I’ve been thinking lately about marketing sites: sites that sell. I’ve built more than a few of them, and I’ve been musing about the process.
After a bit of doodling, this is what I came up with:
Commence
It starts with story, brand, imagination. The components I’ve put here are:
- Goals
- Vision/feel/brand/story
- High-level strategy
- Name
- Claim (social space, usernames)
Create
Then you start building something real, actual, tangible.
- Design: UX & UI (all platforms)
- Technical: coding
- Content: content/social/SEO (technical and content), languages
- Digital collateral: for sharing & partners (content, images, exclusives, links, videos)
- Marketing tactics: earned/owned/shared/paid
- Mobile: web, apps, SMS
Connect
You don’t build an isolated castle … you connect it to key communities. You build in links for more information. You build in hooks for marketing automation, and to the organization.
- Social: FB, Twitter, YouTube/Vimeo, Google+, Pinterest, Flickr
- Info/follow: email, RSS, newsletter, white papers, reports
- Connect: site & social
- Integrate: client channels (sales)
- Lead automation: Hubspot or similar
Carry out
Then, having planned the work, you work the plan. The job is not done when the site/service is created … that’s when it actually starts
- Implement plan across all properties
- Integrate marketing automation (Hubspot)
- Adjust as needed
This, as all things, is draft. I’m sure I’ll want to update it tomorrow … and I’m sure others have more and better ideas to add.