30-Minute Website Marketing

A Step By Step Guide

Lee Wilson

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838670801
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Everyday businesses of all sizes are generating a fraction of the potential website return on investment (ROI) and broader marketing value for their business. The largest part of this opportunity wastage comes from overlooked marketing potential, plus an inability to take immediate action based on competing time demands and budget restraints.
30-Minute Website Marketing: A Step By Step Guide utilizes over 15 years of website marketing experience and digital expertise to empower businesses to identify and act on untapped website success. With all actions taking 30 minutes or less, companies can work towards improving the results gained from their website marketing efforts, and by adhering to the practical steps in this book, businesses can be confident that those 30 minutes provide the returns on resource investment needed.
Through this guide, Lee Wilson delivers impactful, instant value to the broader marketing and targeted website marketing field, with practical help, direction, and expert step-by-step advice for marketing professionals, business owners, entrepreneurs, and start-up organisations.

Chapter 1

An Introduction to the Website Marketing Ecosystem

Website marketing has a greater impact on business at the time of writing this guide than any other form of company marketing activity, and yet one of the fundamental barriers for companies operating online is taking action quick enough.

An effective website facilitates; brand exposure and awareness, prominent non-brand visibility spanning millions of volumes of search requests, landing new users onto your online destination (office/shop/informational resource), and drives new business 24/7.

Having stated this, a website can only ever expect to achieve gains anywhere near to its true potential when companies are positioned to maximise each new and changing marketing signal with the ability to take action sooner.

In most situations, it is over-analysis, segmented specialist teams and excessive red tape which lead to marketing stagnation, declining returns on investment, and ultimately website performance paralysis.

Your company website, when functioning closer to an optimal level, integrates all disperse marketing activity into a single cohesive approach and ideally one marketing and data platform. This enables added controlling of effective marketing spend, driving of people towards desired commercial outcomes and minimising marketing spend overlap and wastage.

It is this proactive ability to identify and act on integrated marketing opportunity that sits within the centre of this 30-Minute Website Marketing: A Step By Step Guide.

Throughout this practical business guide to website marketing you can explore the priority tactics supporting website success online and fill your website backlog with identified actions that are able to directly impact performance.

Added to this, every key expert action and focus area is broken down into a 30-minute timeframe enabling you to implement and take full advantage of new website opportunity as it arises – in many cases before your competition (this ‘first-to-act’ mentality can become a competitive business advantage).

Before delving deeper into the practical marketing actions and insights, it’s important to reinforce the breadth and depth of specialisms that can be integrated into combined website management and performance enhancement approaches. It is here where the website marketing ecosystem comes into force.

1.1. An Introduction to the Website Marketing Ecosystem

A website is an always evolving entity that operates within, and is exposed to, a marketing ecosystem driven by six interconnected and interacting marketing channels, that are all fuelled by, and dependent upon content.

The six primary marketing channels of the website ecosystem can be characterised as:

(1) search engine optimisation (SEO)/organic search;

(2) pay per click (PPC)/paid search;

(3) social media;

(4) email;

(5) direct; and

(6) referral.

Content to a website is, by comparison, the fuel which enables everything else to function. Without effective content, it is impossible for a website to operate on any functional level.

A website marketing ecosystem can be defined as:

An ever changing online marketing platform dependant on interconnecting and interacting visibility, awareness and performance enhancement channels, fuelled by content.

When breaking this statement into its component parts, we can distil it into the following:

• The website (‘an ever changing online marketing platform’);
• The dependency (‘dependant on interconnecting and interacting’);
• The leading indicator focus (‘visibility, awareness’);
• The purpose (‘performance enhancement’); and
• The pre-requisite (‘fuelled by content’).

In layman’s terms and real-world use, this equates to:

A website that relies on integrated marketing channels to drive performance and success, supported by content.

You can see how this website marketing ecosystem operates in the next section of this chapter, with access to ‘The Website Marketing Ecosystem’ diagram, plus added clarity for each of the component parts.

1.2. Demystifying the Website Marketing Ecosystem

As with any ecosystem, the initial stage of understanding and impact relate primarily to deeper awareness of the individual component parts (in this case the core marketing channels, SEO, PPC, etc.), along with the fundamental questions relating to them:

• What is the channel?
• How does the channel function?
• What are the main interactions and overlaps?
• What is the integration opportunity?
• What are the primary roles?

Better understanding of the website marketing ecosystem leads to aligned company awareness of how one role, function and member of the wider team can directly influence and impact another for extra performance improvements.

Once this awareness becomes an encouraged company cultural change, businesses can cultivate and nurture environments supportive of website results and multiplier service/specialism impact.

You can visualise next how this ecosystem functions with ‘The Website Marketing Ecosystem’ diagram as follows (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1.The Website Marketing Ecosystem.

The important concentration for change includes reinforcing the positives from cross-team collaboration, information-sharing, with integrated; content ideation sessions, new customer onboarding chats and other areas like multi-service/specialist collaborative insight and data-sharing.

It is this notion and importance of integrated working spanning marketing channels which is discussed later in this section.

1.3. Creating a Collaborative Marketing Culture

There is a myriad of ways in which a business can establish, nurture and grow a culture of integrated working, knowledge-sharing and co-creation at strategic and tactical levels.

While there can be instances of resource waste and expert overlap when integrated working is not effectively managed and processes refined, the value that can be received from getting segmented marketing channels and expert delivery staff to work in collaboration far outweighs this potential barrier.

1.4. Tips for Integrating Marketing Specialisms

Integrated working fundamentally requires a supporting business culture which places emphasis and backing towards getting teams working in collaboration, contributing knowledge, wins and insights, with a universal positive sentiment towards teamworking and cooperation, over isolated working and single specialist gains.

There are natural integration overlaps throughout website marketing and some of those that habitually occur within digital marketing delivery (as an agency and in house working) include those listed now.

• Onboarding new campaigns. Inside an agency environment, the initial onboarding actions set the tone for campaign delivery and customer handling. At this stage, it is necessary to agree a campaign delivery lead and put together a co-creation mentality on the first stages of service provision. It may sound like a big change to approve to implement matters like this but that doesn’t need to be the case. In this example, a procedural change could be something as simple as ensuring every new customer that comes on board (or a new complex project begins in house) has a 15-minute meeting set up before any actions are progressed with each of the key project stakeholders involved. As a tip on this point, senior staff by default should be expected to set up and run these initial integrated meetings to help with efficiencies and effectiveness of approach. Integrated approaches have no need to be any less effective with time management than any other segmented approach, and the expectation is that in most cases to output will be greater. Once meetings like this become a matter of course, the wider team should be encouraged to take on accountability of running them, helping ongoing focus and cultural buy-in.Supporting this type of collaboration are items such as an onboarding requirement guide, or checklist that ensures important actions do not get overlooked. The delivery team all have accountability for completing this, and the final accountability sits with the campaign lead (by default).An example snippet of an onboarding actions checklist is provided next – how detailed and expansive you choose to make this will depend on your business approach, and typically the below are the fundamental early activities you will want to include expert time with.Ten examples of onboarding actions are as follows:
  (1) internal team meeting, lead setting and internal specialist/resource allocation;
  (2) welcome call and introduction to the delivery team(s);
  (3) scheduling, planning and completion of face to face of briefing session;
  (4) follow-up actions from the initial communications such as scheduling ongoing progress meetings/calls;
  (5) data access for all required staff and initial data reviews, set-ups, benchmarking and tracking;
  (6) first phase of reporting and data visualisation work (translating business goals into effective key performance indicators (KPIs) and report frameworks);
  (7) situational analysis, competitor/market analysis, technical analysis and associated ordering of website marketing audits and reviews (e.g. content audit and user experience reviews);
  (8) audience understanding; demographics, personas, geotargeting and more;
  (9) theme segmentation, understanding and targeting documented; and
  (10) initial strategy creation and discussion (including refinements), and implementation of quick fixes and easy to implement activities.
• Strategy creation. Collaborative expertise sharing and insight needs to be factored in at every key stage of project and campaign service provision. One of the opening chances of demonstrating integrated value is with the first strategy discussions and supportive documentation plus discussion. A company strategy should be a single, cohesive body of work, not multiple documents, delivery methods, and marketing channel itemised entries. The ‘lead’ person will be required to collate marketing specific data, information and expertise sharing, and takes the role of bringing everything together so that the strategy accurately represents both the customer (internal customer being the key stakeholders/investor/board, etc., or external customers in a traditional sense) needs and the delivery requirements for acceptance or refinement of approach and progression into action.
• Content ideation and creation. One of the common frustrations of experts creating work is that they feel the actual items they are building could be better and that they have been omitted from the actual ideation process. By bringing in the people creating the content outputs into the content idea stages, they have increased and vested interest in the outcomes that are derived from them. It is also a missed opportunity to enhance performance when the option of dictation and micromanagement outweigh co-creation in areas like this. A happy team ultimately produce better end products and often are more naturally inclined to look into the performance of the work once implemented, as well as refining it based on new data, by caring more and feeling embedded into the results delivered.
• Content promotion. This is an example of naturally evolving overlap between marketing channels. As an example of this in action, consider the following process of content identification through to promotion – think about the inefficiencies you notice before reviewing the revised and collaborative process, as well as factoring in missed people/specialisms from the a...