The famous quote from Field of Dreams that suggests, 'if you build it and they will come,' is a philosophy to which many website owners subscribe. They believe that once they have spent their cash on building a website that they will suddenly have traffic. They could not be more wrong if they tried. A website by itself is completely useless and if you haven't budgeted for marketing and promotional costs once it is live then you have missed a trick. All a website is an address on the internet - to be found it needs to be known about and that is where digital marketing comes in. If this is not something that you have considered, then here are a few reasons to help you change your mind.
It's the same as bricks and mortar
Let's say that you decide that you are going to start giving massages from home. If this is a step that you have decided on you wouldn't just sit around at home and expect people to start banging your door down looking for back rubs. Before that happens, you need to make it known that you are now operating as a masseuse. There are many ways to do this, but they all fall under the broad category of marketing. When it comes to websites the same logic applies. Instead of having your house as the destination for the business you have created a location on the internet and people need to be told about it. This is where, if you don't know where to start, a good digital marketing company will be a great place to start. This is their area of expertise and working with them you can devise a strategy to get your name out there in the online space.
Pay for traffic
One of the easiest ways of getting people to your site is to pay for them to be there. You can start by contracting with a Google ads management agency and getting them to set up an account and to buy some keywords. What this means when people search for terms related to the nature or purpose of your site, your link will appear at the top of the list of search results that Google returns. It is the digital equivalent of finding interested people at a shopping mall and then marching them through to your shop.
The phone book is dead
The internet, and Google specifically, is the new Yellow Pages. Hardly anybody uses the phonebook anymore and that number of people who do still use it is dwindling every year. Instead what people are now using is the internet. This means that you need to make sure that you have a presence there and that your website can easily be found by people who are looking for it.
Create an ecosystem
The online space is like an ecosystem where there are lots tech of elements that all work in tandem. Your website is the key to the whole system. It is the place where you want an audience and where you need to engage with people. But it is surrounded by things like social media, SEO, paid search, newsletters and content, that all work together to drive people to it. A website with no audience is, quite simply, a waste of space.
