The goal of Web Strategy is to qualify the importance of your online presence as an essential component of your business’s success. A decade ago many small businesses didn’t even have a corporate website on the net, and when they did have a website up it was very likely that they weren’t worried about growing their business online. Today, we can tell that the internet is much more important to businesses then it ever was, and it will continue to increase in importance into the unforeseeable future.

Now that consumers are more likely to visit Google when they’re looking to purchase something we are beginning to understand the importance of being there when potential customers search for something that you sell. This involves two components of Web Strategy: Search Engine Marketing and Online Advertising, which we will return to in a bit

Being there for your prospects when they are looking for you is what effective marketing is all about. It means stocking candy bars at the checkout aisles so you can impulsively pick one up to hold you off ‘til you get home. Here’s something interesting, when you look down at the checkout snacks it’s very likely that you’ll see a Snickers bar and remember their slogan “Hungry, why wait?” This is because they’ve generated brand awareness for their chocolate bar, and on top of that, made the bar available to you when you need it the most. This is how effective marketing works – you’re there when your prospects want you to be there…or when you know you can convince them with the least resistance.

Being there when it matters is why we turn our attention to establishing engaging and effective online social networking profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Places, Twitter and Yelp. This introduces another component of Web Strategy: Social Networking.

The most important component of your web strategy though, is not the clever technologies or cool social networking websites you use, rather, it’s the formal evaluation of the ability of your web presence to help your business achieve its goals. This means that we must correlate online business to offline business, which is where most business is actually based. For example, as a real estate agent you can post a new house for sale on your website, tweet about it and cross post it to your Facebook page and still not receive any inquiries about the house. This means that something is off – you might not be attracting the right folks to your website, you might not be attracting much traffic at all, and more importantly…you don’t have a formal plan for marketing your products and services online

This was just a part of The Guide to Online Advertising – download the complete guide here.