Sometime back I had the opportunity with former employer to lead a web software development project.  This project had languished for some time and was a high profile goal for the company.  Substantial money had been invested to date but the project was not finished and way past due for delivery.  When I took over the project the first thing I did was initiate a 360 degree view of the project to see where it was, what had gone wrong, to understand our goals, and establish task/priorities for completion.

All of this brought me to one conclusion after the analysis, the primary goal of the project had been missed and too much time was spent on secondary goals.  Why do I bring this example up when talking about web marketing?  Simple, most companies do not understand the primary goals of having a website and focus too much attention on secondary goals.  With a clear understanding of the goals, adapting your website/overall marketing to these goals, and measuring your results, you can have a web site that drives sales of your product or service

What are the primary goals of your web site?

Ask yourself these two questions, what are the primary goals of your web site? How does it relate to your overall marketing strategy? We ask these two questions of every company we work with concerning their web presence.  The answers we get vary but most people will say to get more customers to buy from me or my company.  A good goal that needs a lot of refinement and detail, but overall a primary goal everyone should have for their web site. 

The problem is that when we review their web site, it becomes obvious 99% of the time, that their current website and marketing strategy do not support this goal. I submit that every web site should only have two primary goals.  Goal 1) Driving Traffic to your web site. Goal 2) Converting Traffic to leads and sales. Everything you do in your marketing and web site should support these two goals.

You say you are doing this already?  Again our history says that is not the case.  When we ask business owners to tell us how they know this, how many leads is their site producing per a month, how many sales?  They get the deer in the headlights look. 

The first rule of marketing is if you cannot measure it you cannot improve it.

If you have a web site already or are in need of one, you should make sure that you are receiving a report each month that identifies 3 critical measures for determining the success of your web site.  What are the 3 critical pieces of information?  First, you should receive a report showing the number of unique visitors per month.  Too often people focus on hits.  Hits are meaningless for the most part.  Unique visitors are the number of people that came to your website from unique IP addresses.  It represents the number of potential leads you could be getting each month.  Second, you should be able to tell what pages they went to within your site and how long they spent on them.  Finally the third piece of information is how many people asked for more information and were compelled to give you their information in exchange for this information.  This represents the number of conversions.  Taking the number of conversions and dividing it by the number of unique visitors provides you with a conversion rate. Without these key pieces of information you cannot gauge the success of your web site.

Using Your Web Site to Measure the Success of All Your Marketing

Another part of measuring your marketing success is using all your other marketing to drive customers to your web site to perform an action.  Why do this?  Well it gives you immediate feedback as to the success of an advertisement or mailing. 

Think about it this way, most businesses are not open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, or least they think they are not.  The reality is your web site is your business and it is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  So why do most small businesses never put their website on their marketing or better yet focus their marketing on driving people to their web site?  This question baffles me all the time.  By limiting your advertising to ask people to call you when you are not open, you are losing critical conversion unless you have a 24 hour marketing firm answering your phones. Plus, asking people to call can sometimes be intimidating; people might just want more information and not call so they do not have to deal with a sales person trying to sell them something.

By focusing your website in your advertising, direct mail pieces, and other marketing you get the following added benefits:

1.    Immediate Feedback – Every ad or piece should use a unique URL.  Why?  Immediate Feedback.  How, remember the report you should be getting detailing how users use your web site?  Well when you send out a letter or place an ad with a unique URL featured in it directing people to your website for more information, this report will show how many people perform the action requested. We even suggest you use unique URL’s for the same ad placed in different ways.  Say for instance you place an ad on the local TV station and in the newspaper.  By using a unique URL for each, you can tell how many people are coming from each source.

2.    Interactive – Most forms of advertising are passive.  Web sites are interactive and provide the chance to further sell the customer and increase conversions.  Use of videos, offering free reports or information in return for their registration is exactly what you want to happen.

3.    Online and Ready 24/7/365 – Your website is your 24 hour employee.  It is always on, always ready to sell for you.

4.    Convert Visitors to Leads - the potential customer to a lead – Offer free reports or information in exchange for their contact information.  That is one of the primary goals.  By offering something for free in exchange for this information you build leads and gauge interest.

These are just some of the things we do for our web customers.  Our Total Web package includes all of these things discussed her plus more.  We help you align your marketing message with your website to drive people to it and convert them into leads.  Total Web provides a custom web site, with full analytics, SEO, and unlimited custom URL’s for gauging the success of your web site.  All for a low monthly fee that is less than you are paying per month for your static passive yellow pages ad with no upfront development costs.

Do you want to drive more customers to your web site and convert them to sales? 

Visit www.creativeconsultants.net/totalweb to see how Creative Consultants Group can help drive more people to your website and help you convert them to sales!

About Creative Consultants Group
Founded in 1997, Creative Consultants Group provides technology, communications, and information security peace of mind to small and medium-sized organizations by delivering Premier IT infrastructure, Communications, Security, and Web services that utilize the most reliable and advanced systems and processes in the world. Organizations use Creative Consultants Group’s IT management services to keep their businesses running 24×7, to increase reliability and to protect mission-critical data. Creative Consultants Group is a leading provider of IT Managed Services and Communications Infrastructure/Services to the SMB, Healthcare, Financial, and Hospitality markets. Creative is IT for business! ®  For more information, visit us on the web at http://creativeconsultants.net/ or call us at 888-293-4CCG or locally at 843-234-9980.