A business or company today will not sell its products or services well unless it has a strong marketing campaign in place, and many businesses today spend a lot on marketing research to find better ways to reach out to customers, and to study how customers make their decisions and spend their money, and such marketing can also find out what makes a repeat customer. One route for good marketing is the physical: billboards, posters, signs over a shop, and even flyers and handouts. This is the traditional method, and it has its uses. Most often, however, companies will market themselves with the Internet as well, and this can be labor-intensive work that often falls to outsourced labor for graphic design, website UX design, and content generation. A content marketing agency or web design agency can take care of this for a client company. Website UX, or User eXperience, is the mechanics of how a website is built, such as search engines, embedding videos, and general ease of use. User Interface, or UI, is distinct from website UX.
Traffic and Searches
One of the major steps for online marketing is to make sure that a company’s brand is easy to find. The Internet is well known for its vast volume of content, and a single company may get lost in all the noise if it weren’t for search engines. If a company builds its new website so that search engines can easily find it, this can boost traffic by quite a bit, and once a customer is at the site, the product of good website UX design can keep the customer there. Website UX could help make search functions on a website easy to use, and make links and videos work well. SEO writing can also be used on a website so that keyword-dense content makes the website appear more easily on Internet searches.
The statistics already show that this is a major marketing tool. An impressive amount of website traffic, 51% of it all, comes from organic searches online, while 10% comes from paid searches, 5% from social media, and 34% from all other sources put together. This can also translate to a lot of revenue generation; on average, around 40% of a website’s generated revenue is due to captured organic traffic. This marketing, while effective, does not always have to be done by a person, especially for larger brand names and websites. This is where automated marketing systems can be used, and they can be highly profitable and effective. Gartner research, for one, has found that organizations who take this route see their revenue increase 10% or so over six to nine months.
Interacting With Customers
Website UX design can make a website easy to navigate on a mechanical level, and this plays a role in how online customers think. Research shows that online customers are generally impatient; they will often leave a website whose videos or images fail to load on time, and a bad or confusing user interface will also drive customers away and harm the company’s image. A lack of good contact information, or slow response times to customer questions or complaints, will also be a liability.
Online marketing interacts with customers at the company’s website, where information is shared with videos, images, and articles, but now, companies can take an even more hands-on approach with social media platforms. Here, a company can crate accounts on such platforms as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and more, and use them as fast-paced, interactive marketing methods that can reach out to wide audiences, given the popularity of these and other platforms. This allows consumers to see updates from the company at any time of the day, and sometimes many times per day, such as new items, deals, or an opening location. Companies can also take advantage of the messaging features on these platforms to quickly and clearly respond to consumer questions and comments. Research on social media usage has found that consumers often like it when a company responds to them promptly on these platforms. A company could even end up getting a large following with regular customers on Facebook or Twitter, and share news many times per day.