If you’ve read the previous two blogs in this mini series, you’ll know that this month I’ve been looking at the issue of not being able to grow business as well or as quickly as you’d like to. In the first blog I highlighted a number of reasons that prevent businesses from growing. The second blog looked further into the lack of consistency that many businesses struggle with. When your marketing message is inconsistent, it will confuse your potential clients – and your existing clients – and that can stop them from buying from you.

So how do you get consistency in your marketing message? One of the simplest ways of doing this is by using your website as the central point of all your marketing. Not only should all your other marketing tactics be linked to and point to your website; they should all use the same key message too.

To explain this more, here’s how we do it at Appletree:

Blogs – each weekly blog that we write appears on our website. That’s probably where you’re reading this blog! You might have found the blog by seeing one of our tweets or LinkedIn updates about it. We use both those social media tools to point people to our website, where they can read the blog.

Email Newsletter – every month we send out Scribbles, our email newsletter. It’s full of free marketing ideas and advice. Visitors to our website can sign up to Scribbles through the form on our website. We also put all the past issues onto the site, so that site visitors can read about topics they’re interested in. If you’d like to subscribe to Scribbles, you’ll see the sign up form on this page – just fill in your details!

LinkedIn – once a month we publish an article on LinkedIn. The article is usually one of the blogs that has been published in the previous month. At the end of each article, we direct readers to the website for more information, for special offers or to encourage them to subscribe to Scribbles.

Twitter – as I’ve mentioned above, we talk about our blogs (and the newsletter) on Twitter, with links back to the website. We also give lots of free marketing advice away in our tweets and we share some of our tweets on our website.

Videos – on our website are a number of videos we’ve produced, where we can share more marketing advice. We talk about the videos in our blogs, our newsletter, on LinkedIn and on Twitter.

Using our website in this way means that all our marketing activities are consistent, in their look and style, and in their message. We integrate all our marketing so that it’s all pulling in the same direction.

Are you using your website to make sure that your marketing is consistent? In last week’s blog I suggested that you carry out an ‘audit’ of your marketing to see how consistent your message is. Look now at the role that your website plays – is it the central point of your marketing? If you’d like us to give your marketing a free audit (worth over £250!) then just get in touch by calling 01635 578 500 or by clicking here to email me and we’ll do one for you, giving you some suggestions on how you can use your website to grow your business.