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Setting Goals for Your Business Website

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goal-postsThis is the question you should be asking yourself every day:

How effective is your website at achieving the goals you have for your business?

If you do not know the answer, it may be because you have not set your goals properly. Do you know what the purpose of your site is? What are the benefits for you and your business?

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Lets take a look at these questions, and potential answers.

  • Your website should position you as an expert in your field. Perception and reputation are everything to your potential customers and clients. Having a website that effectively conveys that expertise to your visitors improves your visiblity in the marketspace, your credibility as a business-person, and begins to build trust in your products/services.
  • Your website is a starting-point for the identity of your brand. It is a starting point because it is impossible to control all aspects of your brand identity anymore. Your customers have blogs, forums, and Twitter now – where they can and will discuss your product’s price and quality, your customer service interactions, even your advertising strategies.
  • Your website expands your marketspace beyond yesterday’s geographical boundaries. Depending on the products and services that you offer (shipping may be a consideration) you can now offer the services of your business to a global audience, not just the people within a few minutes’ drive.
  • Your website is a tool for expanding your list of potential clients. Due to the expanded nature of the marketspace and the rapidly growing number of people who do their research online before making a purchase. Having an e-mail capture/site registration application on your site can help you to build a list of self-selected potential customers.
  • Your website is a venue for providing value to your market before you ever make a sale. E-books, white papers, product reviews, service explanations – all of these marketing tools can be made available throught your site. For free, or for the price of an e-mail registration. When your visitors see your site (and your business) as value-added then doing business with you is an opportunity, not a risk.

Does your website do these things? If not, do you need help putting them in place? Let us know how we can help.

Agents Are Dead, Long Live the Agents

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From Seth’s Blog: Where have all the agents gone?

Travel agents… gone.
Stock brokers… gone.
Real estate brokers… in trouble. Photographer’s agents, too.
Literary agents?

The problem with being a helpful, efficient but largely anonymous middleman is pretty obvious. Someone can come along who is cheaper, faster and more efficient. And that someone might be the customer aided by a computer.

In the 19th century steam power replaced muscle. The entire world changed. Godin, as usual, is up in the crow’s nest seeing what is out in front of us. And while Heinlein said that “Specialization is for insects“, I agree with Godin that the future does indeed belong to the insect. Or, rather, the entrepreneur with an idea that is specific enough that it still requires expert knowledge, experience, or pure talent to execute.
He also writes that evolving from middleman to frontman means saying “No”.

To thrive in a world of self-service, agents have to hyperspecialize, have to stand for something, have to have the guts to say no far more than they say yes. No, you can’t publish this book. No I won’t represent you. No, don’t take that flight. No, I won’t sell this house, it’s overpriced, list it yourself.

In a world where pretty much anything can be done by anyone willing to put in the effort instead of having to pay someone else agents need to be far more than simply representatives. Mack Collier touched on this subject a while back in his post, “Do You Know the Social Media ‘Rules’” I would submit that the role of the expert consultant and that of the agent are going to continue to overlap and converge until they are indistinguishable.

secret-agentAgents Provocateur

Collier writes:

“Today, companies and individuals are rushing to this space, and it’s exciting to see. And as people discover this space, they are looking for people to give them guidance. Which is often where the trouble starts, because it’s where people start hearing about social media’s ‘rules’. They start hearing about the ‘right’ way to blog, or the ‘correct’ way to use Twitter.“

This is what Agents did in the past, one might even call it the pre-industrial model, when gatekeepers controlled access to markets for buyers and sellers. Today the marketspace is open to (nearly) all via the marvelous tubes of the internet.

  • Publish your own letter to the editor, or the CEO. They will probably see it.
  • Sell your home-made crafts, not to your neighbors, anywhere in the world.
  • Record an album and give it away. Or ask for donations.

What role do the agents play in this, a DIY Marketspace? The agents of the future will be able to tell you the ‘right way’ for you to blog, or the ‘correct way’ for you to use Twitter. Today some are calling them (or decrying them as) ‘Social Marketing Experts’ – perhaps tomorrow the non-charlatans will be known as niche-agents…

What say you? Leave a comment.

What Business Are You In

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Cam Beck from ChaosScenario shares an interesting insight:

: Are you in the business you think you are in?

…imagine you’re Wilbur or Orville Wright, who, in addition to running their own bicycle business, decided to take on the “problem of flight,” which included not only successfully flying a heavier-than-air craft under its own power, but also maneuvering in mid-air.

Oh, and due to a general human intolerance to blunt force trauma and impalement, landing alive consistently was another important issue to solve.

But what business were the Wrights in? Weren’t they just bicycle men?

Well, yeah. But they were so much more than that.

They were even more than entrepreneurs or even inventors. They were all of these things.

But chiefly they were problem solvers who, importantly, were not afraid to try, though they might fail.

Ray Croc, the founder of McDonalds restaurants, is famously known for telling an audience that McDonalds was not in the food business, rather the real estate business.

When you take a step back from the day-to-day operation of your business what does it look like? Are you in the “Marketing Business” or are you in the “Relationship Business”?

Can changing a couple of words in the label change the entire meaning and scope of what you do? What might happen if you changed some other labels in your life and work?