If We Build It, They Will Come
What worked in the movie Field of Dreams won’t work for a Web site. With so many Web sites on the Internet, getting people’s attention and drawing them to your site is very difficult. You cannot launch a site anymore and expect people to just find it or even care about your offerings. That’s why you and the client must build a solid marketing plan and start executing it even before the site is live on the Web.
The best marketing plan for a Web site is one that involves a combination of traditional offline marketing and public relations techniques with online tactics. By offline, I mean every advertising medium that is not the Web: radio, trade
shows, direct mail, billboards, print ads, and TV commercials. Online techniques can be much less expensive or free and just as effective. Some ideas include
Swapping banner ads or purchasing banner ad space. Of course you can always purchase banner space on sites, but you can also be creative and try to work out relationships with other sites. Identify a number of Web sites that have a similar clientele and offer to swap ad banners. Often, to accommodate the disparity between the amount of traffic between your site and your partner’s, you can work out additional forms of compensation. For example, if the partner’s site has heavier traffic, you could sweeten the deal by offering a special discount on your products to that company’s visitors.
Co-promoting with other companies. Another effective marketing tactic is to partner with other online companies with customers who can benefit from your offerings. For example, if your site sells custom reading glasses, try partnering with a book club site and running a promotion such as, “Sign up today for the book club and receive 10% off ACME custom reading glasses.” With this approach, you can have a much greater presence on the partner’s Web site than with a banner ad, and your partner may even actively promote you in its online and offline marketing campaigns.
Leveraging search engines. Search engine optimization, or SEO as it’s called, is an inexpensive way to help promote your site. When people use a search engine such as www.google.com to look for a Web site, they enter a series of keywords and phrases such as “horse, sale, dressage, warmblood” into a search field. To find Web sites that match these keywords and phrases, search engines look through not only the text of Web pages, but also the page’s title, and <meta> tags contained in their HTML code. When you build a site, make sure that such text can be found by search engines.
