Is your website undermining the effectiveness of your advertising and promotion?

It used to be so simple! In the ‘old’ days, you would promote your small business via your chosen methods and channels and sit back and wait for the phone to ring or customers to swing by your store, showroom or office.

For some businesses, you could plan your two or three promotional efforts for the year, then set it and forget it. Letting you get on with what you do best.

Now thanks to web pioneers like Tim Burns Me and Mark Sucker-born-every-minuteberg the old costly but ultimately simple methods of promoting your business have been replaced by crazy, complex and conspiratorial newfangled online methods that nobody older than 15 has time to grasp and understand, let alone execute.

Meaning you have to put aside the very thing that puts food on the table.

Websites: a vital cog in the commercial machine

But like it or not, the online world now has a major say in how well your business performs, whether it be in streamlining your business processes, presenting the reviews from your customers to providing you with an exciting new channel to market.

One critical factor that you may not have considered is the role of your website in not only providing information about your business, but providing it with all important credibility and ‘tangibility’.

In the recent past, it was mainly the ‘online only’ businesses that needed to prove this credibility because they didn’t have a traditional business to call or visit to ‘prove’ they could be trusted with your dollar.

But as more and more people use the web to not only find a real world supplier but find out more about them, businesses that have been around for decades also need to present a credible online face.

Customer expectations grow more rapidly

Because just like every communications medium before it, online production values – the quality aesthetics that provide businesses with an edge over their competition, increase.

In turn, so do the expectations of customers, who quickly come to expect a reasonable level of quality before they will entertain doing business with you.
For example, who hasn’t been discouraged from patronising a business due to a sub-standard piece of advertising?

At the same time, more and more people are using the web, often via their mobile phones, as their very first connection with your business.

It’s been reported that up to 80% of the entire population will peruse a business’ website before setting foot into their physical presence, picking up the phone or shooting them an email.

And why wouldn’t they? A good website should provide them with all they need to know about the business at their own pace and time prior to succumbing to the clutches of an over zealous salesperson.

Poor website = poor credibility = poor conversion

The implications of these developments on businesses shouldn’t be underestimated.

Because if an increasing number of customers are visiting your website prior to making contact with you, it may well represent your last opportunity to impress them before they click off to a competitor.

It also means that all of the time and money you’ve invested in promoting your business both online and off could well be a complete waste if time if all your prospects are doing is abandoning your website almost as soon as it has downloaded.

So close but yet so far…

Of course for some, their online situation is even worse. Those that don’t even have a website.

These days that is simply commercial suicide for all but the most convenient of convenience stores.

Giving people what they want online

So what do your customers want online?

That’s really the subject of another blog post, but in brief it can be summed up in the acronym CRRAC:

• Content: the information about your business and its products and services – the more the merrier.
• Reliability: pages and features which work fast and well.
• Response: a mechanism to ensure the customer gets what they want as quickly and smoothly as possible.
• Aesthetics: looking professional and appealing.
• Currency: up-to-date information.

So how well does your website retain and convert the customers you’ve worked so hard to attract?

The best way to find out is to grit your teeth and get hard, honest feedback. No, not from those who have a vested interest in pleasing you but those who are going to be frank and upfront about it.

Your loyal customers could be a great place to start.

Have you experienced improved sales results following a website renovation? Tell us your story below.

In addition to being a leading eBusiness educator to the smaller business sector, Craig Reardon is the founder and director of independent web services firm The E Team which was established to address the special website and web marketing needs of SMEs in Melbourne and beyond.