Why Your Website Still Matters (Even With Social Media)

Central to all of your digital media strategy is your website. This is because what you are trying to do with the use of all of these tools (and they are really technological tools) is to solve the fundamental marketing problems of how to get the customer or prospect become aware and interested in your product or service, how to get them to purchase and purchase again, and how to get them to recommend your product to others.

As is evident with the disappearance of MySpace and the recent appearance of Google+ as a formidable competitor to both Twitter and Facebook, these tools will continue to change. Your website is where you have complete control. Your website is here to stay for the long term, and it is where customers can get a complete understanding of your products or services. When using these new social media tools, you have to remember what they really are and that these tools  will continue to change. Fundamental marketing issues, though, stay the same.

Use them as technologies to map your problems to solutions. What these tools provide for is greater context, greater reach, and a way to generate greater trust in your product or service. This trust happens at two different levels. One level is when you see a reference or recommendation directly from a friend. There is a second level that comes from reading reviews and experiences of other customers.

What these new tools have done is to give you a way to increase awareness and sharing, and also made it trackable and measurable.  These tools will continue to change and it is worthwhile to focus on keeping control of your website and building it with a focus on blogs and search engines, while continuing to use these other social media tools to generate more traffic to the website.

I agree with the author and believe that a blog-enabled website based on the WordPress platform should be at the core of your social media strategy. Comment, call or ‘connect’ so we can talk about how this applies to your organization…