Online promotion, the major issue. Solutions, tips and examples for website owners

In my daily work, I often see the same problem with many customers who own websites: “Online promotion“.

Some do not understand, others do not want or can not afford to spend money or may not realize that creating a website is just the first step.

It is not enough to make a website on the Internet. Like your website, there are millions of other websites waiting and waiting for your visitors. And the years go by, and they are slow to appear.

You may not have noticed, but there is fierce competition on the Internet. Almost 250,000 new websites appear daily.

There are currently 370 million registered domains. Even if each domain were a single website, there would still be many. But because more subdomains can be added to a domain, the actual number of websites is over 1.7 billion.

And out of all these billions of websites, only the websites that constantly publish interesting and useful content for visitors and the websites that benefit from the promotion make traffic worthy of consideration.

Without promotion the website practically does not exist, it is not found by potential readers or customers. Yes, it appears in Google searches, but on the “xx” page of the results display, where visitors rarely arrive.

Of course, you are afraid to spend money on promotion, without knowing if the resulting profit will be higher than the expenses.
What kind of website promotion is best for you? Which option is the most effective?
Being in the beginning, you have no way of knowing the answers to these questions. And of course you will make some wrong choices. But mistakes are those things without which we cannot progress. So whatever you have in mind, the best thing to do is get started.

If you have made a website, the second step is to promote it.

Website owners should know that:

1. You can’t significantly grow a business without promotion.
Without promotion you will stay long and well in a semi anonymity. You will have between 10 and 50 visitors a day, and most of them are in fact search engine robots scanning your website;

2. Promotion costs.

3. Promotion is done on several channels. Don’t choose a single channel because you will not have spectacular results.

4. Promotion must be done continuously. If you stop, you get where you left off.

6. Without promotion you will be disappointed with the benefits of the website and probably at some point you will consider that the website is “no business”.
It’s actually a good deal if you do it right.

Some of the website owners who realize that they need promotion, approach it incorrectly and the results are only satisfactory and the money is not spent effectively.

What do some website owners do?
Step 1. They have completed the construction of the website. Unfortunately, most of them stop here.
Step 2. A small part of them decide to promote it.

How will they promote the website?
From their point of view, the answer is obvious: on Facebook and Instagram.

Everyone is on social media, so where else? And yes, the answer is partially correct. Presence on social networks is almost mandatory.

A quick search on the Internet or the recommendations of friends and acquaintances will quickly find freelancers or social media promotion agents.

What criteria will the freelancer or marketing agency choose?
Well, according to the seriousness, the price and of course how beautiful the articles are written and how beautiful the images in the Facebook and Instagram posts are.

I make a contract, through which the agency undertakes to make X posts per week on Facebook and Instagram at a budget of approximately 200 – 400 € / month plus the payment of paid advertisements. And ready with almost 300 – 500 € / month they solved the problem.

In the meantime, post promotion statistics are coming up, and the results are Woooow.
The owners now see from the statistics that their posts have reached the pages of over 5,000 Facebook users. 5,000 people already know about you, your products or your services.
You can’t help but feel proud of this achievement. And the number of followers is constantly increasing. Looks like you’ve made the right decision and you’re on the right track.

You did well to start promoting your business. Now is the time to ask yourself if this is the best way to go and how effective is your online promotion?

I keep telling my customers that an incorrect promotion made on Facebook is like throwing leaflets from the plane. Many see them, few bend down to pick them up, and few reach for the phone to ring the phone number on the leaflet.

When you decide to promote your website, you should determine the following:

1. Who are your potential customers?
Define as clearly as possible who you will address through promotion. In the first phase, narrow down the customer segment as much as possible so that you can focus on those with the greatest potential.

2. What do you want to achieve through promotion?
Do you want to increase your brand awareness, do you want to increase your customers’ trust in the quality of your products or services, do you want to increase your sales or do you want them all? The promotion strategy differs depending on the choice you make.

3. What is your target?
Set a clear target. For example: I want to increase sales by 15% compared to the previous period

4. How do you measure results?
Establish a way to measure the results and compare them with the estimates made. This way you will know if the actions you are taking are effective.

5. Still make a marketing budget, even if you are a small business and have few financial resources.
Determine how much money you can spend annually on marketing, divide the amount by 12 months, but not evenly. In some months it is worth investing more in others and I think you can figure out why.

6. Tell the marketing agency what you want:
– this is my marketing budget;
– I want to increase sales by 15% by…
– etc.

7. Consider several online promotion channels.
Here are the most important types of online promotion you can use:
a) SEO – Website optimization for search engines;
b) Pay per click advertising;
c) Email marketing (sending emails with advertising content);
d) Marketing on social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Youtube, TikTok, etc.);
e) Content marketing (writing articles on blogs);
f) Podcasting (creating online audio content distributed by platforms like Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, etc.);
g) Webinars;
f) Guides, e-books;
g) Contests.

8. Check the implementation of your strategy by the advertising agency.
If you are lucky and willing to pay for quality services, you will find a professional marketing agency. If not, you may end up working with less professionally trained people.

I recommend that you pay attention to the following details:

a) Ask the marketing agency you work with to implement and test several types of online promotion.
If they tell you that “we can’t do this money,” they’re probably right. But in this case, try to persuade them to work with you on a percentage of sales basis (if possible). I am convinced that some will accept and it will be beneficial for both parties.

Don’t just rely on social media. Choose to promote your website on at least 3 different channels.

Ideally, you should optimize your website in terms of SEO, although the costs for this operation may be quite high. Use this calculation form to estimate the SEO optimization price of a website.

Try to do marketing newsletter.
Try Google Ads boldly. You may do better in terms of the price you pay per click compared to your Facebook promotion.

b) Check the way articles are posted on Facebook!
I’ve noticed that a lot of people, even some marketing agencies, post articles directly on their Facebook page.
It is a big mistake, time, money and effort wasted inefficiently. If you do this, your website does NOT BENEFIT from the traffic created on the social network Facebook.

If the article you want to post is really very short, then you don’t have much to do and you post the text directly on Facebook but you must also put a link to your website, to the page with products, services, presentation page, contact etc ..

Take a look at how the greatest bloggers.

These bloggers write the article on their website, and on Facebook they only post the link to the article along with a short description and thus force the reader to visit their website.

Why do bloggers do this? Because they need traffic to their site. The more traffic they have, the more advertising they will sell.

Don’t work or spend money just to get traffic on Facebook. It’s more important to drive traffic for yourself, so do your best to redirect social media traffic (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) to your website.

c) Don’t be impressed by the large number of impressions of a Facebook post.
For example, if a post was published on the pages of 5,000 users, it does not mean that all 5,000 noticed it. The most important thing for you is the number of people who clicked on the post and in this way they arrived for example on the product page to buy or on the contact page of the website.

I recommend that you go to the statistics page on Facebook and do a simple calculation: divide the number of clicks on a post (“Impact” column) by the number of impressions of the post (“Interactions” column). You will notice that for most posts, the number of those really interested in “posting” varies between 0.5% and 1.5%, ie 25-75 people out of 5,000. It’s very little.

From here you can conclude that the posts are ineffective, and the reasons may be:
– most of your page’s followers are “filling” and too few potential customers;
– the post was not designed correctly;
– the posting was made at an inappropriate time;
– the post was not made on the days with the largest audience;
– if the post was “paid advertisement”, the ad settings were not the most appropriate.
A properly posted Facebook post could generate clicks for 4% – 6% of the users on whose pages it was displayed.

Check Facebook and Instagram post statistics. Test several options until you get the results you want.

d) Carefully analyze the texts of the posts written by the marketing agency.
Suppose you have an online store and sell interior decorations, and the agency posts on Facebook pictures of the products and texts in which they write about the beauty of the product, about the colors, about how well it would fit in your living room, etc. .
If the purpose of the posts is to increase brand awareness or inform potential customers, the text is ok.
If the purpose of the promotion is to sell the product, the text is insufficient. Your goal is to sell, not just brag about Facebook or Instagram. For this reason, the text should contain the text “Call to action”, which will lead the potential customer to click on the post and reach your online store on the product page.

Example of “Call to action”.

If you have an online store:
– “Buy the product now”;
– “Buy now, pay later…”;
– “For any order consisting of products… you receive a gift…”;
– “See details about our promotion”
– “See product details on our page”
– “Take advantage of the campaign”
– “Visit our stores”
– “Limited offer, latest xxxx products…”.

If you sell digital products online:
– “Try for free….”;
– “Test for free”;
– “Download for free”.

For any website that has implemented the newsletter service:
– “Register on our website and…”;
– “Subscribe to the newsletter and find out the most”;
– “Join the community”.

e) Ask the marketing agency for a general plan for promoting your website online.
Why should you ask for this master plan?
Because I’ve met freelancers and marketers who only promote on Facebook and Instagram. That’s all there is to it.
The fact that it deals only with this kind of promotion is not a bad thing, and the promotion on social networks is useful and in most cases must be done.

Before you get down to business, it’s a good idea to find out the most effective types of promotion for your field.

For example, the most effective long-term way to promote any type of website is SEO (search engine optimization). But there are situations (not many) where you can’t do much with SEO and the only way to promote your products is paid promotion to Google (Google Ads).

If you sell books online, a good way to promote them might be podcasting.

Having a website in the field of psychology, psychotherapy, blogging and podcasts could be successful solutions.

If you want to capture the attention of a niche audience in the industry, promoting on Facebook and Instagram is almost useless and you will have to try newsletter marketing for example.

If your target audience is very young, one of the most useful tools available is probably TikTok.

In conclusion, don’t just rely on Facebook and Instagram, even if this segment has the most offers and the best prices.

f) Choose an agency that knows how to use and interpret analytical data.
Why?
Because it’s not enough to just promote. You have to measure the results. See if you are going in the right direction and if you will reach your target according to plan.
There are quite a few people in the digital marketing field who haven’t even heard of Google Analytics or other useful tools for measuring a website’s performance. Or if they have heard, I don’t know how to use them.