Online promotion is as much about traditional marketing principles as it is about technology – perhaps more. If you don’t get the basics right the best website in the world will not help you achieve your goal. Equally, poor technology will undo any good marketing work that preceded it. At Geo-net we were marketing long before the Internet came along but when it did arrive we immediately embraced it as clearly the most flexible and powerful communication channel ever seen.
Assuming you get the strategy, marketing principles and technology right, your online market can be broken down into four potential channels:
- Direct to your URL as a result of brand awareness or offline marketing
- Link referral traffic from other websites, email/viral marketing
- Paid-for placement, or pay-per-click marketing
- Organic (free) search engine listings ranked on merit
Prominently promoting the website URL everywhere that the brand appears should become standard practice. Search engine optimization (SEO) to maximise the opportunity for as much free marketing as possible must surely be a priority in any online strategy. Only when as much as possible has been done to get this right, should the need arise to look at investing scarce marketing budget in the others.
Geo-net has over 12 years experience in search engine optimisation, including operating our own highly-successful online travel business (now sold) which was totally reliant upon search for its traffic. All our proprietary systems have been specifically designed with search engine optimisation as a priority.
Our CMS also includes the facility to edit all fields considered important to good search engine optimisation and training is offered in best practice.
Pay-per-click (ppc) search engine marketing has become a valuable tool in many online strategies. We would recommend that ppc is considered as part of any plan to ‘plug gaps’ in ‘organic’ search performance. The demand, volume and timing of any ppc campaign will always depend upon consideration of a number of factors such:
- demand for the product/service
- the complexity of the market
- the strength of competition
- the effectiveness of the site in organic listings
- budget
Clearly, considerable research and discussion would be required before any firm recommendations or costs could be arrived at.
