Partner Article

SME's should recognise their website as biggest asset

It’s Online Marketing focus week on Bdaily. Here, Anthony Tattum, co-founder and managing director of Big Cat Group, argues a website is a company’s biggest asset when it comes to marketing.

For SMEs and big brands alike, online marketing is increasingly popular due to both flexibility of cost and trackability. But because there’s so much choice it’s imperative that businesses do their research and choose the right channel for what they want to achieve.

Our website is our biggest asset. It’s often forgotten that it’s a marketing channel in itself. All other activity centres around it, from sharing content on it to driving traffic to it. We actively use SEO (search engine optimisation), eDMs (electronic direct marketing) and social media as well as regularly refreshing the content on the site as part of our marketing mix. We’ll also use pay-per-click and display ads on third-party websites when we’re steering a campaign or expanding into a new market.

Many SMEs, like us, have a number of different audiences born out of their service offering. We use social media to listen as well as speak to these markets, providing customer service, building audiences and getting our business into the forefront of people’s minds. One thing we’re really passionate about at Big Cat is content marketing. Providing valuable content ensures we’re always improving our digital presence and as you learn more about your audience, you can tailor your content specifically to their individual needs, giving you greater insight and opportunity.

The benefits of online versus offline marketing are clear; being able to track and evaluate in real time being the main ones. We’re not saying we only use online methods, that’s simply not true; we still use print advertising in targeted publications. We constantly evaluate how online marketing affects the growth of our business and ROI. Various analytics platforms allow us to record and monitor both on and offline activity to see how each drives traffic online, which is integrated into our CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

The key to any marketing is a clear call to action, although it may take repeat touch points across multiple channels, on and offline, before they convert. Online, you can track the customer journey and just because your audience doesn’t act immediately doesn’t mean that they won’t in the future, it’s about creating the digital equivalent of that path of breadcrumbs.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Anthony Tattum .