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Although setting your primary objectives is vital, it is just as important
to identify your secondary objectives. By setting appropriate secondary
objectives, you will be more prepared to achieve all your online goals.
Many companies identify only primary objectives for their Web site and
completely neglect secondary objectives that can help them succeed
online. Following are some common secondary objectives for online
businesses to consider:
- • The site should be designed to be search engine friendly.
- • The site should be designed to encourage repeat traffic.
- • The site should have viral marketing elements that encourage
visitors to recommend your products or services to others.
- • The site should include elements to leverage its sales force.
- • The site should incorporate permission marketing, where visitors
are encouraged to give you permission to send them e-mail
on a regular basis.
- • The site should be designed to encourage customer loyalty.
- • The site should incorporate stickiness, encouraging visitors to
stay a while and visit many areas of the site.
Designing Your Site to Be Search Engine Friendly
Creating a site that is search engine friendly should be an objective of
every company that wants to do business on the Internet. Search engines
are the most common way for Internet surfers to search for something
on the Net. In fact, 85 percent of all people who use the Internet
use search engines as their primary way to look for information. By
using keywords relating to your company in appropriate places on your
site, you can improve how search engines rank you. You want these
chosen keywords in the keyword meta-tags as well as in each page’s
description meta-tag. Some of the other places where you want to have
these keywords are your domain name if possible, your page titles and
page text, your Alt tags for graphics, and your page headers. Many
search engines place a lot of emphasis on the number and quality of
links to a site to determine its ranking. This means that the more Web
sites you can get to link to your site, the higher your site is shown in
search engine results.
Including Repeat Traffic Generators on Your Site
Every Web site should be designed to entice its site visitors to return
again and again. No matter if the primary objective of your Web site is
to sell your products and services or to create brand awareness, generating
repeat traffic to your Web site helps you achieve these goals. Generating
repeat traffic to your site is a key element of your online success
and can be accomplished in numerous ways. Using contests and competitions,
as well as games, advice columns, and many more techniques,
can increase your Web traffic.
Getting Visitors to Recommend Your Site
The best exposure your Web site can get is to be recommended by a
friend or unbiased third party. It is critical that you try to have elements
of your Web site recommended as often as possible; therefore, you should
have a way for people to easily tell someone about your site and its
contents. The best way to encourage people to recommend your site is
to include viral marketing techniques such as a “Tell a Friend” button
on your site. You might want to include some variations on this as well.
Under articles or press releases, you can have an “E-mail this article to
a friend” button for people to refer their friends and associates to your
site. Virtual postcards are also a good way to get people to send more
people to your Web site. There are many ways to encourage viral marketing.
Leveraging Your Sales Force
If your objectives include trying to sell your products, you might want
to leverage your sales force by making use of an affiliate or associate
program. Affiliate programs once again use the advantage of having
your site recommended to create traffic to your site. The difference is
that an affiliate program is more formal than just having your site recommended
by site visitors. Most affiliate programs involve having a
contractual agreement, having specific links placed on the affiliate’s site
to yours, and having software to track where your traffic is coming
from so that you can compute and send referral fees to your affiliates as
they are earned. The contract usually states the compensation you will
pay to your affiliates for the sales they produce. This is one more way to
have other people working to build traffic to your Web site.
Using Permission Marketing
You always want your company to be seen as upholding the highest
ethical standards and being in compliance with anti-spam legislation,
so it is important not to send out unsolicited e-mail—or spam—promoting
your company or its products. This is why it’s important to
develop a mailing list of people who have given you permission to send
them messages, including company news and promotions. When you’re
developing your Web site, an objective should be to get as many visitors
to your site as possible to give you their e-mail address and permission
to be included in your mailings. You can do this by having numerous
ways for your visitors to sign up to receive newsletters, notices of changes
to your Web site, coupons, or new giveaways.
Creating Loyalty among Visitors
The way to create loyalty among visitors is to provide them with some
incentives for joining your online community and provide them with
proof that you really appreciate their business. You can do this by having
a members-only section of your Web site that has special offers for
them as well as discounts or freebies. When people sign up to join your
members-only section, you can ask for their permission and their e-mail
address to send them e-mails regarding company or product promotions
and news. People like to do business with people who appreciate
their business. We are seeing a real growth in loyalty programs online.
Including “Stickiness” Elements
To get your visitors to visit your site often and have them visit a number
of pages every time they visit, you need to provide interesting , interactive,
and relevant content. You want to have your site visitors feel as if
they are part of your online community and to want to make your site
one of the sites they visit every day. You create “stickiness” by including
many elements that keep your visitors’ attention. Your site can have a
daily advice column, descriptions of your many products, a discussion
forum with constantly changing interesting conversations relative to your
products, a news section that is updated daily, as well as a weekly contest
that site visitors can enter. The combination of these elements makes
a site sticky. You want your site to be a resource people return to often
and not a one-time event.
Setting your Web site’s objectives before you begin building your site is
essential so that you can convey to your Web developer what you want
your Web site to achieve. You obviously want to create a number of
different objectives for your site, but many of the objectives you set can
work together to make your Web site complete.
Whatever your objectives might be, you must carefully consider how
best to incorporate elements in your Web site and your Internet marketing
strategy to help you achieve them. Successful marketing on the Web
is not a simple undertaking. Before you begin to brainstorm over the
objectives of your Web site, be certain you have read and studied all the
information that is pertinent to the market you are attempting to enter.
Read everything you can find, and examine the findings of industry
experts. | 
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