More than a Mere ‘Web Presence’

A Business Management Tool

Businesses Are Missing a lot of Opportunities

Because of the perceived costs of developing and the perceived difficulties of managing a full-featured web site, many owners and managers at small- and medium-sized firms want only a simple ‘web presence.’

Often that ‘presence’ consists of a single page that announces, “we exist, here is our telephone number,” or it consists of a few pages with not much more information.

Clearly, such sites are very cheap to develop and maintain although perhaps ‘not maintain’ is a more apt description. However, such sites do little or nothing to generate revenue or create long-term value.

In this post, we dispel a few of the myths regarding presumed high costs and explain a few of the benefits of a full-featured site.

Web Sites Shouldn’t Be Yellow Page Ads

There’s a good chance that if your business isn’t web, information, or technology-related, then you are not familiar with the ease-of-use and capabilities of modern, informative, well-managed web sites. In fact, if all you know is  ”it’s something with computers,” then you may believe that maintaining a site is much more difficult than it really is—or than it could be with a well-designed site.¹

If the paragraph describes you, then you may think that something that is the equivalent of a Yellow Page advertisement is a sufficient web presence.

It’s not.

If your family is like ours, the Yellow Page book never makes it into the house. It goes straight from the curb or the front porch into the recycling cart.

That’s not very different than how web visitors, who don’t already know you, treat your minimal web presence.

Now, we don’t fault site owners for believing that a single page or a bare bones site is sufficient to generate revenue. They may not know any better.

Out-of-sight, Out-of-mind or Out-of-site, Out-of-mind

In fact, on occasion their prospects and customers may have mentioned, “we found you from your web site.” However, those owners have no idea of ongoing lost profit opportunities because unseen, potential customers can’t find the information they seek (and so, never call).

Those missed opportunities arise because most owners and operators of small- and medium-sized businesses don’t spend their days surfing the web; so, they may not realize that many customers and prospects find web sites to be vital and inexpensive (and in some case, irreplaceable) sources of  information (about products, services, and organizations). So, those owners and managers may be unaware of the lost opportunities to convert web visitors into actual, paying customers.

Fortunately, we think that lack of that awareness can be overcome by asking those individuals a few questions:

1. When you, yourself, are looking for information about a product, service or organization and you find a site that consists of a single static page, how often do you contact the site’s owner?
2. How does your single page differentiate your firm or organization for your competitors, whether they are local, national, international, or on-line?

While it is possible to (psychologically) rationalize a justification to the first question, that’s much more difficult to do with the second. If your single page or uninformative site doesn’t seem to hurt you now, then you better hope that your competitors don’t start leveraging the web to their advantage. (Of course, we would argue that an uninformative site is already hurting sales more than you know.)

Also, note the homograph in the above subtitle, because that’s often what happens when customers leave an unremarkable ‘web presence.’ They forget that you exist.

“We Can’t Afford it.”

Oh really?

When we hear that sentence, we wonder: how can you not? Especially for firms where a single additional sale (generated) from an enhanced presence would pay for the entire site.

For many firms, such myopic perceptions persist far beyond web site and marketing decisions; so, it’s worth emphasizing that cost minimization does not imply profit maximization. In other words, minimizing expenditures doesn’t maximize profits when the marginal amount spent would generate greater marginal benefits. It’s the very definition of being penny-wise and pound foolish.

We understand that for projects like web sites, the marginal costs are incurred immediately, and they are more precisely known than the benefits, which seem to be less certain and amorphous, but still it is 2010, after all, and there are several hundred million PCs in the USA and (we’re guessing) tens of millions of cell phones with web browsing capabilities.

For relatively expensive goods or services a single additional order can recover all upfront design and development costs, and that is true for industrial firms, swimming pool builders, and many other types of products and services.

That’s a single new order over the life of the site that could easily, easily last for five-to-ten years.

Now, we could create a full-fledged, cost-volume-profit analysis and assume certain contribution margins (roughly, revenue – variable costs) and calculate break-even points and probabilities of achieving those points, but if your business needs only one or two additional (i.e., marginal) sales over five-to-ten years then it seems rather obvious. (For lower priced items, the break-even number of marginal orders increases but then the upside potential is much greater, too.)

Moreover, in certain cases, our argument becomes substantially more persuasive:

1. Reputational effects & (what we would call) high serial correlation): If your business or organization serves a market where reputation matters–where a satisfied customer is likely to recommend you to a friend, neighbor, or colleague–then one additional web-generated sale could easily lead to many additional ones. So, given that you provide excellent service, one new customer who found your firm via the web could easily turn into a neighborhood or community of non-web-based customers.
2. Availability of a New Marketing Initiative: many successful and long-standing firms without significant web presences often ignore this opportunity, especially industrial firms. Suppose your organization has a relatively constant customer base, and those customers are well-served by the usual, personal sales techniques. Often sales managers and owners or marketing managers ignore the opportunity to sell to a new market segment, and an inexpensive but effective way to test new markets is via a web-based campaign.

For example, due to recent high energy prices and to governmental regulations, many manufacturers have had to make their products more efficient (consider just about anything that consumes power in an office or factory). Existing customers may or may not be concerned with such advances or changes, but potential new customers that have new sustainability or green initiatives might be. So, a web site, which doesn’t alienate existing customers, but addresses the needs of green and sustainable firms offers a huge opportunity to capture sales and reach (or create) new market segments.

We can imagine a reader protesting that our analysis considers upfront costs but ignores recurring costs. For a normal small or medium-sized businesses, a well-designed, self-managed site can have recurring costs as low as $150 PER YEAR. (With a full-fledged web store that processes transactions on-site–rather than, say, at PayPal–recurring annual cost increases to between $500 – $750.) Yeah, it’s that cheap.

Ancillary & Operating Benefits

A well-designed site offers more than marketing benefits. It can provide better ways to conduct business, and those methods can lead to improved efficiencies and more realistic customer expectations.

With easy-to-create password-protected pages, one can show actual customers more information than generic, web-site visitors. So, customers can receive answers to frequently-ask questions or have access to reference materials without interrupting your day or one of your employees. (Or, without requiring you to answer the same question for the 1,400th time.)

For long-term projects, a site that explains the process–the number of steps, the time-frame, and the usual reasons for delay–creates more realistic customer expectations and permits them to find answers to their questions. We think that it is often lost on small-business owners that during, day, a construction process, customers have almost as much aversion to making calls as you do to answering them. So, why not try to eliminate those calls by providing an alternative source of information.

Forms: a site with well-designed contact forms permits you to know something about your prospects before the first telephone call, including: who they are, where they are from, what they seek, and which pages they have visited. Such forms can be very short, like our contact page or a simple request for information or they can be long and multi-paged, like a sports registration form. Regardless of their size and scope, there is only one answer to the (leading) question: isn’t it better to know something about prospects before making that call?

Upon submission, good form software forwards web visitors to relevant web pages, and it also permits customized, automatic e-mail replies. Almost all form software will send an e-mail to someone within the firm whenever there is a new submission, and that recipient can depend upon the data that were collected. (By the way, many of the form generators that we use are free. The most expensive one is $125.)

Calendars: for businesses that require appointments, why waste your’s staff time scheduling sessions when many customers are willing to make their own reservations on-line. (So, let’s get this straight: you can buy an airline ticket or a hotel reservation on-line, but you can’t make a hair-cut appointment without calling someone?)

With full-featured calendars, it is quite easy to show availability and permit web visitors to make requests. That’s a convenience for your customers who desire it, and it let’s staff members focus on value-added services. For other types of firms, shared resources can be more efficiently used with private versions of the same calendars. In fact, one calendar installation can provide both types of schedules: public or private, password-protected or not.

On-line Transactions: modern web stores are secure, rather inexpensive, and very easy to maintain; so, it is surprisingly simple to sell goods and service on the web; however, your organization does not need a store to provide and benefit from on-line transactions. With PayPal, it is quite easy to send e-mail invoices and permit customers to pay on-line. As we frequently say, 97% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

Caveat Emptor

Of course, not all web sites are created equal. So, when choosing a site designer or builder or developer, be sure that you are getting the ease-of-maintenance of a well-designed content management system. Otherwise, you’ll get a web presence, which may or may be inexpensive to maintain, but you will not get an effective, adapatable business management tool. To see what it available, visit us at SperoWebDesign.

As always with our longer posts, we’ll likely update and edit this during the next few days.