What is a web marketing plan? Simply put, it is a detailed list of all the media and information you intend to communicate to your target market. At the heart of your web marketing plan is your business website, the landing point for all your marketing communications. Oftentimes, business owners become so focused on managing their web marketing plan that the website becomes an almost secondary thought, but the truth is that the condition and design of your website is a vital crux to the success of your web marketing plan.
Listed below are some key criteria that have to be considered about your website and its design to obtain the best results from your web marketing:
You cannot, NOT communicate. Everything you say and don’t say makes a statement.
- A company’s brand image is a combination of the statements it communicates and a summary of how a company is perceived.
- A brand is built with each customer encounter, whether it be online or offline, and can change based on a customer’s reactions to it (i.e. Toyota’s perception before and after brake problem).
- Considering the impact of a company brand, it’s important to give it forethought by answering questions like
- What do you (and your company) want to be famous for?
- Why should people come to you instead of your competitor? / What’s your unique value proposition?
- How will you express these answers in your look, feel and interactions?
Only after you have these answers could you design a means of reinforcing your marketing message through visuals, text, personality, and actions. The key to achieve the marketing message you want is specifying how you want to be perceived and then consistently demonstrating that attitude or message through all customer touch points including but not limited to your business Website, blogs, social media platforms, email marketing and online ads).
Build that Online Brand.
To further extend your marketing message, the focus needs to go to the website design, which includes the graphics, white space, content and layout of your site. However, design should not be misconstrued as only the “look” of a website:
- Design refers not only to the artistic sense of a website, but the planning and structuring of the entire experience encountered.
- For the online world, it is crucial to marry the design, logo, tagline, text, graphics, interaction, and tone. Unify a coherent look and feel among all your digital elements to make you distinguishable and recognizable.
- There should be a consistency, for example, between what your logo represents with the tagline’s promise, the look and feel of your Website, and your presence on Social Media.
- Pay close attention to individual element selection, colors, lines, spaces, graphics and how they work together.
- The visual design selection of the font, font size, photos, graphics, and page orientation.
- The interactive design of how users could navigate through the Web, and their experience on it.
- Content design is how text is laid out (i.e. densely populated or “chunked” for scanning), the topics elected to display, word choice and tone. (i.e. edgy or conservative, formal or informal, etc.).
- Each element on every page and innuendos “between the lines” help heighten brand awareness and reinforce.
Each of these elements must be considered holistically during the design process to form a brand’s meaning and positioning in the user’s mind as soon as they arrive on the website. The design they see sends as much a subliminal impression as an overt message as to who your company is, what it does, and its “personality”.
The ultimate way to increase brand awareness is by designing your brand so well that people talk about it and spread the word. By considering all the design aspects of your website including your colors, your message and content, your graphics and your layout, your online brand will launch the “word of mouth” advertising desired by any company.