As promised, and for a few months now, Chalestra has indulged in web marketing. It's been important for us for several reasons: our clients have asked about it, we really ought to be promoting the business in every way possible, and we would be able to add the experience to our repertoire of skills. And, like most businesses will, the monetary budget was set at zero.
Our thoughts on SEO
Through the help our friends and a lot of research, we applied every known SEO (search engine optimisation) technique to our promotional efforts. And we have mixed conclusions about it.
The key solution, for us, is to just write. Write to promote to customers and nothing else. Good content is made up of good writing, for which we read essays. It should be interesting to as many people as possible. And it is this concept that keeps readers on the website. And it's very sensitive. I think of magazine editors choosing writers for the content of their magazines.
Except that one should also write properly coded websites. But we do that anyway - it's part of our professionalism.
Web marketing
And to compliment our SEO efforts, we also employed web marketing, in which we've spent an enormous amount of effort. You'll find comments from Chalestra in all the big business networking sites, and, again, we've got mixed reactions.
Sales didn't do well. We suspect the reason for that was related to a golden rule we tell our own clients: we clearly didn't promote to the people we should have promoted to - we didn't put the web links in front of the right people. But time and budget constraints, and all that.
Does it work?
To do the job properly, we've tried to be as comprehensive and wide-ranging as possible. We've increased the number of visitors to the site by three times, which isn't too bad. We've noticed that we should expect natural growth: we did expect to get hard hits and big increases. But that was naive: we're wiser now.
As for more sales: we're not impressed. We found a lot more people had heard of Chalestra, so the marketing angle did work. As a sales channel, it left a lot to be desired. For us. Though we will spend more time researching the right people and casting web links to them. But with more people having heard of us, selling has become easier.
Conclusion
In hindsight, we now believe that SEO and web marketing should be parts of a marketing and sales mix. It is for everyone, but in varying degrees. And it should be pursued.
We maintain that there is no alternative to meeting people face-to-face, and getting to know viable potential customers. Word of mouth is second to that. But if people have already heard of you, then that's a benefit, and it's the key benefit of SEO and we marketing.
SEO and web marketing add new layers in the customer to supplier route, and those that don't pursue these disciplines are likely to get left behind. With nearly everyone in the world resorting to the web for research, it's vital for every business to have a presence on the web, and that they promote that presence. How they go about it is dependent on the key objectives, and finding an objective and targeting towards that objective.