How Holistic Marketing Got Me 2,000 “Likes” (Part Two)
Note: This is the second part in an ongoing series. Part one and three.
In the first part in this series, I introduced how I have been using holistic, integrated marketing to build and market a personal, hobby website of mine at night entitled Buffy the Vampire Slayer Online that aims to sell advertising and merchandise. (Yes, it is a website of the 1990s cult-television show because I have been a fan ever since I first saw it in college.)
The first part (which I recommend reading before continuing here) explained the strategy behind building an optimized, online destination before even thinking about getting relevant traffic there. Here, I will go into the next parts: calls to action and holistic marketing.
Still, I must repeat: Whether you are building a website about a television show, marketing a site for a high-tech start-up, or anything else, the principles remain the same. The ideas are what matter. Here, I will continue this series for The Cline Group showing a personal example of what we can do professionally since I test the latest theories on my own site and then apply “what works” to our clients.
What Do You Want Your Visitors to Do?
After I had built a quality “destination” of a website, I asked myself: “What do I want people to do when they arrive?” This is when you need to align your marketing goals with your business ones. In this context, my business goal is to sell as much “Buffy” merchandise as possible. The primary marketing goal, then, is to “push” the traffic to my online store.
So, the next step before getting the traffic was to create a simple pop-up that, when clicked, takes the person to the store – but one that appears only once every three days to the same visitor and is easily dismissed so my visitors are not annoyed. I also created a “catchy” call to action with a link in the text at the top and bottom of each page and blog post.
Many websites I have seen do nothing of the sort. Too many webmasters do not comprehend that visitors need to be “told” to do something when they arrive at a website – otherwise, they will become confused. Some people go to a website looking for something specific; others may want to poke around. Regardless, if you present visitors with a menu of, say, thirty pages and a home page with a large, boring block of text, then they will be unsure of what to do and where to go. Unless you tell visitors what to do, they will likely click away since people have short attention spans today.
Depending on your business and marketing goals, you may want to use some or all of the following possibilities (among others):
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