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In this digital era of communication, everybody knows that website promotion is vital for website success. Promoting your website boils down to few simple strategies such as creating compelling content that site visitors and search engines enjoy and building inbound links to your sites (and repeating). Many developers assume that their beautifully designed website will automatically generate leads; web simply does not work that way. There are billions of great looking websites that nobody ever sees, visits, gains information from, or buys from. They get no new traffic and no new leads.
The basics of marketing management gives the fundamentals that the very first phase required to promote a product or service involves Segmentation and targeting of your customers along with positioning of your product, same principles are applied to develop promotional strategies for our website promotion i.e. culinary society, University Of Surrey. Objective of The Culinary society is to serve students of University of Surrey and providing them opportunities for them to share the experience of cooking. Our uniqueness is that we provide favorite food to anyone through our search engine. Providing recipes, showcasing of food and equipments and organizing various social events are the main highlights on our website. Keeping this in mind we aim to put our website in front of our target audience who are the people who wish to join Culinary society and who have great taste for food and ahead of our competitors who we believe are the big food chains. We wish to accomplish this by using some effective and proven methods of website promotion. Some of the very popular website promotional activities includes SEO (search engine optimization) where we know that most people find products or services on the web by going to the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN etc and by using PPC (pay per click) services Google Ad Words and Overture. PPC is considered to be expensive if not handled carefully but said to be the fastest way to get targeted website traffic. Here we will limit our promotional strategy to the use of best digital communication tools to promote our website. (O’Brien, 2004) To have a presence on the internet, be relevant and get the desired visibility we must use the appropriate tools for digital communication. Here we try to offer a mix of platforms, systems
Digital Communication Tools
1. E-mail: Electronic mail, a method to exchange digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Use of email as a digital communication tool effectively helps to attract attention of the target audience. In our case of website promotion we plan to formulate a well structured electronic mail which can attract the attention of our targets. Our structured email will contain an attractive subject line which matches the interest of the receivers so that they are forced to view this email. Once we get the receiver to study our email we wish to provide the link of our website in the body of the email. Website link will be provided just below the invitation paragraph and the paragraph will be formulated in such a way so that the viewer is compelled to click on our website link. The body of and strategies combined with the digital service of digital intelligence and strategic planning digital communication tools to generate better business results and to achieve our objective of driving the maximum traffic to our website.
the email will focus on our USP which highlights the availability of recipes of Ham and Potato Chowder, chicken curry and chocolate fondant. Through emails we may invite them for social events such as The Big Cooking Contest and will highlight the benefits of joining the culinary society. We wish to make use of email software which will enable us to manage our email list and send out many email messages at once. Email software can be installed either on our website’s server or on our PC or it can be hosted elsewhere on the web. Utilizing emailing software for handling business communications saves time we are able to manage our email list without hands on, manual maintenance. We can email them with special updates such as information about The Group Buying Day, The Big Cooking Contest etc. This will enable us to establish a strong level of consistent communications with the people on our email list. The way to do is to email them at regular intervals with relevant information to the topics they subscribed or are interested in. People may choose from our website whether they need culinary lessons, recipes, food and equipments or whether they wish to be present in any social events. (Marketing Sherpa, 2009) Most emailing software offers an auto responder feature which is emails that are sent immediately on request or at a scheduled time. Since, email marketing is one of the most successful means of advertising and digital communication tool ever developed; we should use it for the better promotion of our website and to attract traffic to our website. The right email software would help us in achieving our objective. One such example of web based emailing software that will help us automate our emailing marketing efforts is the ListKingPro email management system.
2. Newsletters: A newsletter is a regularly distributed publication generally about one main topic that is of interest to its subscribers. In our case we wish to launch a newsletter with a motto to attract maximum traffic or visitors to our website, thus we plan to prepare a newsletter that contains all the important features of our website, the value and services we offer through our site and what benefits can the regular subscribers attain. Latest addition to the list of recipes, short articles on social events such as gathering of culinary society will help attract people to visit our website. Our newsletter will be in a digital format which will be distributed via the internet. We wish to adopt newsletter as a website promotional tool to attract Opt in visitors and to strengthen the brand of The Culinary Society and recalling. Newsletters are important means of keeping in touch with inactive visitors, specific opt-in visitors and with the target segments. They are also a useful medium for branding and increasing your store recall. Understanding the online reading patterns of our target audience is necessary while deciding the layout, language and content of the newsletter. We plan to launch a newsletter every month packed with original articles, latest updates on our website and addition to the recipes or food and equipments. As a low cost promotional tool, it will help us in cutting down our budget allocated for promotional activities. Because of their low cost nature, we propose to add newsletters with any other digital communication tool to promote website. Newsletter will enable us to build rapport and strengthen our relationship with customers and the most frequent visitors of our website. Newsletters will help us in establishing a close link between ourselves and our visitors by providing special inputs and latest updates before anyone else. Our focus will be less on self promotion and more on providing information that is newsworthy and valuable.
Social Media Marketing: Social media marketing is a group of internet based applications that build on ideological and technological foundations which allow the creation and exchange of user generated contents. (Parise,2008) Social media marketing programs usually center on efforts to create content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it with their social network. This form of marketing is driven by word of mouth, meaning it results in earned media rather than paid media. It has become a platform that is easily accessible to anyone with internet access. Social media serves as a relatively inexpensive platform for organizations to implement marketing campaigns. Social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blog allow individuals to interact with one another and build relationships. We plan to introduce and place the link of our website along with the photographs of our recipes, food and equipments and social activities on these social networking websites where people can interact with us and can interact with each other. These websites will allow individual followers to “retweet” or repost comments about our recipes, food and equipments. Because the information about our website is being put out there and is getting repeated, more traffic is expected on our website. (Fraser, 2008) Through social networking sites, we can have conversations and interactions with individual followers. This individual interaction can instill a feeling of loyalty in the followers. Also, by choosing whom to follow on these sites, products can reach a very narrow target audience. Social media marketing has emerged as a really powerful digital communication tool and we don’t really dig deep into our pockets for it.
We target to reach to a huge population base because a large percentage of world’s population has an active profile on one social networking website or the other. (Kaplan, 2010) Moreover, the population on social networks is not just youth; in fact other age groups are equally active and our target audience has no age bars. This gives a chance to us to reach our target audience at almost no cost. We however, plan to spend some money in advertising on social media so that we can customize our ads and reach only our targeted age group or region.
Social media provides a platform to interact with our customers and most frequent visitors of our website. We can know what people want from us, what they think of our recipes and we will welcome their suggestions.
Social media is an ultimate tool for website promotion and the most cost effective due to its reach and other stated benefits. It will provide us the best ROI and no doubt, it is the best medium for interacting and advertising but it can also promote website through regular posts.
Traffic will eventually increase with effective use of social media marketing. The best thing about social media is that there is no technicality involved with it. Websites like (Alexa, 2009) Facebook and Twitter are very easy to use and we can easily create accounts, pages and groups to attract visitors on our website. Furthermore, the paid advertising is also very simple, we just have to choose a plan, select the target audience and pay; pay per click is also an option. We will take a call on hiring a social media manager depending upon the time we ourselves can invest on these activities.
4. Blog: Blogs are online journals for a particular segment of audience or even a person. We, as the owners will post a message periodically about the latest recipes, social events allowing others to comment. We focus to receive healthy ROI from blogs and these will really help us in attracting visitors on to our website and sustaining them for a long term. (Neal, 2010) Blogging is indeed, the most powerful search engine optimization tactic available today which helps to build our natural search engine rankings and traffic. It’s a good way to generate sustained traffic from the Blogosphere where people will read about our offerings i.e. recipes, food and equipments. We plan to accomplish this by creating a blog and submitting it to the hundreds of blog directories such as Technorati, Furl, Dig etc. We further plan to post at least 2 to 3 posts per week which will really help in increasing traffic on our website.
Evaluation of the effectiveness of digital communication tools We made use of the below mentioned metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the above discussed digital communication tools for promoting our website in order to attract maximum
traffic:
a) Cost
b) Reach
c) Technology involved
d) ROI
e) Effectiveness
f) Responsiveness
g) Time consumption
Conclusion
Focusing on our objective to increase the volume of traffic on our website and our target audience which is the mass population because every human being wishes to consume fresh and healthy food, we suggest to formulate an effective marketing campaign using a combination of all available website promotion tools at the right time for an appropriate target audience. Effective use of the mentioned digital communication tools with precise timing and accuracy will help in the desired results. Social media, blogs and newsletters are today’s most effective methods for generating a quick surge of immediate traffic to our website as well as long term sustainable traffic. If we consistently use these marketing tactics we will see a big return on investment.