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Take Back Control Of Your Site
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Author: Tim Giles
Topic: SE-Tactics
Viewed: 69 time(s)
[ Not Rated Yet ]
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Many of you may be aware of a move by organizations to refocus
their efforts into B2B strategies and are pulling back from
their B2C strategies. This is largely because it is perceived to
be safer, is more lucrative in the short-term, and more easily
justified to the bean counters.
I can assure you that true B2C is not dead. It just means that
those who stay will be ahead of the game when the sheep wander
back.
It is important to point out, though, the differences between
B2C and B2B are not that great. It is just the technology and
the environment of those you are targeting that is different...
after all, people in the business sector are still consumers.
Firstly, what is a business to consumer online business? It is
providing an online service to your end-user. Ideally, it
shouldn?t mirror what the offline business is doing but,
importantly, it should leverage and support the business?s
offline activities.
The successful online business does not work in isolation from
the offline business. It reinforces branding, drives sales, but
is not solely revenue driven. A true B2C business will have
online and offline elements.
Firstly, develop a strategy. Within that strategy it is critical
to determine what the organization?s expectations are up front.
Is the online business primarily a?
? Revenue generator ? Marketing
tool for an offline business or a... ? Brand
builder to use as leverage for offline revenue
generation
Once you are ready to build your online business, there are
basic elements to consider ensuring it stays relevant, current
and working for you.
The successful online business includes?
? Relevant and current information. People will
not keep coming back if there isn?t something new or useful to
them.
? Attractive look and feel. It is no different
to the offline world. People expect to read attractive magazines
and enter well-designed outlets.
? Simple user editing capabilities. Have simple
user editing capabilities. This allows you to make simple
content changes to the site without having to pay a web
developer to do it.
? Low ongoing maintenance costs. Have low
ongoing maintenance costs. Often the cost of developing the
business is eventually exceeded by maintenance costs.
? Adaptability. Allow for further content
development and editing. This is critical to ensure the online
business is always dynamic, allowing for changes in your
business and industry.
? Consideration for your audiences technical
infrastructure. Consider your audience?s technical
infrastructure. There is no point having mind-blowing graphics
and content if it takes your visitors 15 minutes to download.
They will lose interest and go elsewhere. The whole point of
going online is the convenience and speed factor.
? Getting the .com. Think globally and get the
.com if you can. The Internet makes the world very small. It
offers a virtual level playing field, which means anyone can do
business on the web, regardless of size... however, ?.com? gives
the impression of ?beyond Australia?.
You?ve built your online business, and need to generate traffic.
But, you don?t have a huge budget.
What do you do?
Public Relations If done well, Public relations
can assist with the branding process, build credibility and
drive traffic to your site. It is a very cost effective way of
raising the profile and credibility of your online business.
Joint Ventures This is more than just link
swapping with other sites. The objective is to develop an
integrated promotional campaign with a site bigger than you so
that you receive a higher level of traffic. However, it is very
difficult to negotiate with a business that doesn?t need you,
and if you don?t have money to burn.
The alternative is to spot an emerging online business. We have
struck gold on a couple of occasions where the sites we have
negotiated joint ventures with now have traffic two to three
times more than our business.
To spot an emerging business you need to do your research. And
this can be done part of the way by monitoring sites like
Hitwise which rates the performance of sites based on traffic.
Permission Marketing Direct e-mail is more than
just forwarding emails to your customers. The onslaught of SPAM,
which is sending unsolicited emails to people, means that
consumers are very sensitive to what is being forwarded to them.
This has seen the emergence of Permission Marketing. More of
this in the coming weeks.
Search Engines Register with search engines.
The only cost involved here is your time. As outlined in
previous editions of ?Directions?, if you apply a generic
branding strategy, you will see even greater returns from search
engines.
Permission Marketing 100 years ago, the world
was populated by small businesses. If you owned a cheese shop
and received a new batch, you would notify the customers you
believed would be interested. It was very much a one-on-one
relationship.
Advertising today = Interruption Marketing The
emergence of national and multi-national organizations,
competitive forces and technology in the 50s and 60s saw the
rise of advertising, and the end of the personal touch.
Traditional advertising is often referred to as interruption
marketing.
Permission Marketing = 1 on 1 and 2 way
Permission marketing gives customers something in return for
providing information about themselves. And as we all know,
information is a powerful asset, as we try to re-establish the
closeness we had 100 years ago with our customers.
Information for information The sorts of things
an online business might offer in exchange for information
includes:
? Information on new products and services based on a customer?s
profile ? Birthday and Christmas greetings ? Newsletters ?
Invitations to special events ? Discounts and special offers
Opt out clause The critical element of
permission marketing is the customer always has the option of
opting out.
What to look out for??
Plan for success Firstly, plan for success.
This may sound strange but you need to ensure your ISP and IT
infrastructure are equipped to deal with large levels of traffic.
We used to use a small Internet Service Provider, but found that
it was too slow and could not handle the level of traffic that
our online businesses were generating.
It was taking forever for pages to download? which meant
visitors gave up and moved on? which meant fewer pages were
being viewed? which meant that the level of traffic rated lower.
At the end of the day, traffic is an evaluation criteria, and
you don?t want external elements like your ISP affecting this.
We eventually moved our hosting boxes to a better ISP. Far more
people were able to access our businesses, but our own IT
infrastructure was unable to cope. Our servers were falling over
every 8 hours. We are currently in the process of upgrading
these servers.
Justifying the effort After building your
online business and establishing your marketing program, you
will be expected to analyze the performance of the business
before moving onto the next stage. There are many products on
the market that can help you with this.
The best strategy is a combination of analysis tools and online
rating sites. The analysis tools allows you to measure the
health and popularity of your business, which URL or web-address
visitors use to try to get to your business, and which pages are
the most successful. One of the best personal analysis tools is
Web trends.
The online rating sites, like Hitwise, illustrate how you are
performing compared to other online businesses, and alerts you
to any PR activity in the marketplace because of the spike in
traffic. The statistics shown in our weekly newsletter are from
Hitwise and are a great measure for the ?health? of our
incubator web sites.
Invest in Security The other thing to look out
for is hackers. We had a mail bomb planted from an external
source that sent out 40 emails per second with one of our online
business?s name attached. This was disastrous because the
content of the email was highly suspect. We were unable to shut
down the bomb for 20 hours even with the assistance of the
Federal Police and Telecommunications Ombudsman. There is a
limit to what you can do, but it is important that every effort
is put into security.
About the author:
Tim Giles is a Pre Marketing
Consultant for Enedia (www.enedia.com). Enedia's
client's include Ansearch (www.ansearch.com.au), an
Australian search engine and directory.
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