Technology: Making Your
Web Site Earn Its Keep

Julie Britt

A Web site must be carefully planned and executed to fulfill its marketing mission. Its content, look, and navigation should enhance the offline marketing activities designed to introduce your organization to new customers and
encourage repeat business.

Julie Britt is an independent marketing consultant based in Columbia, South Carolina, serving clients in South Carolina and the Southeast. After 25 years of experience in traditional marketing, she began applying her expertise to the “new” media of the Internet some six years ago. She has previously served as Director of Public Relations and Account Executive at Rawle/Murdy Associates in Charleston, Vice-President for Marketing for Bobbin International, and political media consultant at Chernoff/Silver. For more information, visit her Web site at www.juliebritt.com or call 803-790-5771.

An online Internet presence has become a necessity for most businesses and organizations today—a powerful addition to the traditional media arsenal of advertising, direct mail, and public relations. Yet because the Internet is new and unfamiliar to many decision-makers, they often allow technology, rather than their business plans, to define their organization’s Web site.

It amazes me that successful businesspeople spend money on an online presence without the due diligence and planning they wisely conduct in the offline world. The very same people who would not dream of spending money on a big-budget advertising campaign without careful research and clear marketing objectives abandon that critical process when it comes to their Web sites—allowing their online marketing strategy to be dictated by Web technicians rather than their own intimate knowledge of their organization and market.

The result: poor return-on-investment, disenchantment with the Internet as a medium for generating and keeping business, and a Web site that doesn’t earn its keep.

No sane business executive will break ground on a bricks-and-mortar presence without studying location and cost, and without hiring the professional architectural and construction assistance required for a successful result. Considering that an online presence will likely draw more visitors than an office, your Web site’s architecture—and the information it delivers through user-friendly site navigation—is critical to positive return-on-investment and fulfilling expectations.

A Web site must be carefully planned and executed to fulfill its marketing mission. Its content, look, and navigation should enhance the offline marketing activities designed to introduce your organization to new customers and encourage repeat business. Appropriately, traditional media should actively promote the Web site as another way for your target markets to learn more about your organization’s offerings. Properly planned and executed, online and offline marketing activities can synergistically produce significantly better results than either one can do alone.

Web objectives should be strictly defined based on your organization and expectations. The driver here is marketing rather than technological expertise. You can buy the latter, but only you and your marketing team can define the former and determine how to make it work for you.

Begin by deciding how the Web site can help you fulfill your organization’s specific marketing objectives. What do you expect your Web site to do for you? A Web developer can build the site for you, but only you and your staff know your company’s business.

Take me, for example. I don’t want, need, or expect to have thousands of “hits” from visitors to my site.

Its purpose is simply to provide prospective clients with my credentials and samples of my work, thereby reducing mailing costs and an unnecessary drain on the limited supply of the printed material I have produced. It allows prospects to review my work at their leisure and at length, and at a time that works for them. There is an additional advantage: they can get feedback from colleagues before they make a decision to hire me.

In short, I don’t need any real functionality on my Web site. I just need to provide an online portfolio.

On the other hand, a membership organization—such as a chamber of commerce or a museum—has completely different needs: attracting new members and retaining current members. A carefully planned and constructed Web site can be a powerful tool in:

• promoting the organization’s mission in a manner consistent with and supportive of offline efforts and activities;

• attracting new members and providing an online mechanism for membership purchasing and renewals;

• providing more comprehensive information about organizational activities, services, and events at far less cost than traditional media;

• communicating with existing members;

• discovering information about site visitors who may become prospective members, donors, or supporters through online forms (online fill-in boxes) that collect information. This information can be used for further marketing efforts, such as e-mail marketing or direct mail.

Properly promoted, your Web site can receive potentially hundreds or thousands of “hits” from site visitors who have indicated interest in the organization and its mission. That’s an important target market.

A well-built, functional Web site provides information for current and
prospective customers to fine-tune the approach of traditional media and
serve as an anchor for the addition of e-mail marketing campaigns.

If you are confident that you know what you want on the site and what you want it to do for you, it’s time to call in a technical Web professional to design and build it, at your direction and based on the information you provide.

If you’re still not confident, however, bring in a marketing professional who knows the Internet medium as well as offline media. That person should work in collaboration with you and your marketing team, plan the site navigation, hone the content specifically for the Web, and either oversee or personally perform the site-building or promotion.

With your knowledge of your organization, your time and effort spent in research, your planning and setting of objectives, and the right help, you’ll get what you paid for: a Web site that works for a living. o