Awareness marketing and your web site
6/30/2010 11:23:31 AM
Web sites have become a business essential in
marketing to our modern society. Do you remember the first corporate web sites that appeared on the scene a dozen years ago? They were the equivalent of an online corporate brochure.
Since then, web sites have taken off to be the backbone of business
communications. In particular, web sites have become an important tool for
awareness marketing.
Awareness marketing, as the name implies, is helping the
customer understand exactly what you are selling. If I were selling a new
delicacy, let’s say a chocolate covered fruit kabob made of strawberries,
grapes and pineapple, and I called it a Strawgraple, I would need to let the
public know what a Strawgraple was before anyone would buy it. In the old way
of marketing awareness, I might get a booth in the produce section at a local
grocery store and give out free samples with a coupon. Today, I would try to
create a following on a web site: www.strawgraple.com. I would want to keep
people coming back to learn more about Strawgraples so that I could effectively
entice them to purchase my product.
There is a link between effectively
engaging your clients online and how well they understand what you are trying
to sell them. If a web site is filled with pertinent information and tools that
make it easier to do business, chances are a customer will come back time and
again, bookmark pages that they find relevant, and pass on info they find on
your site. In our wired society, this is the key to making a sale.
How effective is your web site in making your target market aware of your products and services? You will never know for sure unless you are capturing statistics and comparing them to your marketing efforts. Are people coming back to your site time and again or is it one view and out? What content are they taking time to peruse? Do you see any trends forming? Until you measure it, you will never know for sure.
One of the keys to awareness marketing is to measure your success in communicating with your target audience. We have a client who has seen a historical trend on their web site. In the second quarter of the year, they have the largest number of page views. Based on that information, we know that the second quarter is the best time to launch new products. But how do we know we are being effective in making these large number of viewers aware of a new product? There are many pages they can view on this web site. How do we know they are looking at the new content? The simple answer is we track the number of views for the new product page. But beyond this, we use an old marketing technique on the product page; an action point. For years, we built ads with an action point. We asked people to call a phone number, contact their local retailer, fill out a mail-back postcard, etc. When we are dealing with awareness marketing on a product's web page, we are going to ask the viewer to click for more information. If we are smart about it, we will withhold part of the information from the main product page and build subsequent pages based on the level of interest. Clicking becomes our action point. We can measure the path of "clicks" to find out our effectiveness in communicating awareness of the product.
Whether you are selling Strawgraples or something else, make sure you are building awareness marketing into your web site and measuring the success of your efforts.