Website Marketing 101: Onsite vs. Offsite Marketing
June 22, 2021
Attracting new customers and increasing revenue is the goal of every online marketing strategy. How you achieve that goal depends on your marketing budget, current marketing efforts, team size and more. Steady business growth comes from taking the time to create your marketing plan with your unique business objectives in mind.
That said, every marketing plan should include both onsite and offsite marketing efforts. While these two types of marketing are very different, you need both to attract new people to your website and turn them into paying customers.
In this guide, we’ll go over what these two types of marketing are, how they’re used and why they’re both important pieces of your online marketing plan.
What is onsite marketing?
Onsite marketing is any marketing work that’s done on your website. This includes SEO efforts such as metadata optimization, content marketing efforts such as blog posts and webpage creation, and your website design, which has an impact on all aspects of your marketing strategy.
Examples of onsite marketing
Metadata optimization: Optimizing your website’s metadata helps communicate what your webpages are about to search engines and search engine users. This is done through keyword-driven title tags, meta descriptions and image alt tags.
Website design: Your website design needs to be mobile-friendly and easy to navigate while capturing attention and clearly communicating your services and products. This isn’t just important for converting potential customers — Google uses user experience signals in its ranking algorithm.
Content creation: Onsite content is a key component of your SEO strategy and customer journey. Optimized, relevant and useful content can show website visitors that you know your stuff, improve your ranking in search and perform an important function in your customer journey. For example, white papers, blogs, infographics and landing page content can be weaved into your marketing funnel, and help turn website visitors into paying customers.
Why onsite marketing is important
Your onsite marketing isn’t just important because it focuses on making your website as conversion-friendly as possible. It’s important because the quality of your website impacts the success of your offsite marketing efforts.
Let’s look at an example. Say you own a gym and are running a paid Google Ads campaign to drive new visitors to your website, and claim a free week promotion. The campaign is seeing a high click-through rate and impressive quality score, but the leads just aren’t converting once they get to your website. Why?
Your website may be to blame. If your website isn’t effectively communicating your value proposition through thoughtful content and design, if your website appears untrustworthy or if there’s a bug preventing visitors from submitting a form, every dollar you’re spending on ads is going to waste.
In addition, your onsite marketing efforts can help improve your SEO (search engine optimization). The goal of SEO is to bring more organic (non-paid) visitors to your website. Unlike paid traffic that comes to your website through offsite marketing, organic traffic is free. Building your organic traffic is key for continued success — if you’re paying for every website visitor, you’ll run out of your marketing budget, fast.
What is offsite marketing?
Offsite marketing is marketing efforts performed outside of your website. While the goal of many offsite marketing efforts is to lead users back to your website, the tactics and setup are performed outside of your website.
Examples of offsite marketing
Paid media: Google ads, Bing ads, Facebook ads, etc, are all forms of offsite marketing. In this type of marketing, you set up an ad to show on the respective platform. For example, here’s what a paid Google ad looks like:
This ad appears on Google’s search results and links back to the Marketing 360® website.
Link building: Link building is a SEO technique that aims to build and promote backlinks to your website. Having links to your website on high-authority websites across the web help improve your overall SEO, and can signal trustworthiness to Google.
Social media marketing: Social media marketing is another way to promote more purchases and customers on a place that isn’t your website. Plus, with new ways to buy products on Instagram, social media can be a good place to build your following and get more people purchasing your products/services.
Email marketing: Email marketing is another example of offsite marketing that can help you grow your business. With the impressive ROI of $42 for every dollar spent, it’s a marketing technique you simply can’t overlook.
Why offsite marketing is important
Offsite marketing helps you extend your brand’s reach and get more visitors to your website, fast. However, it’s important to set up tracking to measure the effectiveness of your offsite marketing efforts. Tracking what campaigns and platforms lead to paying customers can help you fine-tune your digital marketing strategy, making your marketing spend effective.
About Marketing 360®
Marketing 360® offers the tools and talent you need to grow your business through onsite and offsite digital marketing efforts. From expert website designers to paid ad specialists, we work with you to create a digital marketing plan for your unique business. Learn more about our plans and pricing today.