Web Business Marketing Blog

Company A needs to develop a website. As good practice prescribes, a project manager and team is established. A budget for content & website development is allocated. The team meets a few times, and develops a specification. Development is outsourced. After x weeks, the contractor comes back with a prototype of about 50-100 screens. A printout is made for review. Comments are made, and after a few iterations, the website is ready for the big launch.

Nobody has thought of promoting the website after launch (and the launch was actually a press release). No web statistical package is in place to track visits. After a few months, when this is put in place, company A checks the server logs and finds out …

Or … company A’s first website is well received internally, and a department manager also wants one of those. A micro-site is set-up for a public relations action. Then another for a product launch. Very quickly, company A has a proliferation of websites, using different templates and technologies, with a high cost of ownership, and almost impossible to maintain. Nobody wants to touch or own the system, and it lingers on and on.

If these stories sound too familiar for comfort, then pray that web-based marketing does not matter much in your sector. The good news is that you can make spectacular improvements.

Company B recognizes its competitors coming out with web presences that appear ‘dead on arrival (DoA)’. Updates are non-existent or infrequent, content is thin, sites are not rss enabled and users are not engaged except for a forum, where the majority of messages are posted by the administrator. While a perfect flash banner brands the site, there is nothing appealing, least of all a reason to ever revisit the site.

So company B chooses a different route. Rather than putting up yet another DoA site, it sets its ambition a little higher. Instead of a stale site that needs continuous effort to drag sullen visitors to it who never come back, company B wants to build the reference site for its industry segment. It wants to be bookmarked in the top favourites of its customers and suppliers who visit the site on a regular basis.

Company B cannot treat its website as a project, where a team meets a couple of times and a manager signs a few invoices for a contractor. It needs to view its web presence as a core function of marketing.

A manager still needs to be in charge. He’d better be marketing oriented with a strong background in web-based communications. Rather than developing a specification for a website, the manager of company B contracts the set-up of a content management system (CMS), which makes the site easy to modify and update. But the biggest challenge is the development of a continuous content stream to animate the site. This means both a system to capture relevant content (intelligence) and a system to process content into messages to market (content development).

Rather than launching all content at once, and rarely update, company B releases stories frequently, with each story a new opportunity to reach and engage users. Because there is always something new, visitors start to come back. Of course, the site is fully optimised for search engines, produces rss feeds, while offering the options for subscriptions for users who prefer email.

Company B’s sales people are enthusiastic. Its content gives them relevant information for their customer calls and visits. Whenever in contact with the customer, they promote the site. Moreover, they provide many of the stories on how company B’s products are used by customers, feeding the site’s content stream. In one year, visits grow a factor 10.

The success has not gone unnoticed by department X (or a sister company, strategic partner, …). They wish to reach out to a similar target group with a complementary offering, but all they currently do is email flash alerts. Department X approaches the web manager to use their system.

It’s a clear win-win. The web manager obtains a complementary content stream relevant to the website’s visitors, which puts the site up even higher in the list of favourites. Moreover, at times, the website had been struggling to find continuously new and relevant content. But department X also wins - at very low marginal cost, they can plug into an existing channel, pushing their messages out to a much larger audience using content that they already have (or at least the intelligence).

Company B’s competitors understand the value of a CMS-based website after company B has developed a content-rich, highly interactive reference web presence. They try to follow suit, but since company B is so much ahead of the learning curve, it is difficult to catch up. Just when company A launches its revised web project, company B comes out with version 2, including rapid e-learning, interactive virtual events, a blog portal, video, podcasting, …

Concluding

Company B is not necessarily right, and company A not necessarily wrong. If all you want is a corporate visit card on the web to occupy your domain name, company A’s approach is the most effective way of achieving that. If you want solution B however, the approach of A is sure to fail.