Good economy or bad economy, if you’re in business for the long-term you are working hard to build quality relationships with clients, cultivate an inclusive atmosphere among colleagues and reinforce your reputation as a firm that delivers on its promises. These objectives depend on a good marketing communications plan, as well as an effective tool set to help with implementation. Your website is one of the most important tools in your toolbox.
Establish a Solid Foundation
Make sure your website looks good and includes all basic information about your firm and its capabilities. Everyone sees your website. When they see it, they form an opinion of you. Your site should accurately reflect your firm. It should portray the level of quality you offer your clients.
From a basic content standpoint, as a minimum your site should provide information about your firm’s services, capabilities, experience, people and culture. And don’t hide your contact information.
Make Sure Your Site Can Be Found
Your site needs to be optimized for search engines. This process is somewhat complex, but the individual page set-up is fairly straightforward though time consuming. It involves coordinating your page titles, text and content tags, and getting cross-linked as effectively as you can. The process can, however, be a bit more challenging if you have a Flash site. If your site was built well originally, it may already be optimized. If not, you’ll benefit from getting it done.
Provide Content Useful to Your Clients
Your clients hire you for your information, insights and solutions. Your website should be an extention of this type of thinking. Look for opportunities to add value to your site by including content your clients will find useful.
Traditional value-added content includes technical papers, white papers, presentations or similar demonstrations of expertise. These features are still effective and should not be discounted.
A simple way to provide quality information is to highlight the challenges and solutions for your projects. This sounds simple, but if you take the time to distill useful information from your site’s existing content, you will increase the amount of time visitors spend on your site.
You also can provide value through the use of interactive content elements that allow site visitors to study a subject in their own way. This can be a very effective tool, especially if the subject matter is somewhat complex.
If you’ve been considering a blog, you may want to go ahead and add it. Blogs provide an informal means of keeping clients up-to-date on developments of all types… economic, regulatory, technical, whatever. You can avoid creating too much of a writing burden by having multiple principals or technical professionals provide content.
Bring People to Your Site
Now that you’ve done the work and made your site as good as you can get it, you need to market it.
Put your web address on everything. Make sure your key staff are using networking tools like LinkedIn, commenting on blogs, participating in online discussions, and generally taking advantage of as many opportunities as possible to network and reach out electronically. Start sending out your eNews on a regular basis.
You don’t want your electronic newsletters to be self-contained. You want them to bring people to your website. Make them short and link them back to the latest bit of value-added content you just posted.
Never underestimate the value of your website.
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