When reviewing the marketing activities of new businesses, it is interesting to see what motivates business owners to perform certain actions. If you are a new business, before you do anything, it may be worth stepping back and working out a strategy first.

The first three things a new business will do is design a logo, order some stationery and build a website. The first three actions a new business will take are to promote their business by advertising, join a networking group and send out expensive brochures to anyone remotely interested in their services.

Isn't it interesting that all these activities are centred around getting as much visibility as possible? Maybe this is the natural thing to do - any attempt to persuade these businesses do otherwise will simply fall on deaf ears - and they appear to be committed to executing a pattern of expected business behaviour.

Your website can be a success if you take a little time and effort to understand and implement some basic marketing strategies. For growing businesses, there are three marketing strategies you should consider implementing:

• Visibility strategies for new products or services
• Lead-generation strategies for new business
• Customer-nurturing strategies for business growth

Although the logical order appears to be visibility, then lead-generation, then customer-nurturing, it is essential that new businesses actually do the reverse as without a customer-nurturing strategy, you will lose your customers as fast as you get them; without a lead-generation strategy, you will fail to get enquiries from your visitors.

Customer-nurturing
If you analyse your products and services, you will discover that most of them are too complex or too hard to understand for the first-time buyer. In fact, you can layer your products and services by the level of trust you have established with your customers.

For prospects, if you work out what results they are looking for and provide a simple solution for them, this will demonstrate your grasp of their problem and bring clarity to your message. For returning customers, they will have seen what you can do and will be ready to accept a higher value product. You can offer upgrade paths, additional services or even bespoke solutions.

The key to your customer-nurturing strategy is to only present the selected range of products or services appropriate to the layer of trust you have with the buyer. On your website, you can group these products and services by these trust layers. The information that demonstrates these products and services will be written according to the level of trust you have with the customer and hence seen as beneficial and highly valuable.

Lead-generation
For argument's sake, let's suppose that your advertising actually worked, and you received the visibility you were looking for. Do you think that these prospects will be curious enough to enquire about your products and services? Do you think you are offering something new or unique? Is there any reason why the prospect should be attracted to your offers?

The key to your lead-generation strategy is to constantly test compelling offers to your target customer types. You can then measure the successes of these campaigns and repeat the ones that work best. On your website, you can present these offers that will appeal to the customers at each trust layer. This will ensure your customers regularly return and make a sale enquiry when it appeals to them.

Visibility
Once you are confident in your lead-generation strategy and your customer-nurturing strategy locks in your customers, your visibility strategy will be down to your budget. If you know you will get a certain percentage of enquiries from your visitor levels, why not try Adwords?

When targeting specific customer types, you can create a special page for each product or service. These are called landing pages. You can set up your Adword campaigns to link directly to these landing pages to make the offer strong and compelling. Again, this can be tested and measured to determine the best page to increase your level of enquiries.

In conclusion, although very appealing, visibility strategies alone will clearly fail. Only when you plan and implement these three strategies will your website begin to work. By creating a website that is tuned to your trust layers, you can run offers to attract specific customers and build your business on returning customers. Once you have a large customer base, who needs visibility anyway?

Jon Beal is managing director of Netflare. For more information visit www.businesswebfactory.com/your_marketing/strategy_builder/the_secret [1]