Converting business success into online success: 5 fundamentals to make your business prosper
The internet is a frightening place for businesses. For those who don’t have time to keep up with its latest developments (and lets face it – who does?) it can seem like a good idea to just stick up a website and then forget about it, pretend it isn’t there and carry on as they always have.
The above approach is obviously flawed yet reflects a large proportion of businesses attitudes to the web in the UK today. MD’s and board members need to focus up on their web presence as historically, any company, large or small, that has stuck its head in the sand when new technologies arrive has been doomed to failure. It’s hard to believe now that the medium of television could once have been looked upon in the same way as the internet is now. There was a great deal of mistrust around advertising on TV and a good number of businesses took an extraordinarily long time to take the leap and reap the benefits whilst businesses that took the lead early on enjoyed lower competition and rates and a wider audience.
The flipside of all of this is that the early adopters of technologies often have a lot to gain from investing a little time and effort into adapting their businesses to suit new communication and marketing mediums, this white paper aims to be the start of your organisations adaptation of a professional, organised approach to the web arm of your business.
One of the common misconceptions regarding promoting your business on the internet is that it is expensive, time consuming and detracts from your core business activities in a detrimental way. The five activities listed in this paper, when implemented, offer your site the chance to thrive with minimal impact on your day to day operations. The value of this is that as more and more people use the internet for a growing number of activities, you and your company will be best placed to take advantage of the commercial rewards.
1 – Get focused!
What do you want your website to do?
An obvious question it seems, but when you start to dig beneath the surface, you begin to realise that your website probably has a multitude of different aims and target audiences. Does your website aim to show visitors how much knowledge you have of a particular product or service? Does it aim to show them why your company is the best / cheapest at doing something? Do you want someone to come onto the website and phone you for more information or to purchase straight from the site, if so, do you make that obvious? A good way start is to look extensively at your competitions websites and jot down what you like and dislike about them. Try to think about what your visitor wants to see and don’t make the site a vehicle for your own ego! There’s nothing that turns the web user off more than reading a company brag about its achievements in sickly marketing blurb.
Provide focus to the people who are going to be adding content to the site by disseminating your aims as widely as possible and not allowing any content that falls outside of these aims to be published, thus retaining your sites focus and ensuring its message remains undiluted.
Another area to focus up is the website’s content, just as you don’t see all of Tesco’s products stacked up in a big pile in the car park, your website shouldn’t shove all of its content in the users face as soon as they hit the “landing page”.
Like Tesco’s, you should have a clean, branded front end to the website, clear segregation of the sites contents and then further segregation within following a logical pattern. The hierarchical categories that you decide upon (the sitemap) will be very difficult to swap around should you decide to change them at a later date so it is important that you take as much time as possible carefully considering and discussing exactly how you wish to organise your site.
Golden rule – Anyone who provides the site with content should know the aims of the site off the top of their heads i.e. “professional, informative and helpful”
2 – Get organised!
You need staff to make your website work! You don’t necessarily need to hire an extra pair of hands (although having a smart, web savvy, full time member of staff to look after and develop the website would be a major advantage).
Assign responsibility for different areas of the site to existing members of staff and have regular progress meetings to ensure everyone is confident about adding to the website in an organised way. Each department from reception to manufacturing can contribute to the overall attractiveness of the website by regularly be adding news articles, blog entries, updating prices/products or services, podcasts, V-casts, white papers etc.
Once you have your meetings up and running on a regular basis, you’ll find that your websites content will start to grow and potential clients will spend longer looking at your website. A regularly updated website also has the advantage of disseminating information throughout your organisation quickly making it easier for departments to cross sell and to create a general sense of inclusiveness.
Golden rule – Update your website regularly! Find an enthusiastic member of staff who will be the main point of contact with your web company and make sure everyone knows to go to them with their web stories / updates etc.
3 – Get tracking
If you had a shop then you’d want to know how many people were coming in everyday, what they were buying, if they were stealing from you, if they were getting lost or confused in your shop and how much they were spending. Getting this information from a regular shop or business is difficult, costly and time consuming but tracking visitors to your website is very simple and can reveal an awful lot about how your website and company is perceived by clients and potential clients.
Tracking visitors to your site also helps you to monitor the progress you are making with your search engine optimisation campaigns and can tell you things such as if your visitor numbers are improving and if the visitors find your site’s content interesting. It is also a very cost effective method of customer profiling and market research, often revealing incredibly useful information about your clients.
Golden rule – Don’t rush into making changes to your site based on your tracking statistics.
4 – Give a lot – gain even more
Like it or not, the internet is all about freedom of choice and information. To get a strong web presence, you need to be prepared to give a lot away and this can be one of the hardest aspects of the internet for businesses to get their heads around.
Taking the altruistic approach to the visitors to your website will reap big rewards if you and your organisation have the patience to see it through. Giving out information in the form of whitepapers, podcasts etc or creating games or useful web applications without hounding your visitor for personal data or money will give your site a good reputation on the web both with human visitors and with the search engines too. This in turn will pay off with extra traffic to your site ultimately resulting in more leads / sales etc.
In reality, letting an employee take half an hour each day to write a blog is something that most traditional businesses would not consider good use of that employees time however, businesses that are comfortable with this concept are the ones who are thriving on the internet today and gaining incredible exposure as a result.
Golden rule – The more you give – the more you get
5 – Get professional
Whether you hire an external agency, employ a specific individual or move an existing employee into a new position, creating a position purely for the management of your web presence is a move that can pay off huge dividends depending on the individual you employ.
Not everyone is cut out to do the job but, with a little bit of research you should be able to find a company or an individual capable of co-ordinating your efforts in creating and promoting your online presence.
The e-commerce survey of businesses has reported year on year rises in both consumer and business spending online since 2000 and with greater take up of broadband and increased security, this looks set to rise even further.
Whichever way you look at it, the internet is going to become increasingly important to your business over the next decade or so and it makes sense to approach to make your approach to it as professional as you possibly can.
Golden rule – Keep up to date with the latest technologies evolving on the internet so your company can be ready to take advantage of them. A good way to do this is by subscribing to RSS feeds from informative websites.
The above approach is obviously flawed yet reflects a large proportion of businesses attitudes to the web in the UK today. MD’s and board members need to focus up on their web presence as historically, any company, large or small, that has stuck its head in the sand when new technologies arrive has been doomed to failure. It’s hard to believe now that the medium of television could once have been looked upon in the same way as the internet is now. There was a great deal of mistrust around advertising on TV and a good number of businesses took an extraordinarily long time to take the leap and reap the benefits whilst businesses that took the lead early on enjoyed lower competition and rates and a wider audience.
The flipside of all of this is that the early adopters of technologies often have a lot to gain from investing a little time and effort into adapting their businesses to suit new communication and marketing mediums, this white paper aims to be the start of your organisations adaptation of a professional, organised approach to the web arm of your business.
One of the common misconceptions regarding promoting your business on the internet is that it is expensive, time consuming and detracts from your core business activities in a detrimental way. The five activities listed in this paper, when implemented, offer your site the chance to thrive with minimal impact on your day to day operations. The value of this is that as more and more people use the internet for a growing number of activities, you and your company will be best placed to take advantage of the commercial rewards.
1 – Get focused!
What do you want your website to do?
An obvious question it seems, but when you start to dig beneath the surface, you begin to realise that your website probably has a multitude of different aims and target audiences. Does your website aim to show visitors how much knowledge you have of a particular product or service? Does it aim to show them why your company is the best / cheapest at doing something? Do you want someone to come onto the website and phone you for more information or to purchase straight from the site, if so, do you make that obvious? A good way start is to look extensively at your competitions websites and jot down what you like and dislike about them. Try to think about what your visitor wants to see and don’t make the site a vehicle for your own ego! There’s nothing that turns the web user off more than reading a company brag about its achievements in sickly marketing blurb.
Provide focus to the people who are going to be adding content to the site by disseminating your aims as widely as possible and not allowing any content that falls outside of these aims to be published, thus retaining your sites focus and ensuring its message remains undiluted.
Another area to focus up is the website’s content, just as you don’t see all of Tesco’s products stacked up in a big pile in the car park, your website shouldn’t shove all of its content in the users face as soon as they hit the “landing page”.
Like Tesco’s, you should have a clean, branded front end to the website, clear segregation of the sites contents and then further segregation within following a logical pattern. The hierarchical categories that you decide upon (the sitemap) will be very difficult to swap around should you decide to change them at a later date so it is important that you take as much time as possible carefully considering and discussing exactly how you wish to organise your site.
Golden rule – Anyone who provides the site with content should know the aims of the site off the top of their heads i.e. “professional, informative and helpful”
2 – Get organised!
You need staff to make your website work! You don’t necessarily need to hire an extra pair of hands (although having a smart, web savvy, full time member of staff to look after and develop the website would be a major advantage).
Assign responsibility for different areas of the site to existing members of staff and have regular progress meetings to ensure everyone is confident about adding to the website in an organised way. Each department from reception to manufacturing can contribute to the overall attractiveness of the website by regularly be adding news articles, blog entries, updating prices/products or services, podcasts, V-casts, white papers etc.
Once you have your meetings up and running on a regular basis, you’ll find that your websites content will start to grow and potential clients will spend longer looking at your website. A regularly updated website also has the advantage of disseminating information throughout your organisation quickly making it easier for departments to cross sell and to create a general sense of inclusiveness.
Golden rule – Update your website regularly! Find an enthusiastic member of staff who will be the main point of contact with your web company and make sure everyone knows to go to them with their web stories / updates etc.
3 – Get tracking
If you had a shop then you’d want to know how many people were coming in everyday, what they were buying, if they were stealing from you, if they were getting lost or confused in your shop and how much they were spending. Getting this information from a regular shop or business is difficult, costly and time consuming but tracking visitors to your website is very simple and can reveal an awful lot about how your website and company is perceived by clients and potential clients.
Tracking visitors to your site also helps you to monitor the progress you are making with your search engine optimisation campaigns and can tell you things such as if your visitor numbers are improving and if the visitors find your site’s content interesting. It is also a very cost effective method of customer profiling and market research, often revealing incredibly useful information about your clients.
Golden rule – Don’t rush into making changes to your site based on your tracking statistics.
4 – Give a lot – gain even more
Like it or not, the internet is all about freedom of choice and information. To get a strong web presence, you need to be prepared to give a lot away and this can be one of the hardest aspects of the internet for businesses to get their heads around.
Taking the altruistic approach to the visitors to your website will reap big rewards if you and your organisation have the patience to see it through. Giving out information in the form of whitepapers, podcasts etc or creating games or useful web applications without hounding your visitor for personal data or money will give your site a good reputation on the web both with human visitors and with the search engines too. This in turn will pay off with extra traffic to your site ultimately resulting in more leads / sales etc.
In reality, letting an employee take half an hour each day to write a blog is something that most traditional businesses would not consider good use of that employees time however, businesses that are comfortable with this concept are the ones who are thriving on the internet today and gaining incredible exposure as a result.
Golden rule – The more you give – the more you get
5 – Get professional
Whether you hire an external agency, employ a specific individual or move an existing employee into a new position, creating a position purely for the management of your web presence is a move that can pay off huge dividends depending on the individual you employ.
Not everyone is cut out to do the job but, with a little bit of research you should be able to find a company or an individual capable of co-ordinating your efforts in creating and promoting your online presence.
The e-commerce survey of businesses has reported year on year rises in both consumer and business spending online since 2000 and with greater take up of broadband and increased security, this looks set to rise even further.
Whichever way you look at it, the internet is going to become increasingly important to your business over the next decade or so and it makes sense to approach to make your approach to it as professional as you possibly can.
Golden rule – Keep up to date with the latest technologies evolving on the internet so your company can be ready to take advantage of them. A good way to do this is by subscribing to RSS feeds from informative websites.
