Digital Marketing
Do you know why It’s important to have a digital marketing strategy in place before developing your website?
October 11, 2016
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Digital Marketing
Image courtesy (saucyhorse.co.uk)

Given that the population of internet users are growing day by day, websites have become one of the key and effective tools for communicating to a larger audience. As a result, nowadays most organizations are launching their own website in hope of gaining online presence.

For SME organizations, usually their initial step towards achieving this involves acquiring the services of a web developing firm for developing an eye catching sophisticated website. The selection process involves calling for quotations and the developer will be selected mainly based on their lowest quoted value and how attractive their past web development work are. After the selection, web designer will come up with a design and architecture which then get modified according to the client’s preference. In other wards the final development outcome will be a website that’s visually pleasing to the client’s eye.

Mostly this is a one-time process and it ends after the website development is completed. If the website looks good and the cost is right, the client and the web designers are happy with it and simply move on and in time the website is left forgotten except only for renewing yearly domain & hosting registrations. Which then of course eventually complicate things by ended up in getting no or low search rankings on search engines, drop in website loading performance or simply gone offline due to being hacked or infected with a malware.

These are the moments we hear typical sayings such as,

  • we launched a nice website but it doesn’t generate any business for us
  • Websites are just an overhead for us
  • I think our website isn’t pretty enough that our web developer could have done a better job
  • Social media? What for?

    digital-marketing-strategy
    Image courtesy (saucyhorse.co.uk)
  • Our website is not working and our web developer is nowhere to be found

What most organizations fail to understand is that; website is just a part of a strategic marketing plan and its true purpose is to function as a digital marketing tool which is act as an organization’s online front, promoting branding, integrate with the social media and bringing in business leads to the organization. Sometimes depending on the situation, some SME organizations don’t even need a sophisticated website at first to achieve what they want; just having a good strategic marketing plan is. So what is this so called strategic marketing plan? It’s called digital marketing strategy and its purpose is to answer questions like,

  • Who are the customers that the organization should focus on?
  • What’s the message we’re giving to our customers?
  • Where can we reach our customers?
  • When we need to reach our customers?
  • How should the organization reach its customers online?

Simply put developing a website is like purchasing a vehicle for an organization. Based on the business purpose only the requirements are decided on, such as type of the vehicle & driver and how should it allocated to bringing in revenue to the business not the other way around. Similarly the digital marketing strategy also has to be perfectly aligned with the organization’s business objectives, strategies & the processes.

A well-developed & strategically positioned website will be an investment, because of the proper digital marketing strategy in place and it can generate a highest expected return like any other investments which in this case are business leads and the online brand building.

So are you facing the same issues or concerns as discussed earlier? What is your website’s contribution for your business? Does your website work for you or you work for the website? Are you in need of a digital marketing solution? Share your comment below or send your concerns using contact page.

Anushka Udayanga

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