Why include web marketing in your communication strategy?

Billboards, advertisements in the press, TV ads … Traditional marketing media requires a lot of resources. It is expensive, mostly happens at a local level and it is difficult to assess the impact on consumers.

Since the advent of the first online banner ad, marketing strategies to attract customers have been continuously refined and are still evolving. Web marketing has changed the face of business communication strategies.

Today, promoting your product online has become accessible at a lower cost and opened a whole range of possibilities that traditional marketing didn’t really permit. This includes being able to target your campaigns, having an overall visibility of your website traffic and measuring your efficiency to improve your commercial strategy.

Here are three reasons why it’s worth including web marketing in your communication strategy today.

Web marketing reduces the costs of communication

In general, the budget allocated to a company’s communication represents 4% to 12% of its total revenue. Today with the web, there are many forms of online advertising. To determine the most interesting advertising approach for your business, it’s worth developing a good marketing strategy that fits your budget.

If you want your communication methods to have an impact on consumers through traditional channels such as television, newspapers or billboards in transportation, you usually have to invest tens of thousands of dollars. Moreover, the message conveyed to consumers is limited in space and time. It’s also more difficult to calculate the ROI, the return on investment.

Web marketing requires less investment in terms of money and material resources. To effectively invest online, web agencies launch Google AdWords campaigns, set up an SEO strategy, promote your business on social networks … Things that require a service, but represent a much lower cost compared to traditional communication channels for an equally, if not more significant, result.

Digital marketing lets you track results

Another advantage of web marketing is the ability to monitor your ad campaign results and see where users came from to find out if your communication strategy is effective.

Measuring your advertising campaigns

With different tools you can measure which campaign attracts the most leads, which pages convert the most sales and how people find your ads.

The best-known tool for analyzing these results is Google Analytics. When a user lands on your page, this free service will register the site the visitor came from and how they came to you. However, to be able to track the results on Google Analytics, you will need to enter precise parameters to find out if a user arrived via newsletter or a website that referred back to yours.

Analyzing your website traffic and conversions

You can also add other tools, like a URL tracker for example, to analyze your results. This is very useful in web marketing if you want to find out how many clicks and sales your affiliate websites bring in or if you want to measure the impact of each shared social media post on your website traffic. With parameters added to the URL, you can find out exactly how many visits an article has generated.

Google Analytics is also a great way track your different goals, including how many forms were filled out by leads on your site. This will allow you to find out which forms are used the most, where the users who fill them come from, the click rate on your action buttons and much more information.

Having this basic information will help you optimize your advertising campaigns and save you a great deal of money. You can see which campaigns perform best and allocate your budget accordingly. Depending on the data analyzed, you can also optimize your web marketing strategy to target an increasing number of users.

 

A/B testing: a traditional marketing technique applied online

A/B tests have long been used in traditional marketing, especially for direct mail. With the advent of web marketing, A/B testing has exploded in popularity. The many tools available online make it easier to perform and measure the results of these tests.

A/B tests let you analyze multiple versions of the same webpage or application to see which one produces the best results (more sales, more clicks, more subscriptions …).

The difference between the two pages can range from the simple colour of a button to a complete page design makeover. Once your two versions are created, divide your traffic in half. Show version A of your page to the first half, then version B to the other half. Afterwards, analyze the results (conversions, clicks …) with statistical tools.

These tests enable you to make changes in relation to the results obtained. You will better understand how and why certain elements impact user behaviour. It’s best to test one change at a time to more accurately tell which ones have an effect on users and which ones have no impact.

In the end, you will know which interface best converts visitors into customers. A/B testing also enables developers and designers to measure the impact of new features on the customer experience.

 

Today, spending thousands of dollars on billboards or television ads while ignoring online campaigns is becoming far less strategic. Web marketing requires less investment and allows companies to analyze campaigns, track website visitors and calculate their ROI. Digital communication experts are very fond of this data since it allows to them to continuously improve their web marketing strategy.

If you want to set up or improve a web marketing strategy, don’t hesitate to contact us.