficult. It may be that your website is purely a portal to give information and to gain enquiries. If this is the case you may take many calls over the phone. It can be hard to know exactly where the enquiry has come from so making it harder to track the success of your marketing within different avenues. You may wish to consider having different telephone numbers, splash pages or even promo codes to try and track the progress of different marketing strategies more accurately.  

Branding and marketing often get confused, as people think that it is the same thing when really it isn’t although the two are closely linked. Branding is basically your whole company, everything from your logo and name to the uniforms your staff wear and messages and promises that you state you will deliver. Once you have a brand established you will need to promote it and this is where the marketing comes in. You can opt to market your business and brand via a number of platforms online and offline. Social media has grown massively popular in recent years and can grow a brand literally over night with the instance reach that you have when it comes to communication with your followers. Whatever form or forms of marketing you chose to do, be sure to track the results that you get from it as accurately as possible so you can then evaluate whether it is working for your brand or not.  

As someone who works in the world of online marketing, I often get asked “how much money do I need to invest in online marketing?” by potential clients. The problem is there is no one answer as it all depends on a number of factors. Competition is one of the biggest deciding factors. If you are a business looking to target a number of broad phrases over a large geographical area then your completion level will be high and therefore so will the amount you need to spend on marketing. If you are a fairly new business with little online presence then you may need to invest heavily initially to get your site up there but then can scale it down a little later on. Investing too little can be pointless and you will get very little return, ideally speak to a web marketing agency who will be able to advise you of what you should be budgeting for.    

Web marketing is essentially a number of processes that are carried out online to improve your reach in terms of number of visitors to your website, this is done in many ways. Online marketing is often split down in to two categories – on page marketing and off page marketing. On page marketing is optimisation that is done actually on your website which is also referred to as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Off page marketing is things such as social media marketing, link building and Google Adwords with is online marketing done away from your website but still with the goal of improving the visits to your site. With any type of marketing it is vital that you track the performance of any marketing campaign you are currently running. This way you can see if it is viable and therefore whether it is worth investing money in. One way you can do this is by checking the statistical information to your website and seeing if... Read More »