Your website needs to be the hub of your company’s online presence. If it isn’t, either it’s not capable of doing that as it is, or it’s not being used to its full advantage.
As with any marketing plan of messages and calls to action, your website needs to be assessed on a regular basis to see if it’s still relevant to customers and the market it’s competing in.
Unless you have unlimited capital and people, we recommend you don’t try to launch a website that does everything up front, especially if you’re a new business.
We’ve found that taking an iterative approach for websites allows everyone to take in and understand what each piece is doing and its importance to the overall marketing goals. It also allows you to be nimbler and more responsive as your business’ priorities grow and evolve. Less massive rework in favour of tuning and tweaking.
MARKETPLACE
Despite the thinking and plans you’ve made to develop your vision – and the clarity that helped you sell it to your investors and early customers – the marketplace is going to shape your business. You may have intended for the company to operate in a certain way, but it’s from your customers’ responses where demand emerges.
There are things you can do to influence demand, but the line of least resistance will come from listening to the customers you can access. They will tell you what they’re looking for in a combination of feedback and controlling access to their wallets. Your early traction will come from providing what they believe they want.
Many companies stall because they believe they know what customers need and want and hang stubbornly onto any misconceptions they may have for too long. If you opened a salon for classical music, but everyone in your area wanted country & western, you’re either going to adapt, or struggle to survive in that market, pardner.
Adaptation doesn’t mean a complete about-face. If you want to change how things are done, merge first, learn the rules of the road around you, and pick up speed as you go. Get in the flow, then influence change. Doing so means you’ll be different than you’d originally intended, but remember what is at the core of what you want to achieve and realize everything else is adaptation to the environment you’re in.
The core thought here is don’t put all your marketing budget into an overblown online presence before it’s been tested in the real world, because you will need a chunk of that operating capital for reality checks.
Let your customers and your nimble response to them define your business’ direction. And seek objective advice from outside marketing experts as needed.
EVOLUTION
Business owners continue to underestimate the importance of ongoing updates to web presence.
With the thought of keeping their operation as lean as possible, businesses curb what at first appear to be overhead expenses to survive during tight times. With their heads down, bracing against external forces, they don’t see that this is not a good strategic choice. They lose their feel for what’s going on in the market and, before you know it, they’re not confident in their messaging because they’ve discounted what marketing does to feed warm leads into sales funnels.
They tell themselves they’ll catch up when the dust settles. But, meanwhile, the game is changing around them, and they’re losing their relevance by increments that go unnoticed. No matter how accurate, insightful, and of the moment their content was when it was created, our completely networked world is not going to stop changing just because they hit pause.
Their inaction means they have become the latest stepping stone for their competition. The most active among them will now judge their next steps by how far ahead of them they can position themselves. Stand still and people will forget who they are and why they were relevant.
Questions to Ask About Your Business
- Did your company launch, or expand online in the last two years?
- How many times have you refreshed your design during that time?
- Are you ranking well in organic search?
- Are your social media channels unified in their message? And are they driving business growth?
- What about your online ad spend; is it returning a minimum of 5:1? If not, why not?
As they say in the Tour de France, “If you’re not advancing, you’re going backwards.” Perhaps it’s time to speak with us about how to get you moving forward again.
FOCUS
Have you ever made additions or changes to address a symptom, but disregarded the underlying problem?
Websites tend to be like that. In fact, they’re digital reflections of the business’ physical operations. Just like it’s said that a cluttered desk betrays a disorganized mind (debatable), an unfocussed online presence shows a lack of attention to marketing detail (very true).
You’ll let it deteriorate until even you’ll admit something must be done about it. It’s time for a spring cleaning – digital style.
But where do you start? You can call us. We won’t care about the way we find it. We’ve seen worse. We’ll just want it to work the way it’s supposed to. We help you keep the good bits and dispose of the bad.
You’ll find there’s value just in talking. Often, you can sense what is wrong, but haven’t had a good sounding board to bounce ideas off. Based on your needs and our experience, we’ll lay out a plan to address the issues, and revise processes to minimize barnacles regrowing on the hull of the ship you help steer.
CONSISTENCY
People often make the mistake of altering their objectives without due consideration of the strategic master plan. Smaller subtle changes have the effect of luring you into believing there is no fundamental hazard to making larger ones that can take you far away from where you wanted to be.
Imagine this: you’re driving down the highway and you notice your vehicle is pulling to the left. In the short term, all that means is that you’ll pull the steering wheel a little to the right to keep you in your lane. No big deal, as long as you get the vehicle into the shop for a realignment as soon as possible. But you wouldn’t climb out the window and attempt a realignment while driving down the freeway.
Objective hopping – or swapping out objectives without due consideration to the underlying strategy – is not a good way to go. Start with the strategy and work your way out. Don’t take what seems to be the easy way. At a minimum, it will create inefficiencies or messaging breakdowns elsewhere in the system – not the kind of experience your users will appreciate.
Centralize control over all your marketing – particularly your online strategy. If you don’t have the capacity in-house, let us show you the cost effectiveness of bringing in someone like us.
Despite all the optimistic enthusiasm that can surround a business and the people passionate about running it, we all know the statistics on business successes and failures. What may not be so obvious is that success goes to those best able to accommodate the variables – and let’s face it, until your venture hits the ground and sticks, there is no track record. Everything is a variable.
We know this. That’s why we always recommend a managed approach to your online presence. Let our experience be your good experience.
Infinity Reef is a small, nimble agency that outperforms for its size and responds well to client engagement and collaboration. Contact us and we’ll be happy to have an unhurried, in-depth conversation with you.
