Web Marketing Benefits

By Mark Sceats

Web marketing is essential but something that frequently gets overlooked.

Websites are without question a highly effective marketing medium. But to work they must be seen. They need visitors.

Without visitors your website will be like having a TV commercial produced and then never shown on TV. Or brochures printed but not distributed to customers. Clearly to do so would be a waste of money - and yet so many businesses effectively do this very thing with their websites.

A common mistake made by businesses both big and small is to spend all their budget developing a website and then only consider online promotion as an after thought (if at all).

Big mistake!

No matter how good a website may be or how much money is spent on design and development, it will still be just one of millions competing for attention on the World Wide Web.

The Web is estimated to now contain over 5 billion web pages and around 7 million new pages are added daily. (For more information about the size of the Internet and the challenges this poses marketers follow this link:Internet facts and figures)

The vast size of the Web means that simply creating a website and publishing it on the Web does not guarantee your desired audience will find it. If ever the analogy of finding a needle in a haystack applied, then this is it!

So how do you ensure your website gets found?

To break through the clutter and get visibility it is essential that traffic is driven to a website.

This can be achieved through a variety of off-line and on-line marketing techniques, (ideally in a combined and integrated manner). The options available to you are discussed here.

When budgeting for your website you need to consider more than just its development costs. Basically there are 3 broad cost areas that should be budgeted for. These are:

• The initial cost of developing the site;
• Ongoing maintenance and hosting costs;
• And last but not least, a budget for actively marketing your website.

Just how much to budget will depend on your specific requirements and the depths of your pockets. Some US Fortune 500 companies who spend millions on developing websites have allocated around 25% of their budget on development, 25% on maintenance/hosting and 50% on website promotion.

The key point is don’t spend all your budget developing the site and have nothing left for marketing it.

Next we'll discuss specific ways of promoting your website and driving traffic to it. Next topic: Online Promotion Options

This page last updated May 03, 2010

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