When it comes to launching an inbound marketing initiative, many companies are faced with the challenge of figuring out how to budget for both the marketing campaign and a new website design. The truth is that your site may not require a complete redesign to work effectively with your inbound marketing efforts. Instead, you could begin rolling out your marketing strategy today and then take queues from your site’s performance before you decide which features need the most attention.
Inbound Marketing First
There are many elements that make up a successful inbound marketing campaign, while also functioning independently of your website. If you haven’t already created social media pages or an email list, now is the time to do so. You can post regular updates to social media which redirect to your website without needing to overhaul your site first. Your goal is simply to invite people to visit your site through any available avenue.
Measuring Success
If you have implemented a variety of inbound marketing techniques to bring people to your site, now is your chance to look at the numbers. Ideally, your website will lead visitors through a natural progression of steps until they either contact you or make a purchase directly through your webpage. It is possible that you will see a spike in visitors to your site, but you will find that you are not closing the deal frequently enough. Look at information about how many unique visitors you are getting, how long they are spending on each page, and other data to determine if there is a problem with the flow of your site. Your visitors may be getting discouraged by an overly complex site, or having difficulty completing a purchase due to bad links or other errors. Using your investigative skills you can help determine where the problem lies before you begin working on your new website.
The Redesign
Hopefully you took the time to do your homework before you began redesigning your site. Even if your visitors were struggling to complete a sale, you may still be able to reuse much of the content on your page. Tweaking your content to meet today’s SEO standards will help boost your rankings further, but you should also be paying attention to layout and workflow. The majority of your efforts should be spent ensuring that your new site design addresses all of the hurdles that your visitors are facing. You may even be able to include a survey on your page so that visitors can make suggestions based on their experience visiting you online. Throughout this process your inbound marketing dollars will be working for you.
Choosing to take on an inbound marketing strategy does not necessarily mean going through a major overhaul of your entire site. Instead, your campaign can be rolled out in stages as you work your way through the buyer’s journey and see which problems need to be addressed immediately. Dead or broken links on your site, or language that simply doesn’t encourage the reader to move to the next stage can be solved easily with minimal changes to the infrastructure of your site.
Zinc is here to help you achieve the absolute best results with your inbound marketing campaign. We can help you create a step by step plan to achieve your goals from the very first campaign all the way through the website re-design.
