Wouldn’t it be great if your website stood out from the crowd: generating heaps of traffic and attracting new clients every day? Unfortunately, most corporate websites don’t. Take a look at the top 250 law firms in America, for example. They are nigh-on identical: logo top left; long, thin image across the top (usually a skyline or similar); and below that, three columns – news, highlights/services and a definition of the firm. Sound familiar?

Does your website feature a home page that resembles a glorified business card, with menus and headings? And is your marketer in control of it, cautiously directing visitors to your products, experience, career opportunities and so on? If so, you’re not alone – and that’s the problem.

The new reality is that customers do not tend to use home pages as their primary point of contact with a site. They go to Google, search using keywords and click through to find the specific data they were seeking – possibly on a page deep down into your site. They may never even see your carefully designed home page. So Google effectively becomes the user interface that determines a customer’s experience of your content .

But that’s not the extent of it. Unless Google puts a link to your website on that crucial first page of search results, the chance is that no one will ever find yours among the millions of others out there. In effect, your expensive website becomes nothing more than a brochure visited by people who are personally directed to it by you. What’s more, online content ages quickly, and you probably have no time to update frequently, so after a while you may feel too embarrassed to refer people to your site. Which prompts the question: would you be better off without a website altogether?

It is not such a radical idea. According to a recent study by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, only one in four small businesses have a web presence, and only half of those businesses with up to 200 employees have gone to the trouble of setting up a site. Have they made the smart choice?

Cowboy marketing

The old style of web marketing was all about trying to attract visitors to your site. Today, however, the worldwide web has become so large that there’s no simple way to reach the majority of internet users simultaneously – there’s no online equivalent of a Melbourne Cup TV commercial. Consumers have spread out across the web to myriad different destinations. This means that a web presence centred around ‘cowboy marketing’, which aims to herd people to a site, is no longer enough.

Done properly, though, it is still a useful element of the marketing mix. A regularly updated site is a good starting point, but you will need to meet the interests of the target audience and deliver messages to wherever likely audiences can be found online. And it does not stop there: your online marketing strategy needs to evolve from being website-centric to managing your brand’s overall product presence across all the channels that potential customers use today. Examples include:

• Your website
• Your email newsletters
• Your blog
• The archives of your newsletters or blog that live on long after their initial publication
• Your profile pages on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other networks
• Your friends, followers and fans on social networking platforms
• Your company’s listings in online directories
• Search results of your brand and your products in Google and other search engines
• The websites with which your site exchanges links – and what that says about your business
• Your online videos
• How your website looks on mobile platforms like an iPhone or BlackBerry
• Your e-commerce (e.g. eBay) transactions and reputation
• Photos that your team has shared on Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook and other media-sharing sites
• Your online advertising
• The forums in which distributors and affiliate partners promote your products.

Multiple shop fronts

A smarter way of boosting your online impact is to complement your website (the ‘single shop front’) with other forms of online marketing. It can be cost-effective to represent yourself at numerous markets and network meetings, as this effectively allows you to have a continual and broad web presence, increasing your exposure to new customers and opportunities. However, it means that you need to stop spending all your time and marketing resources just tweaking your website. To get more bang for your buck, get on the web and meet your customers where they are already hanging out. Happy surfing!

Bert Verhoeven is currently Director of Xpress Information, a company that offers communication coaching and training as well as online editorial services and marketing strategy. Bert also lectures on entrepreneurship and innovation at Swinburne University.

Where do you stand?

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