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Should your business be on the web? Should you have a Facebook presence, and what should it be? If you have a product or service to sell, is the best place to sell it your own website or are there other places that you can sell? Should you be using paid search? Or SEO? Should your web site be improved before you start these activities, or can you wait?
These are the kind of strategic and tactical web marketing questions that we’re often asked by small and medium-sized business owners and marketing managers. Of course, it’s not possible to tell you now, without understanding your product, your market and how you are visible on the web today. What we can tell you is that unless you have a web marketing expert on staff, you’re probably overlooking some fairly easy and inexpensive wins. Some examples?
- Leisure products company asked about their strategy recently. They were really big on Amazon in their sector, but they’d never thought to use eBay for selling – and eBay is not that big a leap from selling on Amazon.
- Property related business told us that they had retained a company to deliver Social Marketing and were confused about why they spending money and couldn’t see any more visitors; was Social Marketing the right technique or was it a waste of time for them? Turned out that they had no presence on Facebook, or Twitter, or LinkedIn – their agency regarded Social Media as solely being article writing for article syndication networks, a strange diversion from what Social Marketing really is about.
- Business services company told us that they knew that the web was working for them, but they didn’t know where and how the prospects found them and whether they were getting all the leads they could from the visitors that they were getting – could we help them find out why they had business and optimise it?
- Manufacturing business wanted their eCommerce website upgraded and their staff trained both on the new software and in the use of “lean manufacturing” principles applied to web marketing (gradual improvement through repeated changes).
When you’re a small or even a medium-sized business, you can’t afford to flail around in the dark. Sometimes you just need a short discussion about what your options are, with someone who’s been there and done it before. Sometimes you need some technical expertise to overcome the objections your own technical staff may have about doing more on the web. We’re here to help you with a rapid assessment of what you could be doing. We do have a few services that we can offer you, too – but we’re as happy to help you bring your own staff up to speed and check what they’re doing, as to do stuff ourselves, or to brief your web designer on the changes they should make.
We’ve worked on SME business web sites and strategy since 1994 – when our founder set up his first commercial website for a product company he’d set up in the USA. We’ve seen pretty much everything, from websites accidentally wrecked by web designers, through web sites that don’t tell visitors what the company sells, to businesses that have been banned or suspended by Google. We’ve brought them back from the brink – sometimes with as little as a few hours work, and sometimes involving months of effort.
We also do more pinpoint work for larger companies – typically troubleshooting web servers and web sites for unexpected SEO, paid search, conversion rate or web analytics problems. Tiny technical and content changes on large scale websites can have dramatic effects on site visitor rates, conversion improvement, and return visit rates. Changing the colour on a single item on the page can dramatically improve conversion rates for example, or fixing a small but persistent 404 (page missing) problem may boost traffic by more than 25%. We can’t guarantee that you have equally simple changes to make, but unless someone looks, you’ll never know!