Website Marketing 101: 7 Effective Strategies to Promote Your Website

Do you want to boost sales? Increase your reach? Get high quality leads? Your website is your virtual storefront, so it’s crucial to ensure that it informs, educates, and sells your products or services effectively.

As such, a website needs to aid a smooth customer journey, be intuitive and user-friendly, and support all your marketing initiatives effortlessly.

But marketing a website can be a challenging task as there are a number of things you can do. To help you promote your website, we’ve compiled a list of the most effective marketing strategies for websites and some important FAQs.

Let’s get started!

What is Website Marketing?

Website marketing involves all activities related to promoting your website. This marketing initiative aims to drive more traffic to your website. This way, you expose your business to more potential customers and increase your sales and other vital KPIs.

To expose your business to a wider audience online, you need to ensure your website ranks high in the SERPs (search engine results). To achieve that, you can adopt various website marketing strategies like SEO, running social media campaigns, or providing valuable content (think blogs, white papers, videos, etc.)

To help you identify the strategies that would work best for your use case, we’ve compiled a list with 7 of the most effective website marketing strategies and how to go about creating them (along with some tools and resources you can use along the way).

What are the Main Website Marketing Strategies?

In 2023, there are about 1.13 billion websites and about 5.16 billion active users on the Internet. Additionally, users form their opinion about a website in just a fraction of a second (0.05 seconds, to be precise).

So how do you promote your website to stand out from the competition?

As long as you understand your target audience and define your goals, nothing is impossible. Let’s check out some great website marketing strategies you can implement right away!

SEO is vital to website marketing as it directly helps you rank higher in search engine results. SEO uses a mix of elements, including optimized SEO landing pages, that help Google and other search engines measure your website’s authority, usefulness, and relevance.

Some key SEO practices include producing SEO-optimized content, performing on-page and off-page SEO, and local SEO (if you own a brick-and-mortar store).

How to Create an SEO Strategy

First things first, it could be rather confusing to determine when to kickstart your SEO initiative.

If your website is still under development, it’s best to start implementing the best SEO practices right away. This way, the developers will incorporate SEO while building the website, so you will start off on the right foot from the very beginning.

However, if you already have a published website, the best thing to do is to start with an SEO audit. Many marketing agencies, including Scopic offer this SEO service for free.

The purpose of a thorough SEO audit is to show the key issues of your website (such as speed, duplicate content, etc.) and identify areas you can potentially improve.

Once the SEO audit is complete, you can determine the next steps you need to take. These could include:

Set up tracking:

Most SEO specialists use Google Analytics to derive and monitor key data on your website visitors, where they come from, and whether they’re quality leads.

Do keyword research:

Identify what keywords your target audience is using when searching for your or similar products/services. Try targeting high-volume, low-competition keywords.

Perform on-page SEO:

Next, optimize your website by creating high-quality content, improving website speed, and adjusting your site’s meta tags, headings, and URLs. This increases your chances of ranking higher in the SERPs.

Initiate off-page SEO activities:

To improve your authority and credibility, aim to acquire high-quality backlinks from other authoritative sites. You can do this by guest blogging or through various partnerships.

Analyze and adjust:

To understand if your efforts are paying off, you need to monitor and analyze your results (like keyword rankings, traffic, and conversions) on a regular basis. This will allow you to refine and adjust your SEO strategy to achieve better results.

You should also note that seeing results can take some time, but when done right SEO can bring lots of qualified leads organically in the long term, making it one of the best marketing strategies for small business.

Also, it’s important to note that SEO is not a one-time initiative. Rather it’s an ongoing activity where you constantly monitor the competition, current trends, and other hot topics that can impact your ratings. So, once you have a solid foundation, you need to have some recurring SEO activities and checks to stay on top of the SEO game.

Resources and Tools

In today’s digital world, it is essential for almost all businesses to have a well-established social media presence. Once you identify the social media platforms you’ll target, you can create your social media marketing strategy.

How to Create an SMM Strategy

First, identify what goals you want to achieve. Most businesses go on social media with the aim to increase their sales and leads.

If that’s the case for you, you’ll need to have strong activity on social media and utilize different formats (stories, reels, videos) to keep up with the latest trends and stay on top of your consumers’ minds.

You can follow these steps to create an effective SMM strategy:

Choose the right social media platforms:

As different audiences use different platforms, it’s important to identify which social media outlet is best for your use case. To do that, you should know your target audience well. Think: Where does it hang out? What does it search for? What content does it consume?

Create engaging content:

You need to produce content that is tailored to the platform you’re on (as SM platforms can have various content formats and types). The bare minimum you should aim for is to build polished, good looking, branded and informative social media pages.

Build a community:

No matter how active you’re on social media, you need to reply to messages and comments to show to your audience you care and listen. Think out of the box to quickly increase your following and interact with your followers by doing collaborations with influencers, organizing different giveaways, contests, and other engaging activities.

Run ads:

This is a great way to get more traction in a shorter time period.

Analyze and optimize:

Finally, you should track your social media performance. Based on the results, you can try different strategies, modify the content you share, or adjust your posting schedule.

Resources and Tools

When it comes to email marketing, most people think of these lengthy emails that no one even bothers to open and read anymore.

But did you know that for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you get an ROI of $40? That’s pretty good results!

Email marketing turns out to be a great way to promote your products and services and nurture your relationship with potential and existing customers. The traffic from this strategy also brings in high-value conversions as your email subscribers usually follow your email newsletters, updates, and promotions up close and are interested in your brand.

How to Create an Email Marketing Strategy

Once you’ve set your objectives, you can start building your email marketing strategy. To do that, you should:

Build and segment your email list:

To build an email list, you can use different lead magnets (such as eBooks, free trials, etc.) to encourage sign-ups. Then you need to segment your email list based on demographics and other factors to ensure better email campaign results (think: higher open and click-through rates). This also allows you to create tailored emails that are relevant to the user.

Create engaging email content:

First, ask yourself what you are trying to achieve and where your email subscribers are in their customer journey. This will help you determine what content to produce so it truly resonates with your audience. Make sure to follow best practices about the different email elements, such as subject line, email preview, content length, call to action buttons.

Automate your email campaigns:

Email automation allows you to create different triggers when you want a specific email sequence to be sent to users. These could be welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, and other follow-up emails.

Monitor and analyze your efforts:

With the help of different email marketing tools, you can track vital metrics such as open rates and conversions. Or you can do A/B testing to understand what subject line, image, video or title better resonates with your audience. These will help you to optimize your campaigns and increase engagement.

Resources and Tools

Pay-per-click is a faster way to get on top of the SERPs and drive traffic to your website. For example, if you’re implementing SEO, this will require some time to improve your rankings. On the other hand, PPC can place your business in front of your target audience, increase leads and sales as soon as possible.

How PPC ads work is you pay for every click your ad gets, and the goal is to capture as many quality leads as possible and increase conversions.

There are many ad types, models, and elements to optimize. With paid ads, you are also in control of your spending and there are many ways to know expected cost per click, acquisition, and other key metrics.
Before you dig in, keep in mind that your ads campaign success depends not only on the ads but also on your website speed, user experience, page content and much more. So, a more holistic approach is usually needed to bring in high quality leads.

• Pro tip: To learn more on the topic, check out Google’s Ads courses .

How to Create a PPC Marketing Strategy

If you want to use PPC ads, use these key steps to build your strategy:

Choose the right platform:

Choose your advertising platform (e.g., Google Ads or social media ads) based on your goals and target audience.

Conduct keyword research and create the ad copy:

To get good ad results, you need to bid on the right keywords. Once you identify the keywords, you should create a compelling ad copy – use various combinations of your target keywords with clear call-to-actions to achieve high conversion rates.

Set a budget:

Determine your budget and spread it over several ad campaigns. Once you do that, you should monitor your ad spend in case you need to adjust it based on which ad groups perform better.

Analyze and optimize:

To understand your ads’ success, you should monitor your results and readjust your campaigns based on that data.

Resources and Tools

When you do affiliate marketing, you enable other individuals or companies to promote your products or services. If they realize a sale, they get a percentage of the sale.

However, it’s really important to strategically choose who you select to promote your business – look for reputable and well-established partners you know you can trust.

If this strategy fits your business objectives, you can substantially increase sales and revenue.

How to Create an Affiliate Marketing Strategy

To build your strategy, follow these steps:

Choose an affiliate network:

There are many affiliate networks, such as Amazon Associates and ShareASale. Choose the network that aligns with your business objectives.

Recruit affiliates:

Select affiliates whose target audience is the same as yours. Next, provide them with all the marketing materials they need.

Set your commission rates:

To attain high-quality affiliates, you should incentivize them with good commission rates that work well for both parties.

Analyze:

Monitor your affiliate program’s performance and optimize based on the results. You might have to adjust the commission rates or target new affiliates.

Resources and Tools

Content marketing is a cost-effective strategy that can bring satisfying results in the long term. Providing high-value content (blogs, videos, white papers, eBooks, or other informative materials) to your potential customers is a cornerstone in creating a successful website strategy.

This makes you a valuable information resource, increases your authority in the eyes of Google, and makes users perceive you as more trustworthy.

Additionally, once you create valuable content, you can easily promote it on other channels such as social media, email marketing campaigns, etc.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

To kickstart your content marketing efforts, follow these steps:

Understand your audience:

To understand what type of content to produce, you need to know your target audience really well. This will ensure you’re creating truly engaging content.

Develop a content plan:

Create a detailed content plan – consider whether you will produce blog posts, videos, or social media posts.

Create and post content:

Now, it’s time to create the actual content and distribute it to your audience.

Measure results:

Based on the metrics you track (such as website traffic and conversions), you can assess whether your content marketing efforts are paying off or whether you need to change your strategy.

Resources and Tools

Influencers have a well-established follower base, and they’re seen as trendsetters in their niches. This makes them a good option if you haven’t established your brand online just yet.

This way, you get to reach out to a wide yet very specific audience and move it fast through your sales funnel.

Additionally, you get to connect to other businesses in the industry and potentially create partnerships with them.

How to Create an Influencer Marketing Strategy

To create your influencer marketing strategy, follow these steps:

Choose influencer partners:

Choose relevant influencers whose following match your target audience. You can use various tools to find a good influencer match for your business.

Develop your influencer campaign:

Define the content type, timeline, and how you’ll incentivize your influencers.

Action your campaign:

Here, you can collaborate with the influencer to create high-quality content and distribute it on various channels.

Monitor and analyze:

Monitor the campaign results and analyze them. Identify areas of improvement that you can modify for your next campaign.

Resources and Tools

Website Marketing FAQs

Want to learn more about website marketing? Here are the answers to some important FAQs: