With new revolutionary online marketing strategies gaining momentum to market your Houston web design site it has become increasingly important for small business owners to realize their Marketing budgets and efforts. The biggest challenge is to measure on what’s working and what’s not so to spend the time and budget most efficiently that directly impact sales and bottom line.
Why Measure?
With Social Media, Search Engine Optimization and Email Marketing taking the front seat for Website Marketing to generate leads and to attract prospective clients it’s highly advisable to measure how these are working for your business’ success. Here are few factors what measuring could result in:
- Increase in inbound leads
- Lowered expenses & budgets
- Streamlined operations
- Leveraged time spent
- Business growth
- Bigger ROI
Know your Goals
Before you can measure the efforts, do you even know your goals? Everyone’s business is different and hence the goals. As a first step list the goals so you can create the measuring steps around those. Here are few examples of the website goals to consider:
- Increase visitors interaction in requesting more information or appointments
- Increase online purchases from online store
- Improve site rankings on search engine
- Increase time spent on the website
- Drive visitors to signing up for newsletters
- Attracting visitors to join and follow you on Social Media networks
What can you measure?
There are various tools in the market to make the measuring and analysis easy. Taking advantage of the features inside the tools can quantify your efforts and improve streamlining your time and efforts.
Website Analytics
Monitoring the traffic sources, referring sites, the keywords used to find your site, number of visitors, page views etc helps measure your website’s performance in terms of customer retain ability and increase in leads.
Social Media Analytics
Analyzing the Likes, subscribers, impressions, feedback %, mentions etc on your Social Media profiles helps know active users and interactions that measures the stickiness of the networks to result in inbound traffic and bigger online exposure.
Email Analytics
Knowing the Open ratios, click rates, bounce backs and unsubscribers’ rate helps in measuring your success in the updates, response on the content and loyalty of the subscribers on your brand, and services.
Contacts Manager (CRM)
Calculating the mailing list growth, follow ups, sales tracking and team performance helps measure the conversion rate from leads to prospects and to customers, and to collaborate the activities among the sales teams.
It’s One Integrated Strategy
The first and foremost step to consider when building a Website Marketing strategy is to make sure you have an integrated approach consolidating Blogs, Social Media, Search Engine Optimization and Email Marketing steps and helping in creating a bigger brand awareness, customer loyalty and visitor engagement. The Website still is the core and the first marketing and landing page for most of the online visitors. Below is a representation of this approach.
Check out our presentation on the same topic presented at a seminar as part of the Business Success Seminar series conducted by Lone Star Small Business Development Center and the Lone Star College-Cyfair.
As a business owner your primary goal is to increase the website traffic and inbound leads. You can get highest return on your investment by measuring your marketing efforts and by improving lead to prospect conversion rates effectively over time.