Website Marketing: Measures and Tips for Your E-Business

1. What is website marketing?
2. Why is website marketing important?
3. What is the goal of website marketing?
4. What does website marketing include?
5. 9 Tips for Website Marketing
6. Which ranking factors count in website marketing?
7. Which tools are suitable for website marketing?
8. Conclusion: Without website marketing, no online success

Imagine a new Star Wars movie is running in the cinema, but no one knows about it. No advertising, no moviegoers. It's similar with your website and website marketing. Only your efforts to make users aware of your online presence generate traffic and lead to the sale of your products or services. What goals you can achieve with website marketing, which methods are available, and which ranking factors count for your website, you will find out here.

What is website marketing?

The website is the digital hub for your business. Your target audience can view your services, consume your content and use the digital display window to be convinced by your company. To ensure that as many people as possible visit your company website, however, you must become active. Website marketing refers to all strategic efforts, to increase the traffic on a website and maximize your success in the digital space. This includes techniques such as search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, and other methods and tactics aimed at attracting visitors, binding them and ultimately converting them into customers.

Why is website marketing important?

The mere existence of your website rarely attracts, or at least not enough visitors. Website or online marketing allows you to take the reins and ensure a constant influx of potential buyers. Website marketing is also important for the following reasons:

• Visibility and Reach: Through targeted website marketing, you can ensure that your website is well positioned with search engines like Google and is present on other platforms. This increases the likelihood of people looking for your products or services stumbling upon your website. Better visibility and reach, therefore, means you reach a larger audience, increasing the chances of increasing sales and attracting customers.
• Customer Retention: Retaining existing customers is crucial to the long-term success of your business. Through marketing measures such as content marketing and social media marketing, you offer relevant and interesting content that encourages your customers to regularly return to your website. This promotes customer loyalty and relationships, which in turn leads them to stay with you and buy more often.
• Lead Generation: As a business owner, it is crucial for you to identify and attract potential customers. Website marketing helps to generate qualified leads by getting visitors to leave contact information or perform other actions. These leads are potential buyers that you can target and convert in the future.
• Competitiveness: Your customers spend a lot of time online. Your online presence is therefore extremely important to reach them there and keep up with your competitors. If you don't market online, you risk losing market share to competitors who are already successful in the digital space. Through website marketing, you therefore ensure that you remain competitive in this competitive environment and your brand remains visible.

Image: Internet activities for private purposes (Source: Federal Statistical Office)

• Measurability: Online marketing has the advantage that you can accurately measure and analyze the results of your efforts. This allows you to continually optimize your marketing strategies by making data- and fact-based decisions. You can find out which approaches are most effective and align your resources accordingly.
• Credibility and Trust: A professionally designed website and high-quality, informative content contribute to your company's credibility. Consumers tend to trust brands and businesses that have a solid online presence. A trustworthy image can in turn contribute to attracting and retaining customers. Therefore, the quality of your website and your online presence directly reflects the quality of your brand.

What is the goal of website marketing?

Website marketing pursues a main goal: Maximizing the online success and revenue of your business. To achieve this overarching goal, various sub-goals are pursued, including:

• Acquisition of new customers
• Strengthen brand image
• Customer retention
• Top ranking in the search engines
• Higher conversion rate
• Increasing awareness

Usually, multiple goals are combined and pursued through various techniques. While SEO aims to optimize your website content for search engines and make it more accessible to your target audience, blogging serves to explain your products and build trust. At the same time, you can use social media ads to promote certain product groups or campaigns, and alert subscribers to special offers in your online shop with the newsletter.

Typical examples of website marketing goals are therefore:

• Increase in organic traffic
• Improvement of search engine rankings
• Reduction of the bounce rate
• Reduction of CPA costs (Cost per Acquisition)
• Increase in the average dwell time on the website
• Increase in social interaction through likes, comments and shares

What does website marketing include?

To be successful with your website, there are a multitude of methods and tools that you can use and integrate into your strategy. We would like to introduce you to the most important ones here.

SEO

In an age when most people search online for information, products, and services, a good placement in the search results is crucial. Therefore, search engine optimization is indispensable for many entrepreneurs. SEO will help you attract qualified visitors and improve organic traffic. SEO covers different aspects like keyword research, on-page optimization, technical SEO, backlink building and much more. If you need support in this area, feel free to read our comprehensive SEO guide, where we explain the most important things.

Image: SEO Effectiveness (Source: Hubspot Marketing Report 2021)

Blog

Your corporate blog is proof of your expertise, offers a variety of benefits for your business and therefore also plays a major role in website marketing. By regularly creating blog posts, you can show your competence in your industry, increase the visibility of your website in search engines and attract visitors who are searching for information, solutions or products. A well-maintained blog therefore promotes customer retention as it provides useful added-value easily and for free, thus building a relationship with your target audience. It also supports the social media presence and facilitates content sharing, which increases the reach and potential for viral spread. A blog that is also equipped with relevant keywords forms a powerful connection between content marketing and SEO.

Email Marketing

Through targeted email campaigns, your company can send personalized content and offers to subscribers, to stay in touch and create regular interest in your offers. This contributes to strengthening customer loyalty, increasing website traffic and achieving business objectives. To do email marketing, you must first collect the email addresses of your potential buyers. Ideally, you should also have an appropriate marketing automation tool, which makes the workflow and dispatch of your mailings significantly easier and more professional. We reveal tips in our Writing a newsletter post. You can find basic information in the OMR Glossary post on email marketing.

Social Media Marketing

Is your target audience on TikTok, Facebook, or LinkedIn? Then you should be too. By using social media platforms, your company can share meaningful content, stimulate discussions, and direct visitors to your website. Social Media Marketing also makes it possible to build an engaged community and is another way to increase your brand awareness. Moreover, it provides a stage for important customer feedback and allows you keep a more personal relationship with your audiences. It's important to choose the platforms where your target audience is most active. While Facebook is still the most used platform, for example, users under 25 are more likely to be found on Instagram, TikTok or Snapchat.

Image: Social Media Usage

But that's not all. Following web marketing approaches could help you to strengthen your online success:

• Affiliate Marketing
• Video Marketing
• Influencer Marketing
• Landing Pages
• Mobile Marketing
• Target Group Analysis and Segmentation
• Online PR

9 Tips for Website Marketing

Now you already know the core around website marketing and can build your strategy accordingly. To make your project work really well, we'll also give you a few tips along the way. They are the fine gears that get your measures going:

1. Know your target audience: Often heard and unfortunately almost as often disregarded. Only if you understand who your target audience is and tailor your content to their needs, can you convince them of you, your company and your website.
2. Provide high-quality content: Be funny, useful, or razor-sharp. Definitely offer added value, occasionally even exceeding the expectations of your target audience. This strengthens the credibility of your brand and ultimately promotes your goals.
3. Optimize your website for mobile devices: This is, so to speak, the essential precursor to mobile marketing. Only websites optimized for mobile use are worth the targeted measures. Therefore, first work on usability and responsive design before starting elaborate campaigns.
4. Be agile and up-to-date: Your website is not a static work, it needs to live, grow and thrive. Accordingly, it needs your constant attention. Newsrooms or your corporate blog are wonderful sections on your website to regularly provide new and appealing content.
5. Analyze and optimize: Use analysis tools, to measure the success of your marketing efforts, and optimize your strategy based on the insights. For example, if your analysis software shows pages with particularly high bounce rates, it could be due to less relevant content, poor page design or poorly written content.
6. Provide clear calls to action (CTAs): CTAs are a must on almost every page. By doing so, you make it particularly easy for your visitors to perform the desired actions on your website, be it the purchase of a product or subscription to your newsletter.
7. Pay attention to security: Data protection, privacy and the like are not just for particularly accurate people, but the minimum standard that your website must also offer to protect your users and promote trust. Security measures such as an SSL certificate or your data protection declaration are therefore also your tasks. Special security tools support you in this.
8. Test and experiment: Sometimes there are two or more ways to get to your goal. You can find out which option works better yourself by conducting A/B tests or experiments. Change the colors, test different headlines or vary the delivery time of your newsletters to find out which combinations achieve the highest conversion rate.
9. Optimize load time: If your website takes too long to display completely, you lose users. Image optimization or lazy loading are common measures to help you optimize your page speed.

Which ranking factors count in website marketing?

There are numerous factors that influence the ranking of your websites and decide how high up your pages appear in the search results. You should definitely know the following:

• Mobile Optimization: As more and more users access websites from mobile devices, search engines prefer mobile-optimized websites.
• Page Speed: The load time of your website is a very important factor. Pages that load quickly offer a better user experience and are preferred in search results.
• Technical SEO: This includes the optimization of factors such as page structure, URL structure, image compression, and XML sitemaps.
• Backlinks: The number and quality of backlinks referring to a website have a significant impact on the ranking. Therefore, collect high-quality and topic-relevant backlinks.
• Internal Linking: Also use internal links to link related content on the website. This improves the user experience and search engine optimization.
• User Experience (UX): A user-friendly website with a clear layout and easy navigation is important to increase the dwell time of your users.
• Local SEO: For local businesses like restaurants or craft businesses, factors such as Google My Business verification, customer reviews, and local citations are important.
• Timeliness of content: Current and updated content is preferred by search engines as they logically tend to be more relevant.
• Social Signals: Social signals are generated through activities in social media channels and backlinks. For example, by sharing your website on Facebook you generate links that positively influence your ranking.

Which tools are suitable for website marketing?

Website marketing is complex and extensive. The right tool or a combination of several systems can significantly simplify these tasks for you and help you to maintain your strategy and keep an eye on all developments. With the following tools, you can perform tasks such as website analysis, SEO, competitive analysis, keyword research, A/B tests and much more at a professional level:

Google Analytics

Tracify

Hotjar

Google Tag Manager

Adobe Analytics

Brevo (ehemals Sendinblue)

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Klaviyo

EASY2

Click on the tools to read features, price info and reviews or feel free to check out the related OMR category Web Analytics to find further alternatives.

Conclusion: Without website marketing, no online success

Website marketing is a crucial part of your online presence. A well-designed and optimized website strengthens your brand image, increases visibility in search engines, promotes customer retention and maximizes your success in e-business. Measures like SEO, blogging, or affiliate marketing also ensure constant traffic and users who buy and come back if you've done your job right. In this respect, web analytic tools are essential helpers to evaluate the screws of your efforts and to stick to your goals.