Keep the marketing home fires burning - what your website should do for you

I spoke to someone last week who made an interesting comment. They said ‘our web site doesn’t get us any work or make us any money‘. This alarmed me, so I came back with another question, ‘why have you got a web site then’? The reply was even more intriguing. ‘We had a web site built because we didn’t want to be left behind’. I couldn’t help but think ‘you already have been’. 5 or 10 years ago when the internet was much less populated than it is today, that company would probably have been preventing themselves being ‘left behind’ by simply going to the effort of having a web site created; things are very different now. Its not enough any more to just stick the equivalent of your brochure on line; not if you want this web site to work for you and continually find new customers. More of that later.

In today’s cluttered world of the internet, getting yourself found is just the beginning. For your web site to really work well for you it has got to ‘give’ people something; give them some kind of benefit. This could be information, entertainment, a special offer, just something that they see as a benefit to them and worthy of them clicking onto that button that says RSS Feed, bookmarking you or saving your link to their ‘delicious’ list and wanting to come back again. I have a whole list of sites that I regularly go back to because I know that they will have something new for me to read, learn or otherwise benefit from. Those people work very hard to keep me coming back and they realise the investment they are making in enticing me back is well worth that effort. Sometimes I have bought from them, sometimes I have just passed their address onto my friends and colleagues and often I just find their content of interest or benefit to me. The value for them doesn’t necessarily come from the direct route of me purchasing something. It can be as subtle as this; having me visit their site and linking to them, helps them in their quest to get in front of the people they really need to be seen by. Quality footfall (that is people who stay on a while and read or otherwise consume something from your site) helps in your search engine ranking; we would all like to be top of the relevant Google page.

Perhaps you are too busy already and you barely have enough time to read this post. Why would you want a constant stream of people coming back to your web site? Well, even if you are over run with work at the moment, you should never let your marketing guard down. We have all done it, I know I have. Sometimes you get so busy you become complacent almost looking forward to a ‘minor’ downturn so that you can have a break and get back to some kind of normal life. Backing off the marketing effort is the wrong cure for this particular problem. Markets are constantly changing. When things do get quiet and you wonder why there isn’t much work coming in, it is probably already too late to start thinking about marketing. 

Think of this analogy. You may remember the old coal fire that many of us used to have at home. If you didn’t keep the fire fed with coal and you noticed it was getting cold in the room, the fire was either already out or, if you were lucky, would take a great deal of effort to get going again with a long period of no heat, lots of puffing and lots of smoke. Marketing is coal fired, not gas fired; there isn’t a reliable and instant source of heat that can be turned on and off at will. The fire of sales has to be constantly stoked with the coal of marketing; turning prospects into money can be a slow burn affair. 

Keeping a constant supply of readers happily heading to your web site and consuming its contents is a good thing to have. They may not be ready to buy from you now and perhaps they never will, but they will help with keeping that fire going. Our task is to help you fill those pages and keep visitors coming back for more. - Neil Hickson