~~By John Focht
Today’s fast-paced, technological world requires more in developing a solid business plan than ever before. Twenty years ago, a website was a non-existent factor in developing a marketing plan for your small business. Ten years ago, your marketing plan required you to have a website to ensure you had a web presence for your small business. Today, if you are merely planning on a website as stating you have a web presence, your marketing plan is as effective as a twenty year old marketing plan that had no website at all.
For a website to be effective today, your business and marketing plans need to have an effective strategy that identifies how your website will do more than just create bells and whistles; it needs to create web traffic.
Traditional models of advertising and word of mouth can generate traffic to your website. In fact, your marketing plan should incorporate these methods as well. The additional strategy your marketing plan needs to address is Search Engine Marketing to design a plan that will drive paid and/or organic search results back to your website.
Social media plays a major role in search engine optimization and marketing. More people today are on social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, than ever before. As a small business owner with a website, social media websites are your avenue to driving more web traffic to your website. But how do you drive more to traffic to your site?
Your search engine marketing plan needs to identify resources, time, and money to be budgeted and allocated toward social media and social engine optimization. If it doesn’t, you will be hard-pressed to effectively drive new potential customers through today’s medium of web traffic delivery.
Getting your small business connected into the social media world is a start in getting your website exposure into the technological, social world. The next step is getting your business and website noticed. Just as with a traditional brick-and-mortar shop, your website requires the attention from you to attract potential customers to walk in the front door.
Successful social media campaigns and search engine optimization require dedicated attention from you to ensure your business is competitive in regards to attracting website traffic. Budgeting for the resources, time, and money on social media campaigns will help you in generating the web traffic required to generate visitors and new customers.
To drive web traffic to your website, you will need to attract potential customers from social media sites to your website. Connect your website to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Post regular updates to social media sites as you would your own website through a content management system or through a blog.
Back-links from social media sites to your website, or specifically to a page on your website that you are targeting, will help you in attracting new customers to your website.
There are many social media sites available besides Facebook and Twitter, so start getting your website content available to the cyber world because there are people out there waiting to view it, read it, and jump over to your website to see what you are offering.
The misnomer about the web, social media sites, and search engine optimization techniques is it is easy to drive traffic to your site through these mechanisms. Like anything else, you could get lucky and hit the right target audience with the right ad on the right social media site at precisely the right time and generate a million viewers in a single day. If you are planning for that, you are planning for failure.
The truth is search engine optimization and social networking is a slow, daily grind. Industries are now creating specific jobs for search engine optimization analysts. This should tell you that is no easy button when it comes to driving traffic and potential customers to your website.
Put together a solid plan today. Account for the time, resources, and cost it will take to generate web traffic and new customers to your website.