- The website was built with a dated technology or one that is literally unreadable by the search engines (much like our old site found here)
- They built a website and let it get stale, dusty and die
- They are doing nothing to market their website online

If you have not seen a return on the investment of your website, then it may be time to examine whether or not you’re getting all you can out of this investment? Or is your website like a new, expensive toy that you bought out of impulse and never use?

In a thriving economy most companies and Marketers don’t think of Inbound Marketing tactics such as PR, search engine optimization and social networking as ways of meeting their businesses goals. These methods are often overshadowed by traditional mass media tactics that drive pending sales. However, with the increasing popularity of Online Media, and the fact that people are more careful where and how they spend their money in our current economic situation, Inbound Marketing is an absolute must for any company, and especially high end brands (see Bringing Your Brand Online To Reach Luxury Customers).

People today do not go on the Internet because they want to be sold something, and consumers today are not in any rush to spend money. Their low intensity and distaste for online sales pitches do not play a role in Inbound Marketing, and instead define exactly what Inbound Marketing is. Inbound Marketing is intended to boost a company’s brand awareness, relevance and ease of “findability” for the consumer, not to bombard them with sales pitches. Inbound Marketing is really the act of offering the information and content that the consumers are looking for at the exact moment when they are searching for this information on the Web. In this case the content and information is showing up for searches, and in places where consumers are actively looking for your product or service.

As opposed to Outbound or Direct Marking, with Inbound Marketing your company will be easy to find, and only when you are offering exactly what the consumer is looking for. Even if the consumer doesn’t make a purchase when they are searching, when they are ready to purchase, the company that was able to provide them with the information they were looking while they were looking for information will win the sale. In today’s Online marketplace many are viewing Inbound Marketing as the major strategy to be used for securing the online future of a company. By laying the channels for easy “findability” and two way communication it will allow their online brand to grow and continue to deploy more and more Inbound Marketing techniques.

Through traditional PR practices a very well established and magnificent brand image can be built by sending out press kits, establishing good connections and relationships with the media outlets and purchasing ads in publications. In this day and age, however, all of this work can also help to establish a strong online brand as well. Because it is so much easier to publish content on line with the use of Content Management Systems, we are seeing a much larger rate of publicity coming through the online form then we have seen previously.

Residual online press coverage is excellent, but you may not be taking full advantage of this occurrence if you are not also optimizing your press for the Web. Through optimizing your PR efforts for the Web you can provide your brand with a more prevalent online presence. For years we have been optimizing and targeting online media sources as well as print, and with the evolution of new and emerging online technologies we continue to move further into combining all PR efforts with our Internet Marketing efforts. These two practices go hand in hand, so not to couple them would be shortsighted. As we continue to release new materials and market our products we expect to find an increasing number of online coverage from our efforts which will help our client’s Web and offline presence grow.

It is extremely important for these brands to not only be online, but to reach their target market online. The demographics of the luxury consumer is very promising, and involves a market segment that has a higher than average income, is in a higher social class and lives a luxury lifestyle. This segment not only goes online often to use the Internet, but even has access to the Internet in more places then the average consumer based on their wealth and the trend that we have seen in applying the Internet to nearly all high end electronics, automobiles, boats, planes etc.

If an upscale brand is NOT on the Internet, and not easily findable on the Web then it greatly reduces the chances that their customer base will be able to find the important information they need when making their purchasing decisions. Many high end brands are taking advantage of all of the benefits of having an excellent online presence. This fact, in turn, hurts the competition who is not applying their brand to all aspects of the online world even more.

Bringing a brand online effectively so that the content contained in the website is viewable by the search engines is not a costly process. A simple website with a beautiful design that is easily editable and maintainable can be done for as little as $5,000, while a more dynamic, feature rich website for a luxury brand could end up costing as much as $50,000 depending on the features and functionality of the website. Inbound Marketing Campaigns can also vary in cost and range anywhere from $1000 a month to $40,000 a month depending on the level of involvement needed in the marketing campaigns, as well as the amount of money that is spent on paid traffic (purchasing traffic at a cost-per-click or impression/view basis).