Web Promotion Campaigns

In this post, I'll go through some of the common elements of an online promotion campaign for a typical small/medium business website. First off though, let's talk about the goals of a campaign:

1. Increase search engine ranking (ex. PageRank in Google): some people view this as the end goal of a campaign, but in reality, it's the starting point. Because being number one on Google doesn't make you any money on its own.
2. Increased website traffic: goal number one will help this, but there are other ways to increase traffic than just through search engines. Again though, visitors alone don't pay for your time, unless if you're selling your traffic (to advertisers of your own), but most small businesses don't fall into that category.
3. Increase leads, inquiries, or sales. Here lies the true reason for starting a promotion campaign, to increase the number of people interesting in purchasing your goods and services.

How do we go from 1 to 3? Let's start with the search engine rankings and some examples of activities that will improve your standing:

Search Engine Ranking
Search engines are enigmatic beasts. Sometimes it's hard to tell why one site is listed before another. That being said, there are some factors that will your affect business' ranking on the major engines:

1. Backlinks (links from other sites to yours), links are rating according to their reputation (think Harvard vs. Lakeland College), relevancy to your site, and quantity.
2. Content: search engines want their users to find useful information. If you don't have any on your site, they'll give their users someone else's site instead.
3. Size and age of your site, older, larger sites are better.

So, the actions to be taken are: increase the quality and quantity of both the content on your website and the backlinks to it. Directory submissions are a low cost way of increasing backlinks, and blogs are fantastic for increasing the amount of content you have. Backlinks can also be purchased or exchanged with partner sites that are complementary.

Another important element of your campaign is to be strategic. All of the content on your page should be reviewed to emphasize the words you want people to find you by (ex. web design and search engine optimization are words you'll see all over my site). Try to think of unique words as well to get an edge on your competitors. For example, and this was accidental, my site is ranked on the first page of google when you type in "the invisible movie saskatoon", likely because that phrase doesn't appear all that often online. Now, you'll probably want more relevant keywords as I doubt the guy looking for the invisible movie found it on my site.

Website Traffic
Improving your search engine ranking is a great first step towards your final goals and will increase the traffic coming to your website. There are other more targeted ways to increase that traffic.

One is of course advertising, both online and off. There are millions of other webmasters that will gladly take your money in return for showing one of your ads on their page. The tricky part again is to pick those that will ultimately provide a return on the investment.

Email marketing is another method. If you have an email list and are coming out with a new product or promotion, then letting your past customers know about it while directing them to your website for more detailed information is a very affordable way to increase traffic from the best kind of visitor: ones that have already been loyal to your business.

Interactivity is of course a strength of the internet, and having a site that allows it can keep visitors coming back to your website. Blogs with comment fields, forums, discussion boards are examples. Unfortunately, you do need a critical mass of visitors for this to be effective, otherwise you risk looking a little silly if your only discussion board item is a welcome message.

Sales, leads, business
Ultimately, the point of the above is to capture business (some campaigns may be focused solely on brand building or value adding, but I would posit that these activities as well have the end goal of providing a product or service). If you aren't operating an e-commerce site, and even if you are, it is important to query your customers in a non-intrusive way to find out how they discovered your business. Keep track of that information!

The really annoying thing about any type of marketing is trying to figure out when it's working. Some things can be measured (pagerank, search engine position, website traffic, emails, etc) but others can't (goodwill, billboard exposure, reputation). The factors that you can pin down, should be, and analyzed so that you have an idea as to what the effect of the money and time you spend on your marketing is. Some businesses spend the money and hope it works out, others choose not to make the investments in the first place, the sweet spot of course is somewhere in the middle.