There are many interactive marketing paths, but the main road always leads back to your website. Email campaigns, search-engine marketing, banner ads, press releases, blogs, RSS, social networking, videos; sooner or later, they all point to your home page, a landing page: some sort of web page.
Here are seven ways to take control of your site and zoom forward with powerful marketing programs:
1. Put marketing in the driver's seat for on-the-fly site updates
At many companies, IT still represents a sizable speed bump on the web content-management road. That's because many companies still use IT resources or third-party webmasters for site updates, forcing you to go through a marketing outsider every time you need to change a comma or optimize your site.
A web content management system (CMS) empowers you to take control of creating and updating site content yourself, free of IT reliance. Many Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products are now available for a reasonable monthly fee, putting web CMS functionality within reach for even the smallest businesses.
2. Always yield to the customer experience
Your site is your brand's biggest ambassador and it should make for an effortless and satisfying user experience. At minimum, it must be easy to use, easy to navigate, relevant to the target audience and pleasing to the eye. But how do you get there?
You can start by complying with industry standards for design, layout, usability and accessibility. Adhere to The World Wide Web Consortium's recommendations for HTML and Cascading Style Sheets.
For extra credit, implement guidelines from Section 508 of the U.S. government's Rehabilitation Act, which requires Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities.
3. Put your site on the map with solid SEM practices
The first step to creating a site that search engines can find is your underlying site infrastructure. This encompasses a wide range of search engine optimization techniques, from creating alt tags to publishing XML site maps to naming URLs.
The best way to become SEO proficient is to study online resources, such as these Google tips, and to attend search engine trade shows.
The second step -- adding relevant, strategic and effective keyword phrases throughout your site -- is what separates brilliant marketers from so-so ones.
Search engines prioritize web pages based on many factors, including whether a particular search term appears in the page title or headline and how many times the keyword is used on a page.
Winning the keywords' race is not a one-shot deal. It involves figuring out which keywords and phrases are most effective for your offerings, placing these keywords everywhere on your site, creating hyperlink strategies, optimizing individual pages for specific keyword phrases, and continually monitoring performance and making adjustments.
4. Don't be afraid of Web 2.0 mass transit
Keywords aren't the only thing search engines look at to determine your ranking. Their algorithms also attempt to determine how popular and interconnected your site is, and they do that by tracking the number and quality of both inbound and outbound links to your site.
Leveraging social media technology, such as blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, videos, podcasting, interactive surveys and discussion boards, is one way to exponentially increase your site's visibility.
Your web CMS should make it easy and painless to implement blogs and RSS feeds that help generate those important inbound links from other sites and blogs. More interactive Web 2.0 commodities are often available as widgets that you can embed directly into your site, with minimal technical difficulty.
5. Rev up your lead-generation engine
Your job is to start thinking of your site as a lead-generation engine and design it that way. You do that via "calls to action" that are prominently displayed on every page, and make these calls to action truly actionable by pairing them with web forms that capture data.
Users expect to immediately receive incentives, sign up for newsletters, schedule appointments, register for demos, or just flat out buy products on the spot. Your site should automatically trigger an automated response when users complete web forms.
Relevant form data should be automatically passed to your sales force automation or CRM system, as well as your email marketing software, in a "closed-loop" lead-generation process.
6. Take the content-consistency shortcut to brand management
Content reuse and consistency distinguishes a well-managed brand from a scattered one. Your website, landing pages, emails, banner ads and flash video should look, feel and sound like parts of the same whole.
You accomplish this through design that reuses the same logos, images, fonts and colors, and through copywriting that repurposes the same key messages in the appropriate way for each delivery channel.
A web CMS that houses pre-approved, reusable content in a central repository saves time when you need to quickly launch a program that cuts across multiple channels.
7. Make web analytics your GPS
There is simply no better way to measure and improve the effectiveness of your site than to employ web analytics such as ClickTracks, WebTrends or Google Analytics.
Web analytics tell you how visitors are finding your site. They illustrate which keywords are driving traffic, and more importantly, conversions and sales. They show which pages are working and which ones are not.
This information tells you when and how to turn to reach your ROI destination faster. It also advises you to back up or take a U-turn when you have gotten lost along the way.
The best web CMS systems now integrate with your web analytics vendor of choice.
Conclusion
The success of so many interactive marketing programs directly depends on the performance of your website. Now more than ever, it's imperative that marketers take control of website content.
David Terry is vice president of marketing at Hot Banana software, a leading SaaS Web CMS. Read full bio.
