Where are my customers?

You wouldn’t open a shop and just expect customers to find you. The same applies to producing a website – once you’ve done all the hard work of design, development and content creation, you need to tell your audience where to find you.

When you’re developing your communication strategy for your business you need to include a range of media channels to let your customers know where you are, what you offer and tell them why they should purchase from you.

So as well as traditional media such as advertising, direct mail etc, you also need to include SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing) as part of your communication strategy.

I’ll leave a more indepth discussion of SEO to the experts but put simply, it’s about ensuring that your website is amongst the most popular in your category. SEO takes time, and therefore money, but the search results are what’s called “organic” so have a more trustworthy reputation in your audience’s eyes.

SEM is is about paid search engine marketing, where you purchase ads on Google that are relevant to your business. The ads appear on the same page as the organic search results and visitors click through directly to your site. Another option is to run banner ads on specific and relevant websites.

Social media is also a great way to get customers to your site – Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest can all be used for letting your customers know where you are.

As well as online marketing, you need to include your website address on all material you produce for your audience.

It’s simple really – if you tell everyone where they can find you, you’ll make sales!