Determining the Potential of Your Web Presence

- October 5th, 2008 by Steven Leung

In this article:

Understanding the goals behind your web presence
What makes a web presence successful
Investing vs. advertising, and doing both at the same time

When I talk with people about their Internet presences — not just their websites but the development of their reputation on the Internet — I almost never talk about the underlying technology first.

To me, it’s more important to understand their underlying goals and what people want to accomplish by establishing a presence online. Their goals usually fall into one of three categories, which help shape the framework of the project and how much potential is has for their businesses.

The goals are:

Creating and converting more prospects. Whether you offer in-person services, sell products online, or have both inside and outside sales forces, your web presence must generate more leads, help you evaluate them, and simplify the process of converting these prospects to valuable customers.
Outflanking the competition. Building a powerful online brand not only bolsters your reputation as an industry expert, and allows potential customers to easily locate you, but gives you an edge over more established competitors who haven’t yet established an online strategy. A smart web presence can help build your reputation, making your company look as big as – if not bigger than – the competition.
Replacing or augmenting traditional advertising. A client came to me, frustrated after paying for hundreds of thousands of newspaper flyers and months of twice-hourly radio spots. He told me that not only was this type of advertising enormously expensive, but that he saw no year-after-year difference after giving up on it. Instead, he turned to advertising on a single website – and says he achieved better than 20:1 returns.

He shared with me an insight that an American business pioneer had in the 1860s. John Wanamaker, who revolutionized all business as we know it by being the first retailer with a single price list and a return policy.

He had this insight on advertising, “Half the money I spend is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” We’ll help you avoid Wanamaker’s predicament.

Measuring Your Success and Making Your Business More Agile

We’ll supply you with a set of state-of-the-art online tracking tools which, when integrated with traditional methods, let you see which of your campaigns are working best, in real-time.

This unprecedented access to marketing performance information provides your business with the agility to quickly reallocate resources to campaigns that are performing, and tweak the ones that aren’t — you stop wasting money because you now have the tools to gauge what’s working and what isn’t.

What Makes a Web Presence Successful?

The most successful web presences take potential customers and clients from one level to the next, where each successive level means you’ve established a closer, more invested relationship. Let’s take a look at the four levels.

Level 1 – Converting strangers to visitors

This level refers to people who aren’t yet familiar with your services. They won’t be searching for you or your business by name because they don’t know you yet.

Instead, they’ll arrive at your site from various sources including keyword searches on Google (70% market share in the U.S.; and, so you know which way the wind is blowing, 90% in the U.K.), word of mouth, traditional advertising, and your own marketing collateral.

The most cost-effective way of converting strangers into visitors is to create a site that’s easy for search engines to include in their results pages, using a combination of relevant content and an easily indexed site architecture. This will increase the traffic to your site dramatically over time.

It’s important to support your site using a coordinated search advertising program. That way you can still increase the number of visitors to your website (using paid advertising) while search engines find, index and rank you.

Level 2 – Converting visitors to prospects

Taking those visitors and converting them into people you can contact as part of your sales process is the next level of success. Getting visitors to give you their contact information requires an investment of trust on their part, and an incentive on your part.

When visitors became prospects, they do things like offering contact information, signing up for your newsletter, and calling using a special tracking number. Ultimately, they frequent your business, providing a printout or a coupon that entitles them to discounts or some other sort of special incentive.

Level 3 – Converting prospects into paying customers

Paying customers are the lifeblood of your business and the ultimate measure of your success.

Level 4 – Converting customers into references

How can a website convert a customer into a reference? This is where it’s important to note that a website is just one component in your complete Internet presence.

Bonus Level: Converting customers into references. This means referrals: word-of-mouth business that will ultimately cut down on the need to advertise.

Investing vs. Advertising, and Doing Both at the Same Time

Some businesses have trouble estimating a budget for their online presences. That’s because they don’t know how to measure the success of their websites, or because they don’t understand the full potential of establishing a reputation on the internet.

We gauge potential by walking through:

The lifetime value of a customer. How much can you monetize the relationship with a single new client?
How to create a strong online reputation. That involves more than just your website. It means getting people to talk about your services, and plugging into communities who can raise your company’s profile through word of mouth.
Getting the most from the web by plugging into your current means of getting customers. This is a combination between proven and emerging techniques.
Evaluating your current web presence to determine what’s working, what’s not, and what you need to make things happen now.

Tags: Advertising, Goal Setting, Prospect Conversion, Websites

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