I do quite a bit of marketing training with SMEs and I am constantly impressed by the way many have embraced web marketing, particularly search marketing. Not only have they embraced it, but they are using it very successfully. There is no need for expensive search marketing companies so far as most small and medium businesses are concerned. High end software and auto bidding etc. are techniques which generally use a blunderbuss approach ideal for mass consumer brands. When my company was involved in search marketing for clients we soon realised that manual approaches were far more successful and cost effective for SMEs and B2B companies. So it is little wonder that those same companies, with a little investment in time and learning, can do a great job for themselves
My only caveat would be to get a good marketing strategy in place first, including a good digital strategy to ensure your efforts are on-course and that you are spending your time and money in the right area. A little help here will pay great dividends. And getting a little bit of training will let you hit the ground running and save you making wasteful mistakes.
I’ve already spoken of the problems of evaluating website proposals and so often I have been called in by clients whose lovely websites are just not delivering business results. Often the problem lies in the lack of identifying clear objectives in briefing, or the web developers being unclear of how the site will deliver. It is the underlying structure and architecture of the site that is of critical importance.
What many clients fail to understand is that with modern web standards based sites changing the visual look should generally be very simple. So, your prime criteria in selecting a site should be the structure and whether it delivers technically. If you can get a site that really works for you you can change the visual look easily. Too often the client forgets the business objectives of a site and is seduced by the visual look of it. It’s like going out to buy an economical three door car and buying a gas-guzzling 4×4… because you like the colour. Follow these simple rules:
- Give a clear brief on what you want the site to do from a business point of view (for example, is it to generate responses, build brands, provide technical data, drive customers to outlets?). Build this into your brief and make it the prime criteria for selection.
- Consider how the site will be maintained and updated, in view of you internal resource – put this in your brief.
- Look at other websites that deliver what you want yours to deliver – forget the looks and concentrate on technical delivery and usability – reference these in your brief and compare your developers’ solutions to these best practices.
- When you get a proposed solution that delivers, then look at the visual design. If you don’t like it as the developers to work on it until you are happy. Remember it is far easier to change the visual look than change the underlying coding and structure at some point in the future.
When I first became involved in what we then called ‘new media’ back in the late 80’s, the naive criticism I would have to deal with was along the lines of.. ‘Well we don’t know who’s viewing our site… probably some 14 year old kid in Uzbekistan.’ But today, digital is probably the most measurable medium available. Marketers love it: clients get positively orgasmic when I send them pages and pages of stats. Accurately calculated ROI sends them into paroxysms of delight. The battle for data and accountability is won… so what next? First we have to learn to use the data, but also to extract the more fine grained data. But do we have to be more human centric? Do we have to bring back semantics and meaning… the skills of the creative, the copywriter and art director? Perhaps we may be at the beginning of a new era as the winds of social Internet allow us to build on the hard data with a more qualitative, collaborative approach by listening to the people as well as the statistics.
