Improving business operations with great web
It’s important to have an effective website that represents your company well, this is a given. Often people miss out on the potential enhancements a great website can deliver to your business. When we implement a new website for a customer, our strategic approach considers these two important things:
How can your website be a marketing engine
What services can be moved to the web to improve a business
Marketing Engine. The first is obvious, however sometimes certain things get overlooked. For example, consider a service company that spends a quarter million per year in advertising. This company is interested in capturing leads on the web, so they have invested a third of their budget in optimizing their site for search and buying paid ads on Google (PPC). They’ve designed their site to capture leads from strangers searching the web.
What about the rest of that budget? Let’s say the balance is split between a regional cable TV spend and direct mail to past customers. It’s important to reinforce these advertisements with your web site. Every ad should have a call to action (sure, there may be some exceptions). In this case, maybe it is “visit www.our-site.com/special-page to download a coupon for your first visit free”. In both cases, your site’s visitors are already familiar with you, and they are looking for more info. Driving a call to action to your site allows you to measure your ads effectiveness while driving immediate action for your customers.
Moving Tools to the Web. Your business has a variety of functions, some of which include paper, some include the phone. Recently a client in California – a manufacturers rep – asked us to solve a business problem. They were having trouble tracking their sales people and reporting it to their manufacturer clients. We created the sales check in system, a tool built into their website that their sales people can utilize easily on their ipads. The tool collects data on the back end which is used to generate a report to have a clearer visual of how effective (or ineffective) their sales people are in the field, and furthermore, any trends in customer reaction or request that they can adapt to.
The sales check in system not only made it more clear to the client what they were getting, but it also improved the transparency of the sales reps activity, making them more accountable for success, without feeling overly managed.
You ever think about what you can do with the web to improve your business?
