Do you know why people visit your website? Is it to get information? To buy something? To be entertained? To contact you? Or a combination of several of these factors. It comes as no surprise to marketers and search engine optimization experts that one of the best ways to get found on the Internet — and to get repeat visitors — is to make your brand’s website a resource for your target customer.
Move Past Brochureware
Put simply: For many brands – especially those with complex stories to tell – it makes good marketing sense to move beyond brochureware. Don’t just create a catalog of your products – especially if there aren’t purchasing opportunities and communications conduits built into your site’s pages. Don’t fall into the trap of just making a one-way advertisement.
Move past brochureware or your target customers will move past you.
Become a Valued Source
The best way to be valuable – and valued – is to provide useful, actionable information in your market that your brand’s customers can use in their daily lives.
For example, many years ago at the dawn of the social media era, one upstart medical supply company providing wheelchairs and other products for those with short-term or long-term disabilities figured out that the best way to funnel users to their website was by making themselves a one-stop shop for news and information about disabilities and mobility developments. The result: they quickly skyrocketed to grab significant market share from their competition whose websites resembled the tired medical equipment catalogs from decades past.
It’s all about providing “news your customers can use.”
The easiest way to accomplish this is to combine two things: Your brand’s natural expertise with some simple reporting skills. Find industry news sources to monitor and then put your spin on this news in your own blog posts and web articles and videos.
And, of course, don’t hesitate to link to useful products that your brand provides that help solve the issues you cover – both within the posts themselves and in internal promotions that run alongside your posts within your website’s native environment.
Surface Your Useful Info
It’s not enough to simply have this information on your site just for purposes of getting it indexed by search engines. You need to make sure it’s easily accessible – to be both truly useful to customers and to maximize your SEO potential.
Make sure these valuable informational posts are indexed on your site’s internal search engine, so customer search results deliver product pages as well as topical informational and blog pages. Also make sure this information is on your site’s main menu or prominently promoted in a way that it’s not buried many clicks away from your site’s front page.
Extend This to Social Media
Make sure to extend this strategy to your social media accounts, as well. Don’t just post about how great your products are, provide tangible information of value to your followers – things they will want to consume and share with their followers and contacts.
And you can go one step further and extend your reach on social menu to those people who are interested in your key topics but who aren’t already your followers. Since you now have such great content that your potential audience cares about, harness it to become the centerpiece for influencer marketing campaigns where thought leaders in your space share it with their followers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
You can do this yourself (in fact, we here at StatePoint Media have a free e-book detailing five steps to create a successful social marketing campaign) or you can tap into a service like StatePoint’s Social Amplification service , where we do the work for you and drive the right online traffic and social media engagements around your brand’s content.
Above all: position your brand as valued expert on your website and on social media!
Image Credit: Brian Jackson – Fotolia.com