According to the 2010 U.S. Small Business Attitudinal Survey, 66.5% of small businesses ranked the following 3 areas as trouble spots in their business.
- Marketing
- Sales/new business
- Growth planning/business growth
If you find yourself nodding your head in agreement, let’s take a closer look.
Marketing/sales and business growth tend to be tied together so let’s focus on the 1st of these worries—marketing.
Traditional Marketing is Expensive
The traditional marketing model–yellow pages, billboards, radio, newspaper, magazines and tv ads–holds that you put out a lot of money for a glossy spread and hope it drives sales. If your ads bring in dollars then your business grows. This approach is working less and less for businesses large and small.
In fact, the July 2009 Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey found only 14% of people trust advertisements. Not much surprise there. Consumers have gotten savvy.
However, 78% trust the recommendations of peers. So, even if you can afford traditional marketing, you may be cutting back and channeling your marketing budget into online media—done right, it’s cheaper and more effective.
The “New” Marketing is Online
Websites/online advertising/social media does cost money but it’s a lot less than the traditional methods.
And, while most companies have a website by now, most of them don’t contribute significant dollars to the bottom line. The reason why is so many companies don’t have the fundamentals down when it comes to their website.
Here are 5 Website Fundamentals That Are Surprisingly Overlooked:
Pretend you’re a first time visitor to your site. Try to look at it through their eyes, is your site:
- Easy to use?
- Clearly focused?
- Have converting copy?
- Search Engine Optimized?
- Do you test regularly?
These are each crucial to a successful website.
Let’s look at these five pieces in more depth.
1) Ease of Use—if you have lots of graphics competing with your text, too many links, too many options for your visitors—download this, watch that, buy this, oh, and don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter! You’re confusing your visitor. Confused visitors leave. Never to return.
2) Clear Focus–Keep your pages focused with one goal per page. Goals can include fill out a form, download your white paper, post a comment on your blog, etc.
3) Converting Copy—Of course traffic is the lifeblood of any site but if your copy doesn’t convert those visitors into sales, you’ve just created a site for entertainment. And that doesn’t help your bottom line!
4) Search Engine Optimized (SEO)—While SEO can cover a lot of areas, at its basic level, it includes keyword research and writing your content with those keyword phrases strategically located throughout your pages.
You have to include the same keyword phrase in your title, your description and your metatags of each page. Without this, your website will be a virtual Titanic–sinking fast.
5) Test — By including Google Analytics on your webpages and having someone review them regularly and keep notes, you’ll learn which pages are successful and which ones need improvement.
Testing becomes even more crucial as you get into online ads and social media.
If you’re not happy with your website’s performance and you want a full report of the good, the bad and the ugly, then give me a call for a website audit.
For your free 30 minute consultation, just give me a call at 267-265-7291 (EST) or send me an email to set up a time. I look forward to talking with you.
