Website a Marketing Must for Small Business - Part 1
(This article was originally printed in Greater Wilmington Business, August 2006.)
It’s incredible to think that only 13 years ago Netscape, the first commercial browser, was released, setting in motion the explosion of Dot Com companies such as Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo! that have so dramatically changed the business environment.
Does your business have a website? Better question: does your competition have one? You are losing sales and missing out on an exceptional marketing opportunity if you don’t.
A professionally created website is, at the most basic level, inexpensive advertising for your company. At its most advanced level, it can provide information, customer service and sell products while you sleep.
Additionally, many consumers are using search engines like Yahoo.Com or Google.Com instead of the Yellow Pages to find local businesses when making purchase decisions. To test out this so-called “local search”, go to http://maps.google.com and type “plumber” followed by your zip code. Contact information about all local plumbers should pop up with a convenient map. Now, imagine that you are a plumber and, at this critical point in the customer decision-making process, your competitor has a professional website and you don’t. Who is that potential customer more likely to call?
You should first ask yourself whether you’d like to build the website in-house or outsource the task to a website development company. Presumably, you should focus on the core competencies of your business, and let someone else who is more technology and marketing-capable build it for you. The downside is that a professional website can run you in the thousands.
If you are cash-strapped like many small businesses, you may want to build it yourself. This would take an investment of you or your employee’s time to ramp up on graphic design, marketing and programming skills and might distract you from running your business.
Be wary of the tradeoffs- if the first or only experience a customer has with your company is an unprofessional and unappealing website, they may choose to do business elsewhere and may never experience the fantastic customer service and attention to quality that has made you successful.
But, whether you build it yourself or hire someone, you’ll go through the same basic 3 steps; create, maintain and market.
When creating the website, first define objectives, define your target market, and gather your logo, product pictures, and contact information. Then, create a basic layout of the web pages, draft a prototype and, finally, launch the website by alerting media, customers and search engines of its availability. The entire process is iterative in that you’ll continuously refine pictures, text, layout and color scheme until you are satisfied with the result.
Maintaining the site includes changing content to make sure information is up to date and to keep customers coming back. Updates occur at different frequencies depending on your type of business. A restaurant, for example, might want weekly specials updated on one page, while the rest of the site remains largely “static” or unchanged. A consulting service business might have a blog (short for web log) that is updated monthly. (See great example at http://wilmingtonconnection.blogspot.com/. )
Marketing your website includes periodically adding your website to search engines and adding the right keywords, title and description so that your website will show up when customers search for you on Google. Also, you can hire a web design company to provide SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services to improve your ranking in those search results.
In next month’s column, we’ll go into the specifics of choosing a designer to build your site, the steps you’d go through to build one yourself and more specific cost information.
It’s incredible to think that only 13 years ago Netscape, the first commercial browser, was released, setting in motion the explosion of Dot Com companies such as Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo! that have so dramatically changed the business environment.
Does your business have a website? Better question: does your competition have one? You are losing sales and missing out on an exceptional marketing opportunity if you don’t.
A professionally created website is, at the most basic level, inexpensive advertising for your company. At its most advanced level, it can provide information, customer service and sell products while you sleep.
Additionally, many consumers are using search engines like Yahoo.Com or Google.Com instead of the Yellow Pages to find local businesses when making purchase decisions. To test out this so-called “local search”, go to http://maps.google.com and type “plumber” followed by your zip code. Contact information about all local plumbers should pop up with a convenient map. Now, imagine that you are a plumber and, at this critical point in the customer decision-making process, your competitor has a professional website and you don’t. Who is that potential customer more likely to call?
You should first ask yourself whether you’d like to build the website in-house or outsource the task to a website development company. Presumably, you should focus on the core competencies of your business, and let someone else who is more technology and marketing-capable build it for you. The downside is that a professional website can run you in the thousands.
If you are cash-strapped like many small businesses, you may want to build it yourself. This would take an investment of you or your employee’s time to ramp up on graphic design, marketing and programming skills and might distract you from running your business.
Be wary of the tradeoffs- if the first or only experience a customer has with your company is an unprofessional and unappealing website, they may choose to do business elsewhere and may never experience the fantastic customer service and attention to quality that has made you successful.
But, whether you build it yourself or hire someone, you’ll go through the same basic 3 steps; create, maintain and market.
When creating the website, first define objectives, define your target market, and gather your logo, product pictures, and contact information. Then, create a basic layout of the web pages, draft a prototype and, finally, launch the website by alerting media, customers and search engines of its availability. The entire process is iterative in that you’ll continuously refine pictures, text, layout and color scheme until you are satisfied with the result.
Maintaining the site includes changing content to make sure information is up to date and to keep customers coming back. Updates occur at different frequencies depending on your type of business. A restaurant, for example, might want weekly specials updated on one page, while the rest of the site remains largely “static” or unchanged. A consulting service business might have a blog (short for web log) that is updated monthly. (See great example at http://wilmingtonconnection.blogspot.com/. )
Marketing your website includes periodically adding your website to search engines and adding the right keywords, title and description so that your website will show up when customers search for you on Google. Also, you can hire a web design company to provide SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services to improve your ranking in those search results.
In next month’s column, we’ll go into the specifics of choosing a designer to build your site, the steps you’d go through to build one yourself and more specific cost information.
posted by slidesage at 9:26 AM
2 Comments:
I enjoyed your article in Greater Wilmington Business, and will look forward to next months column. Can you give any suggestions or direction on how we get our web site www.thefrontrowkb.com linked to maximize exposure? Are their companies that do it? I have tried to get some information by googling "link exchange", but it doesn't seem to be leading me to where I want to go. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your question.
I would consult with your current web designer (looks like Signal, a fine local Wilmington shop) and possibly some other competitors for their prices and options on refining your website to pop up in the search engines. (Also, check out http://www.theseobook.com - a link recommended by http://www.SageIsland.Com .)
Your main page looks graphics-heavy (very attractive) but content-poor. Possibly, add more helpful information to the content on the main page.
You could also link to all of your local partners including mortgage companies, attorneys, home inspectors, etc. which should elevate the relevancy of your site.
Another thing you could do is add a blog to your website. (Free on blogger.com or if you're hosting on godaddy.com) This will allow you to generate organic content that may boost your ratings in search engines.
Hope that helps!
Thanks,
Matt
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