You should be thinking about marketing in a holistic and integrated way, if you haven't started moving towards this mindset, we can help you get there today.
Marketing in the age of the internet is a more complex and interesting business than it was 50 years ago. While marketing is trickier to master, it is also more powerful than ever. You can reach people on the other side of the world right now! Thinking about marketing requires you to take a holistic, integrated approach considering all the marketing tools you have at your disposal. You can compare marketing to a music band - each instrument plays the same tune to the same rhythm at the same time to make beautiful music. Or compare marketing to a car - the engine needs the oil, water, spark and wheels to make it move. In the same way, marketing needs all the necessary parts to work together to distribute the same message at the same time, to convert your prospect into a customer.
Marketing in 2019: What has changed?
Right now businesses have to adapt to the way that the sales cycle has changed. No longer is it a world where a print ad in a newspaper is enough to lead a person from being casually interested to becoming a definite buyer. With the tools literally at the fingertips of each person to do their own research, companies have to make sure that they are available and informative on every platform.
Your potential customer might start out by seeing an ad on Facebook and click through to your Facebook profile. Then this person searches for you on Google, where they not only see an organic listing for your keyword but also a shopping ad and a Google My Business Page. Later on, a re-marketing campaign serves your ad on YouTube. After a bit of research, they click on the call to action (CTA), look at your website and purchase your product. Suddenly the money spent on social media marketing, Google Ads, SEO and a new website have all come together to make this sale. With any one of these marketing components left out, you could have missed the opportunity and a competitor would have capitalized on it.
A website as a marketing tool
Now consider this: A business sets up a website. The business does not see an immediate increase in the feet to their brick and mortar store, nor does the phone start ringing off the hook. Is the website a failure? Not necessarily. If the business had a new brick and mortar store, they would make sure that everyone knew about it - a billboard, a balloon arch or an event with opening specials advertised in the window would do the job. So why is it when a new website is launched that the same attention is not given to the marketing of the website? Every tool that you have, should be leading your customer to the same place: into your sales cycle.
Your website is your online storefront, which is ultimately a tool in your marketing arsenal to get the customer to buy something. When you have invested a chunk of your business' money to get the best website you can, it pays to bring the traffic to your website. The integrated marketing approach delivers wherever the prospect is in the sales cycle. So all the marketing tools work together to increase your marketing value exponentially. You need to be speaking to every type of customer: the customer that is still looking around for different options, the customer that has made a buying decision and is looking for the right supplier, or the customer that has bought and is potentially a lifetime customer. At each of these stages, your marketing tools need to be communicating in a way that convinces the customer to buy from you.
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