It's built now what?
Promoting your website
Without effective promotion, your website is unlikely to be seen as often as you would like. As you have invested time and money in the site, promoting it certainly makes sense. The site will not achieve the aims hoped for if the target audiences do not know it is there and are not often reminded of it.
Advertising the organisation's website address in traditional media can be a very effective method of promoting the site. A website can be advertised as part of an advertising campaign or simply on its own, using:
- magazines
- newsletters
- posters
- billboards
- newspapers
- television
- radio programs
- books
What to do
Ensure that the website's domain name appears, or is mentioned, whenever you have interaction with clients or customers. This means making sure the website address - eg www.freshfruitmart.com.au - appears on:
- letterheads, invoices, receipts and envelopes
- emails
- business cards
- packaging, wrappers
- uniforms
- signage on buildings, windows, vehicles
- recorded messages on staff mobiles and the office switchboard number
Other promotional methods you might consider include:
- Issuing press releases about virtual events, additional features on the website or reaching milestones.
- Entering Internet awards.
- Inviting reviewers to review the site and write it up in magazines and newspapers.
Ensure that you have established performance measures for the advertising dollar you spend. Establish from the beginning whether it is increased traffic through the site (not just to the home page), increased downloading of documents and/or greater online sales you want to achieve. As with any form of advertising, the expense needs to be justified. Simply increasing traffic to your website may not, in itself, reap sufficient benefits to justify the cost.
Evolving Your Web Site
After your site launches, the real work begins. It´s only after people visit your site that you can see what works and what doesn´t. No matter how well you´ve planned, you can´t always predict how a site will be used.
Successful web development, then, is an iterative process: You launch the site, study how people use it, and make continual changes to improve its performance.
This is the advantage of the web over other media: Everything can be measured, and then changed to reflect what´s been learned. The measurability, and flexibility, of the web proves important to just about every industry, because it helps businesses understand their customers and better serve their needs.
A few Do’s and Don’ts
Don’t place counters on your site unless there is a good volume of customers, and that it actually means something to your clients.
Don’t place a ‘Last updated’ on your site unless you are updating the content regularly.
Don’t leave out-of-date information on your site, like the coming event dated March 2005. Customers will leave in droves.
Do attempt to put fresh content up at regular intervals. If you are providing a weekly newsletter, do it weekly, else change it to be a monthly newsletter.
Do use quality images. It is well worth the time to place quality images, source banners from a stock photography site, or have them taken by a professional photographer. Remember, this is your company’s image you are projecting.
Do give your site a consistent look and feel across the whole site. It reduces confusion and lends professionalism to your image.
Do give your website a makeover from time to time. The experts tell us about every 2 years, we should at least give our sites a facelift. Our customers want to feel that things are dynamic, changing, fresh, up-to-date.