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Author: OIMAdmin
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7 Things your Website should do for your Business
- Incorporate your business brand into its design, content and features, giving your business a consistent message and appearance.
Your business card just isn’t big enough to provide all the information your clients and prospects need. A website gives one publicly available spot from which your business can identify itself in a consistent manner. Brand consistency shapes what people think of you; this is not limiting, rather it frees you to express your message about services and products within a familiar, recognizable environment. This in turn will bring out trust and loyalty in your customers.
- Facilitate communication from prospects and clients to your business.
Customers often wish to interact with your business in off hours, when you’re not available, or that’s just inconvenient. A contact form, and even online support can bridge communication between your customers and your business. Keeping the conversation going will build trust and loyalty.
- Identify customer benefits of working with or buying from your business.
A 24/7 sales and support mechanism keeps your message out there. A well planned and executed website allows your customers to absorb your message at their own speed, without the need of personal efforts when they’re not needed
- Demonstrate your expertise, through whitepapers, FAQs, and tip sheets.
Whether you find it difficult to “brag yourself up” or just become bored restating the same points over and over again, your website allows you to get the message right, and allow others to find your expertise in their own wan at their own pave.
- Enhance all other marketing. Online and Offline marketing campaigns should direct prospects and clients to an appropriate page on your website
A business website becomes the fulcrum for all your marketing messages. A central point that organizes and delivers your message to your customers, and allows them a place and means to react to it. When all your marketing efforts have a common starting and ending point (the website) it becomes easier to build a business message that, in its consistency, draws prospects to your business.
- Educate prospects and clients, allowing them to interact with you from a more knowledgeable position.
When your customers and prospects have a fuller knowledge of what and why they need, they will become smarter, better consumers of your business products and services. This will deliver prospects into your sales channel who are better prepared and more likely to make a purchase. It will also shorten your sales cycle.
- Provide a mechanism to analyze and evaluate who your prospects and clients are, what they need, when they need it, where they come from and why they need it.
When you better understand you customers, clients, and prospects you will be better equipped to respond to their needs. Responding to their real needs, in useful ways will create trust and loyalty.
- Incorporate your business brand into its design, content and features, giving your business a consistent message and appearance.
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Promoting a Website and its Lifecycle – Planning
When website planning includes plans to promote the site right from the start, you will be much more successful. If your website is an important part of how you market your business, product, service and/or event, then planning how your website will do that move to towards success. Planning right from the start should not only include only page sizes, and image type and size, it should include
- whether email will be used,
- whether images and video are hosted on the same or another site,
- how streaming media might be implemented,
- what logging actions will be performed,
- what statistic analysis will be done,
- marketing basics including
- your demographics,
- where your telephone number is displayed,
- what SEO strategies will be employed,
- what cross-promotional tactics may be employed with other websites,
- how landing pages will be structured, and where they will be placed
- how the website builds your brand
- how the website positions the business within your industry and market
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7 Things: Reasons to Have a Business Website
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Credibility
You have a business card don’t you? Can you image introducing yourself and your business without one? You have a business phone, right? Can you image trying to gain new customers without one? The same is now true of websites. Without a professional website you look small; you look temporary.
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Save Time & Money
The cost of getting a website can be a little overwhelming sometimes. Dirt cheap websites start at $500; the best move quickly into 6 figures. Once you have it, though, it costs very little. A website built on a current CMS (Code Management System) like WordPress, allows you to update the site, adding your news, coupons, whitepapers, product pages, without calling in expensive professionals. You should rarely pay more than hosting costs, and those should be cheaper than your monthly phone line.
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Find a Wider Audience
There are people looking for you. And in your wildest dreams, you would never think to look for many of them. Your website lets them find you. It lets them find out about you, without being invasive. They can begin to familiarize themselves with your business offerings in a way they feel comfortable. Once you make a real sales or marketing contact with them, you already have the beginning or a relationship. Now a site optimized for the search engines will do better at this than others, but all sites offer outreach to potential customers that previously eluded you.
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Be Available
Websites ushered in the “24/7” world. Your customers can look up product information on their schedule, not just during your business hours. Your website doesn’t take breaks, it doesn’t sleep, its there. A contact form allows visitors to send you a message anytime, opening up a new communication channel. Posting news provides a mechanism to get product announcements and news out to your customers with minimal cost.
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Support Your Customers
Let your web visitors find the product information they want with photos, graphics, videos and text. Allow them to find out the place and times of events without having to call and ask. Give them photos and images so they can understand your business and its advantages.
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Interact with Your Customers
Provide a contact form so you customers can comprehensively communicate with you, even allow them to upload RFPs, their images, documents, and bid requirements directly in a way that you and your staff can easily find and share.
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Measurable Marketing
What other marketing medium allows you to know exactly what people looked at, how long they took to look? No other marketing medium allows such immediacy in learning what people found appealing and to what they responded. Website marketing metrics are comprehensive and immediate, allowing you to quickly respond to the fluctuations in your market.
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Improving Internet Marketing with a Contact Form
When I talk about internet marketing, I am talking about improving the use of email and your website as marketing tools. The two should work hand-in-hand in building your business. Every email you send out should have a link to your website, and your website should provide a way to contact you through email.
While you probably don’t want to post your email on your website, as that will just draw spam, you do want to make sure that you have a contact form on your website. The contact form should be easy to use and to the point. Don’t try to collect too much information on your contact form, just enough to be able to get back in touch with your website visitor.
Too many contact forms try to collect all sorts of extraneous information like your address, or your fax number. When a form is too long, or requires the visitor to enter information they prefer not to give out, you loose the opportunity to continue building an internet marketing relationship with that visitor. Its just too easy to hit the back button, to try another search at Google, or just leave your site. Keep your contact form as short as possible.
Clearly identify which fields are required and which fields are not. Use asterisks or a bold font to indicate a required field. Offer a drop-down list when possible (such as a list of states) and provide formatting tips eg. [Phone: (###) ### – ####]. When using a drop-down, always give the visitor the option of choosing ‘Other’ or “I don’t know’.
Check the email inbox which receives the email and answer those queries quickly and politely. This may be your next best customer.
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Google Search Engine or Content Provider
Can Google continue being both content provider and search engine?
Larry Page launched a web crawler in 1996 to collect data about the number of links pointing to web pages. This project, initially part of a PhD dissertation for the then Stanford student grew with the addition and support of Sergei Brin. When the two registered the google.com domain in 1997 they were reluctant to even include ads on the fledgling site.
Google has grown mightily in the intervening years, and as a modern corporation has bought up other web sites to continue its growth. It bought Blogger (Pyra Labs) in 2003 followed by the purchase of YouTube in 2006. As it has continued to grow, Google has moved from just supplying links to content, to supplying the content itself.
Does Google now promote its own content over that of rival content providers?
Let’s not overlook the prize here. The prize, as it is for all media, is the advertising dollar. Google already gets a cut coming and going with both Ad-Sense and Ad-Words, two of its products that put web site traffic and advertising dollars together. As Google promotes its own pages in its search results, it captures more of the advertising dollar.
There may be a point at which Google so pollutes its search results with its own content that search customers turn away.
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How Do You Measure Success
Measuring the success of your web site provides the feedback necessary to constantly improve your site. Perhaps the most basic measurement is the number of pageviews. A pageview is a simple request for a single webpage. A webpage may contain many files as each image is a separate file. Such measurements are usually taken directly from your server. (Read more about the types of web statistics).
Beyond measuring the number of pageviews from your website, you may also measure specific actions that visitors have taken. Such actions include clicking on a specific link, textual or graphical; watching a video or filing out a form. Identifying and measuring the actions your visitors perform helps you understand what about your website your visitors find interesting, informative and useful. As you find visitors migrating to specific categories and pages, you have insight as to what to expand as you continue to grow your website.
You could also measure the time that a visitor is on a page or the entire website. Again, this will provide valuable insight into which area(s) of the website your visitors find engaging. With some A – B testing separate the engaging content from the dull. Do more of one, less of the other.
Finally, you might measure your visitors themselves. What percentage are new visitors, what percentage are returning visitors. Does the site attract visitors from one part of the country above other parts?
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What should a small business website look like?
A small business website should be more than a small sandwich board hung near an out-of-the-way country road. There are a few features that will surely enliven your web site and allow your customers to interact with you in an efficient manner:
- Your telephone number. Make sure that your business telephone number is prominently displayed. Don’t make visitors look for it, because they won’t; they’ll just move on to the next website – your competitors.
- A contact form. Use a contact form instead of an email address. Email addresses on websites draw email spammers, and you don’t need any more spam email. Instead use a contact form. Collect only the information you really need such as an email address and their name. Don’t collect physical addresses unless you’re going to snail mail them something.
- Your privacy statement. Let people know exactly what you will and won’t do with any personal information you collect. If you’re committed to not selling this info, say so. If you may use their email address yourself, to follow-up or send regular newsletters, say so.
- Thee security of your site. If you have an ecommerce site, you should use SSL, and you may have the security of your site audited. If so display the security badge you pay for, it reassures your customers that you consider their security, and take precautions to safeguard it.
- Testimonials. If you’re in business I hope there is someone who says nice things about you. If so, use them on your website. If not get out of business
- An “About Us” page. Let your customers know who you are, where you are, and even what you believe. It reassures them that you’re not a fly-by-night operation.
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Your Site vs. The Page
Many web owners end up confused about the rankings for their site, and never realize it. The confusion arises from the fact that often links on Google™, Yahoo™, and Bing™, point to the home page of the site. Yet, it is your web pages that are ranked not your site. So how is it that so many of the links from the search engines point to the home page.
The short answer is navigation. Undoubtedly every page on your site has a link in the menu, or in the logo, or other places to your home page. Probably every page has multiple links to your home page. With these links, every page on your site is casting “votes” onto the home page. The search engines tally these “votes”. Then each in its own way, they translate this such that when you search for a phrase (your key phrase) a set of links come up. The weight that each search engine gives all its different measurements ends up with your home page often representing the weights of several other pages in the site. It may seem as if the search engines ranked your entire site, but the reality is that many of your sites pages have added their “votes” together in such a way that it is your home page that appears first in the rankings ie. the search engine return pages (SERPs).
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What is Internet Marketing?
Very simply put, internet marketing is using the internet to market your business products and services. Both websites and email, the components of the internet we’re all most familiar, can and should be used.
Websites, both your own, and others (in the form of advertisements and links) can be used to directly market and sell your products and services. On your website you promote, describe, and even sell the products and services upon which your business is built. You do this with words, images and video. On your website you are in complete control of your message. When you promote your products and services on other websites, through endorsements, free links, and paid advertisements you may have varying levels of control, from the complete control of a paid advertisement, to relative lack of control when your business is mentioned in social media such as Facebook™ or Twitter™. Your goal, as always, is to get the most favorable, the most persuasive, endorsement of you product in front of as many people as possible.
Additionally, you can promote and market your website, and use your website to promote your products. You do this with web traffic. Getting as many people as possible to visit your website. People may come directly to your website. They do this by directly entering the URL of your website into their browser. People come from other sites. They may see and add, or a reference (a link) on another website that interests them, and they “click” on the link and are transferred to your website. Finally they may come from the search engines (Google, Bing and the rest) when searching for something. With all these methods the name of the game is to drive traffic (large numbers of web visitors) to your website in the hope that some percentage will be persuaded that your product is just what they want and need right now.
Search engines may list your website in answer to a search for free, because the Google or Bing have determined that your website is best suited to addressing the search. You may target certain search for phrases on your website: we call this Search Engine Optimization, SEO for short. Google, Bing Yahoo and the others also can be paid to display an advertisement linking to your website. We call this Pay-Per-Click or ppc.
Your internet marketing goals may also be achieved with email. Some businesses (not yours surely) spray the internet with a continuous volley of junk email that only a tiny fraction of internet users actually care about. We call this spam. This is a bad thing.
A better approach is to use the email addresses of your existing customers, with their permission of course, to make them aware of special promotions, sales, and new products and services of which they may hold interest. Keeping in touch, and reminding your customers that last year, or last week, they had need of your products, may touch that need again. This can drive repeat business. Correctly used, email can help you build and maintain relationships with your customers. This is a good thing.