Michael V. Mahoney -
Transform Your Website into a Marketing Powerhouse

Transform Your Web Site into a Marketing Powerhouse

Wednesday, August 24, 2004 by Mike Mahoney

Now that nearly all companies have websites, the real competitive advantage lies in making sure your website is functional from a marketing perspective - not just providing a series of product brochures in cyberspace. It can be a powerful tool to interact with readers and gather marketing intelligence information about:

• where your potential customers are located,
• how interested they are in your offering,
• how ready they are to buy,
• which styles or models or product grades are most attractive,
• how they heard about your brand, and
• how receptive they may be to pricing and promotional offers.

But harnessing the power of the Web is easier said than done.

Simply posting a website will not generate vast numbers of new customers. Many business people don't understand that "if you build it, they will come" is not the way a one-to-one medium like the Web works. Traditional methods (advertising, direct mail, trade shows, public relations) still must be used to drive people to the Web to find out more about your company and its offering. Searching on the Web is akin to picking up the phone - it is an action that is the result of previous brand awareness investment.

The Marketing Funnel

Marketers often speak in terms of a 'funnel': the universe is first broken down into a pool of potential customers, then further into those who are aware of your brand, those who have interest in it, those who have developed a preference for it, those who are buyers of your product/service, those who are satisfied and become loyal, repeat buyers, and finally those few who become evangelists or advocates on your behalf. The focus of marketing is to increase the diameter of the funnel at each stage to increase the percentage of potential customers converted to buyers.

Advertising is the primary tool to build brand awareness among potential customers. Your website comes into play for those who are already at the awareness or interest phases. A functional marketing website is designed to provide incentives for moving people down the funnel to the next phase nearer to buyers. The sales process and post-sale phases have the job of turning buyers into repeat buyers and, if you're lucky, evangelists.

Different content sections of your website work on audiences at different stages. "About Our Company" should be aimed at turning aware readers into interested readers or turning interested readers into those with a preference for your company as they learn about your scope, reliability, geographic coverage and culture. Product information or on-line catalogs take readers from interest or preference a step down the funnel if they are successful in matching their needs for products and services with your offerings, pricing and availability. Warranty information and return policies reassure them that they're making the right choice. Feedback forms, bulletin boards and customer support content increase the likelihood of customers returning in the future. And customer testimonials strengthen relationships with featured customers (making them evangelists) as well as building empathy with prospects poised to become buyers.

Tactical Content Tips

Good design is always appropriate - navigation must be presented consistently on every page (and organized so there are no more than three clicks to any key page), pages must load quickly, text must be easy to read (use headings, sub-headings, bullet lists, etc. liberally) and the layout must be clean and straightforward. But there are many tactics you can use to make your website a driver for converting prospects to buyers.

Make Your Site Findable

Design your site for search engine optimization so it can easily be found by readers at the awareness stage. Use HTML text wherever possible; GIFs, JPEGs and JavaScript mouseovers for headings and navigation menus give designers control over fonts and look stylish but they reduce the word count on which search engines index. The same goes for Flash animations. Make liberal use of ALT IMG tags to give search engines a handle on your content.

Clearly articulate your company's offering and marketing position, especially on the home page. "Company XYZ, based in Pittsburgh, PA, is the leading manufacturer of telekinetic control devices in the Eastern U.S." is much better than "Welcome to the Company XYZ home page" as lead-in text.

Pay careful attention to META tag keywords and descriptions to assist search engine indexing robots.

Register your site with key search engines. Considering buying sponsored placements for search engine key words.

When you advertise, don't overlook the Web. Banner ads, sponsored key words and mutual links with business partners like suppliers, distributors and dealers can boost your visibility on search engines and drive traffic to your site.

Try to reuse advertising materials developed for other media on your website. Place Adobe Acrobat PDF copies of your print ads on the website, for example. Digitize and post clips of any TV spots (but check with your agency for re-use fees first). You may even choose to make separate web entry pages for specific ads. That allows you to track the number of page views on the web address for each ad separately and helps you gauge the effectiveness of different media.

A lack of consistency in message across different media gives your prospects the impression that your right hand doesn't know what your left hand is doing!

All your product packaging, warranty registration cards, TV/print advertising, trade show booths, vehicle signage and press releases should prominently feature your web address. Simple things can be very effective - you depend upon these tools to encourage potential customers to take the next steps and become aware and interested in your offering.

Keep Your Site Up-To-Date

Once readers find your site, nothing promotes a stronger image of an active, growing market leader than a bevy of recent listings on "What's New" and "Press Releases" web pages. If prospects see you have done nothing of interest since last March, they will not have a good impression of your firm.

Promote appearances at trade shows, industry events or charity affiliations. Demonstrate that your company is interested in the community to which your customers belong. Trade show invitations and post-show press releases draw attention to your active participation in the industry and can showcase your new product introductions. "Cause marketing" is huge topic worthy of separate study, but if your company participates in good causes make sure your readers get the opportunity to learn about it. A good example is Hyundai's support for the Jimmy Fund of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (see http://helping.hyundaiusa.com/). Similarly, highlight any "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" activities if your marketing strategy includes a focus on "green" or environmental concerns (see examples at Hewlett Packard or DuPont™ Corian©).

Update your website content whenever you update your print literature. Inconsistency between print and web product information will result in customer dissatisfaction and costly calls to your customer service operators: "Your website didn't say you offer the Model 351 in Chartreuse but I stopped at Home Depot and saw it on the shelf! Get your act together!"

Trade Information with Prospective Customers

Potential buyers may be very willing to trade personal information for information about your offering, the industry or product applications. Offer a white paper or booklet on "How to Select the Right Widget" if you're in the widget industry and set up a form so interested readers must register or at least give you their ZIP code before downloading the booklet. You will collect data on the location of your prospects and determine whether or not you have dealers nearby to meet demand. If the offer is sufficiently attractive to prospects you may get them to register and request a sales call or appointment. A campaign I recently designed and implemented won 100,000+ requests for a kitchen-design magazine. Roughly 35% of the requesters qualified as leads - and follow-up surveys showed 22% of them purchased the product within 12-14 weeks.

If it's important to your business, consider using a website as an alternative to warranty cards for registering a purchase. This can also be a valuable resource for quality surveys or to target for repeat customers.

Of course any kind of registration must be backed up by clear communication to the reader about your intended use of the information. Let him/her know what to expect - a print brochure mailed to the registration address, a coupon redeemable at the local retailer, an e-mail newsletter subscription for three monthly issues, a call from a salesman - be explicit. The reader must give his/her permission if the data is to be used for future e-mail or newsletter mailings or anything beyond the immediate transaction. Your website must have a "privacy policy" and "terms and conditions of use" statement. You will need help from a legal consultant with this type of work, especially in light of recent concern over spam and the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (see http://www.privacy.org/, http://www.epic.org/, http://www.sarbanes-oxley.com/ ).

Appropriate reader permissions allow you to build e-mail or direct mail target lists that help build customer loyalty and interest in future product or service offerings. List maintenance is worthy of a separate article; readers tend to create and dispose of e-mail addresses from HotMail, Juno or AOL far more frequently than they change physical addresses. And keeping up with COA (Change Of Address) notifications for physical mail is an administrative nightmare.

Coupons can be a good idea. The hard part in making downloadable or printable coupons pay off lies in the redemption process. A 10%-off coupon might be worthwhile if your retailers or distributors can be relied on to return the redeemed coupons to your marketing team. Such a tactic can help you gauge the effectiveness of your web advertising versus other advertising media.

Be wary of contests or sweepstakes - they can also be effective but they require professional legal assistance to ensure compliance with local, state or national laws governing commercial use of tactics depending upon chance. Remember, the Web is global - English language content may have readers throughout the world. Instructions must be very carefully worded and eligibility rules must be explicit.

Integrate Your Message Across Multiple Media

Take care to ensure consistency between what you tell customers on the website and what you tell them at your trade shows, on your TV ads, in your print literature and wherever else your messaging appears. When updates are made in one place they must be made everywhere else. This is especially true for time-sensitive promotional information like effective dates or expiration dates.

Use your website address as a call to action - "find out more at http://www.whatever.com" - and interpret website traffic as evidence of success in your messaging elsewhere. You can afford to present more detailed information on the website than potential customers can parse in a glance at a print ad or can take in from a 30-second TV commercial. Remember, you are trying to move potential customers to the next stage.

Set up separate entry pages for each media or for each advertisement. For example, refer TV viewers to http://www.mycompany.com/tv1 or http://tv1.mycompany.com and magazine readers to http://www.mycompany.com/magad1 or http://magad1.mycompany.com. Those pages may be identical to your company's home page or may be tailored to address readers coming from those different sources. Regardless, your web statistics tracking will give you insight into the effectiveness of the different media and allow you to calculate the cost per visitor. This will help you manage your advertising spending effectively.

Regional and Translation Issues

Marketing functionality on websites must be especially sensitive to the needs of regional audiences. The success of specific programs may vary widely. Like content, tactics must be customized to be successful - and help from business partners in each region/country is critical.

Trade Shows or Trade Fairs

For example, trade shows or trade fairs may be more important to your business in different regions. In my last assignment, trade fairs were a more effective marketing vehicle for the client's products in Europe and in the Asia Pacific region than in the United States. We ran pop-ups or cookie-driven redirects for readers entering the site from those regions to press releases announcing upcoming trade shows. When the trade shows occurred, we added photos and news about the shows. The information was retained for several months after each show to highlight the client's participation and to place the client in context as an industry leader. For some of the trade fairs in Europe, separate "sub-sites" were maintained for long afterwards, highlighting the displays used as a means of promoting artisans championing this particular product. The U.S. marketing team felt far less strongly motivated to use such tools.

Promotions

Promotions occurring in non-U.S. regions in the English language were similarly set up for this particular client. Since English was widely used as the language of commerce in Asia Pacific for this particular industry, great care was taken to clearly articulate which particular promotion was under way in which particular countries. The time-sensitive nature of promotions dictated that each promo page was loaded when the promotion began and was removed once the promotional offer had expired. Coordination with all participating value chain partners was carried out by marketing communications professionals in the region. The promotion in India specifically listed the participating distributors.

English Is a Double-Edged Sword

On one hand, English is so widely used throughout the world that you may expect global readership from an English-only site. But product specifications and availability may vary quite widely from region to region. Ranking high in a search engine like Google may successfully drive readers the world over to your site, but they may not always enter it in the way you desire. It can be quite frustrating to your customer service staff if 30% of U.S. readers are viewing the product catalog intended for Europe. They receive incorrect information about products and support and you will incur costs to sort out the misdirected readers. You may wish to deliberately restrict search engine indexing robots so readers will enter your site only through the appropriate portal pages for their regions.

Regional preferences for units of measure (metric), differences in date representations ("26 August, 2004" vs. "8/26/04") and lack of Anglicized terminology ("color" vs. "colour") may alienate readers and make them uncomfortable. Metric units of measure may actually be legally mandated in some areas.

You may find it necessary to post region-specific versions of your English-language site or even find it helpful to have specific sub-sites for individual countries. Obviously, this makes site maintenance much more complicated and expensive.

Other Issues

Professional assistance in each region may be required for help in submitting your site to search engines. South Korea has a very high national penetration for broadband Internet connections and a skilled computer-using society. It was critical to enlist regional aid to boost a client's site visibility in Korea - but traffic multiplied within a matter of months.

Be particularly sensitive to industry jargon in each region. For one client, a specific product was installed by certified fabricator/installers. The Spanish term in Europe for this particular player in the value chain was quite different than the term in used Latin America.

Use the right languages and character sets for key audiences. Traditional Chinese may be widely used in Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia, but we received feedback that Simplified Chinese was more appropriate for use in the mainland. Listen to your local contacts.

New products may be introduced on different schedules depending upon region. Press releases and "What's New" portions of your site may require regional maintenance.

Be prepared to carry through the implied promise to your readers - if you have a Korean-language version of your site, you must have processes and resources in place to answer e-mails and phone calls in Korean. This sounds obvious but business managers don't always see the forest for the trees. One client I worked with ultimately removed both their French-Canadian and North American Spanish-language site segments several months after launching them because they did not have the resources to respond to customer queries in those languages!

Transformation Requires Continuing Effort

Once you have analyzed your particular challenges and redesigned your site you must budget to continue the effort. Many marketing communications organizations still do not treat websites as continuous rather than batch productions. They are accustomed to engaging an agency to produce a new piece of print literature or to execute an advertising campaign using traditional media. They ramp up, produce and publish the work and then close the book on it. More effective organizations perform an after-action review to judge a campaign's effectiveness and capture key learnings.

But websites are more like 24-hour automated radio stations than print literature. Once set up, the thing keeps on running. Obsolete information must be pruned. New information must be added. It can require continuous attention between major revision efforts.

As communications professionals in a society becoming increasing global in scope we must remind our business partners of the unique nature of this medium. We can never completely rest. Somewhere, a competitor is paying close attention to their website, making it easier to find in Google or Yahoo! or making their content more closely-attuned to readers who may be your customers. We must play a key and vigilant role to make the Web a truly successful marketing tool.