10 Home truths about Web Marketing 18/05/2009

Consider these 10 home truths about websites that the shiny suited website sales rep may have overlooked in his Powerpoint presentation.

1. All markets are finite. Few businesses can successfully transact globally through their website therefore you will always be limited by the key question – Who can you sell to?

2. Search engines are not level and fair playing fields, however optimising websites for better performance is not rocket science.

3. The key to online success is content and the best person to produce that content is you or your team. If you do not have browser based administration of key website content then your site is a museum piece, or worse still a headstone.

4. On average websites lose 70% of their traffic with every click. Therefore most of your website visitors will not get past the page they arrive on. Any dollars spent on improving this will return greater rewards than buckets of cash thrown at online advertising.

5. Website advertising is a numbers game. Lower your expectations. Unless you are generating millions of page views a month you will be unlikely to generate a fortune from on site ads. They should be considered a supplemental revenue stream not a panacea.

6. The average abort time for website visitors is around 10 seconds. If your site takes longer to load on slow connections you will be losing visitors. Many broadband users are on capped monthly plans and at any given time a significant number of users will be effectively accessing the internet on dial up speeds. Factor in mobile access from handheld devices and the situation gets much worse.

7. The marketing game does not end with a visitors successful arrival on your website. This is not a conversion. A conversion is when they make a booking, spend some money, sign up to your mailing list or take some other action that takes them a step closer to transacting with you.

8. Sometimes you have to don the chicken suit and dance alongside the highway to get attention. Online you are simply one of many options. You need to stand out from the crowd before they click through to your website.

9. Your website could be the problem. There is nothing more doomed to failure than bad service successfully advertised.

10. The web is simply a new medium not a new marketing system. The best results flow from incorporating the web into a businesses global marketing plan rather than trying to tack it on or run in isolation.

Now much of this is of course simply common sense. What we are really talking about here is a consistency in thinking, the ability to break down each decision touch point into the key ingredients that manage a customer through to a desired outcome.