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Virtual Marketing

Using the Web to reach your customers can be highly beneficial if done right

By Kim Kaiser

The digital world is here to stay. More and more people are using the Internet as their main source of news, to do their grocery shopping and even for designing their new kitchens. So, it’s more important than ever for your company to have a good, usable website.

“I really think websites are being used by consumers more and more before they go into make a purchase,” says Jill Dodge, marketing program director for Wilsonart International. “They want to know more about what they are getting into and want to be more educated before they go into shop. Websites are a pretty big deal.”

In 2006, Wilsonart launched Countertop.com and recently made a number of improvements to the site to better serve its customers. The site takes the point of view of homeowners who might be in varying stages of selecting a new countertop for their kitchen.

However, just having a website isn’t enough anymore. It needs to be a usable website. Having a quality website gives your company a lot more credibility, says William Rice, president of the Web Marketing Association.

“The first time most people hear about your company or your product, the first thing they are going to do is go into the search engines and search for it,” he says. “When your website comes up, if you don’t have a credible look and feel and a professional look and feel to your website, then that’s going to say something about the quality of your products as well.”

Creating a usable, quality website isn’t something you can do overnight. You’re going to have to put some time into it, but the end result will make it worth it. Shari Thurow, search engine optimization director for Grantastic Designs, a full-service Web design usability and search engine optimization firm in Carpentersville, Ill., and author of Search Engine Visibility, says it can take anywhere from one to three months to get a quality site up and running.

BEFORE YOU START
Before you take on the task of creating a website or redesigning your current website, Rice says the very first thing you should do is get help. “You need a professional Web designer who can help build a template and build the infrastructure for you; then if you want to maintain it, I think that is very doable by most business people.”

Keep in mind, however, that websites are not the magic solution to all of your marketing needs. “You still need to have a lot of good products behind it and have a good fundamental business plan in place, but a website really can reach audiences a small business person never could touch before,” Rice says.

The Internet has acted as “the great equalizer” between large and small companies, he says. What’s the reason for this? If a website is good, you shouldn’t be able to tell if it is a home-based company or a multinational conglomerate because the site will cater to the very specific needs of the individual, Rice explains. With the help of the Internet, “a small company that would have had to rely on a regional distributor in the past and forming relationships that way can sell directly to the public if they have the marketing know-how,” he says.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
Knowing and understanding your target audience is one of the most important things you can do, says Thurow. It’s important to conduct key word research on your target audience. Knowing how your audience is searching for your site is one of the best ways you can serve them.

“Key word research involves looking at your website statistics and finding how people navigate your site and discovering how people are finding your site in the first place,” Thurow says. “Talk to your customer services representatives. What are the questions they answer over and over and over again? Are you providing that information on your website?”

Another way to find out more about your audience’s key word usage is to take advantage of the free key word research tools available at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com, according to Thurow.

It’s important to keep in mind that the way you would search for your product is not necessarily the way your target customers will. In order to make sure your site is answering your audience’s questions, Thurow suggests usability testing. Usability testing is a way of measuring how well people are able to navigate your site and complete a task, such as adding items to a shopping cart.

“I guarantee you they’re not going to say what the marketing department says or the boss says or the boss’s wife,” she says. “Usability testing seems like it’s expensive, it seems like it’s a waste of time, a waste of money, but in the end what you are doing is you’re giving your target audience what it wants. So the return on investment is priceless.”

MAKE IT SEARCHABLE
If your website doesn’t show up on search engines, which, Thurow says, many poor sites don’t, then it is almost as if your site doesn’t exist.

Thus, being search engine friendly is integral to your website’s success. Thurow says a site has to include the key words the target audience uses, and, even more so, it needs to appear focused on those key words. A viewability test will help you determine if your site is focused on those key words. Viewability testing is simply showing a person a quick glance at a website to see if they can determine the page’s topic, Thurow explains.

“If I showed a person a website for eight seconds and they cannot correctly identify what the topic of the page is, then it’s probably not search engine friendly and it’s probably not user-friendly either,” she says.

Dodge agrees that making your website search engine friendly is important. “One of the great things with our site is our Web people have done a great job indexing the site, so search engines will pick it up,” she says. “When people search for countertops or Wilsonart, [Countertop.com] pops up very high on Google and Yahoo.”

Indexing is just as important for businesses of all sizes. “I think for cabinet shops and people like that, it’s very important to make sure you are doing the things you need to for search engine marketing,” Dodge says. “Make sure your site really is what it says it is. If it’s Joe’s Cabinet Shop, cabinets should be on there. You should have information on cabinets.”

KEEP IT SIMPLE
Keeping your website simple will help make it more beneficial to your customers. A beautiful elaborate site might be nice to look at, but if it’s not functional, it won’t be a useful tool for your customers. This is a lesson Wilsonart learned after it launched Countertops.com.

“What we really tried to do with the website was to make it much more customer-friendly,” Dodge says. “We were just finding that there was some confusion on different aspects, and while it was very attractive, it wasn’t always very functional. So we were trying to get that fine line between fancy and functional.”

Grantastic Designs follows five rules to Web design: Easy to read, easy to navigate, easy to find, consistent design and layout, and quick to download. Thurow notes that easy to read means easy for the target audience to read, not the developer or someone within the company.

It’s important to understand the demographic of your audience when determining what is easy to read. “If you have an older audience — baby boomers and above — you need to consider your font size; you need to consider color contrasts,” Thurow says. “A lot of people are very, very fixated on ‘I want a pretty site.’ Well, it doesn’t matter how pretty your site is if people can’t read it.”

Dodge agrees. “Sometimes because we’re very familiar with the product and even the site, we may think that things are simpler than they actually are. It’s obvious to us because we know where to look,” she says.

Be sure your company logo and the navigation keys are found in the same place on each page. This is important, Thurow says, because people do not always enter your site via the home page.

“People should know where they are on your site at all times. People can enter your website from any page they want … If they don’t land on the page that has the information they’re looking for, the navigation scheme should provide a means to lead them to what they are looking for,” she says.
Consistency in layout and navigation communicates trust, credibility, dependability and reliability on the Web, Thurow says.

This consistency will also give your site a professional look, which Rice says translates as credibility.

LEARNING MORE & MOVING FORWARD
There are a number of ways business owners can stay abreast of what’s hot in the website world. Rice suggests looking into some of the publications that are specific to Internet marketing, such as MarketingSherpa.com, which has a series of free newsletters and case studies on what is working and what’s not in Web design.

“That’s one organization that I rely on heavily. You get a lot of e-mails during the day, and that’s the one I always make sure I take a look at.” Rice also likes emarketer.com, which provides a variety of statistics that can be beneficial when doing research for your site.

As you move forward on your website journey, keep in mind the process never ends. The best websites are updated all the time, Rice says. He notes that it doesn’t have to be the entire site that is being updated, just parts of it. However, he recommends updating the design every two or three years because what is considered good Web design is always evolving.

“What we’ve seen over the last decade with the WebAward is something that is considered cutting edge one year, by two years you’re still considered OK, you’re probably in the middle of the pack,” Rice says. “But by three years and four years, whether it’s the color pallets or just the look and feel of the site, you tend to need to give it a new look as the design of the Internet changes. It’s like throwing a new coat of paint on your website.”

The WebAward recognizes the best websites in 96 industries and is given out annually by the Web Marketing Association.
Thurow says you should have Web analytic software in place. “You should be at least looking at that once a month,” she says. “Browsers evolve, code evolves, so a site redesign or rewriting is common every two years or so,” she says.
Websites need to be freshened up just like your other forms of marketing on a regular basis.

“Coca-Cola doesn’t show the same commercial every year. People don’t send out the same brochures. People don’t write the same radio ads. Well, you don’t produce the same website year after year after year,” she says. “The idea is to set up a strong foundation. Think about a house. Without that foundation, the house is going to crumble. So if you have a strong foundation, redecorating a room doesn’t take that much [work].”

For more information on the WebAward go to www.webaward.org.

For more information on Grantastic Designs please visit www.grantasticdesigns.com.