Trending Now

How a smarter website can improve your marketing effectiveness, Part I

This month, I begin a three-part series of posts on which I’ve collaborated with long-time colleague Scott Hornstein. (We owe a tip of the hat to Wayne Cerullo and Phil Shelp, as well.) If you’re wondering why you’re not seeing the results you expect from your website – the engagement, lead generation, and sales – you’ll want to pay close attention.

A Smarter Website Matters
In our experience, companies that implement the ideas we will outline below have seen a 10% – 20% improvement in results – engagement, leads, and sales – within the first 6 months.

Get a Grip
Your website is your core digital asset, the hub of your digital presence. It can be a much smarter, more powerful sales tool that will generate higher engagement, proactively move prospects along their consideration journey, and give conversion a big boot in the butt.

Or, it can lay there like a lox.

Is Your B2B Website a Library or a Cocktail Party?
Websites have become passive, where stuff resides instead of where relationships blossom.

Take a look at your website, and ask yourself whether it is engaging prospects and encouraging them to take action, or more passively providing resources and materials without any real guidance as to how to use them and why they’re important.

The Billboard of Me
Is your website doing what your B2B prospects want and need it to do to move them through their unique consideration journeys? How do you know?

Here’s a quick challenge that will reveal the prospect orientation of your website – go to your website and under the Edit menu, go to Find. Enter a first-person pronoun, such as “we.” How many times does it come up? My guess is, a lot. Now try searching for a third-person pronoun, like “you.” as in a prospect.

If there’s a lot more “we” than “you” your website is a Billboard of Me. That means you’re leaving money on the table.

Self-Assessment
There’s hope for correcting these issues. You can start by taking our self-assessment to get a better handle on how prospect-centric your website really is.

Website Self-Assessment: Looking with Your Prospect’s Eyes

We’ll be back next month to talk about the unrealized potential of your site.

Andrew Schulkind

Since 1996, Andrew Schulkind has asked clients one simple question: what does digital marketing success look like, and how can marketing progress be measured? A veteran content marketer, web developer, and digital strategist, Andrew founded Andigo New Media to help firms find a more strategic and productive mix of tools that genuinely support online brand goals over time. With a passion for true collaboration and meaningful consensus, his work touches social media, search-engine optimization, and email marketing, among other components. He views is primary goal as encouraging engagement. Getting an audience involved in your story requires solid information architecture, a great user experience, and compelling content. A dash of common sense doesn’t hurt, either. Andrew has presented at Social Media Week NY and WordCampNYC, among other events, on content marketing and web-development topics. His technology writing appears on the Andigo blog, in a monthly column on Biznology.com, and for print and online publications like The New York Enterprise Report, Social Media Today, and GSG Worldwide’s publications LinkedIn & Business, Facebook & Business, and Tweeting & Business. Andrew graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy from Bucknell University. He engages in a range of community volunteer work and is an avid fly fisherman and cyclist. He also loves collecting meaningless trivia. (Did you know the Lone Ranger made his mask from the cloth of his brother's vest after his brother was killed by "the bad guys?")

Join the Discussion

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to top