Online business success stories for lean times
In a Telegraph article on the success story behind Clippykit bags and accessories, the author finishes with advice for prospering during a recession:
Optimise your website. Keep driving customers to your website using PR and marketing and make your site ‘sticky’. It’s your portal to world markets.
Of course as online marketers who specialize in website optimization we’re admittedly biased to think this is the best advice ever, but hear us out anyway: if your business is even partly conducted online (and how many these days aren’t?), you truly need to think about its effectiveness.
I sat down with a neighbor the other day who’s looking to build out a website to represent her new small business, most of which is conducted offline. As we talked about where she was going to go to get the site designed and built and how much she could probably expect to spend (if you haven’t shopped for small websites lately, $5000 is a fair ballpark amount for an entry-level site), I could tell she had sticker shock. I could also tell that she’d been thinking of the site’s purpose primarily as a digital brochure. I suggested that she reframe her thinking about the site as her virtual front office, with a virtual assistant making sure prospects walking in the door are being given the best impression of the business. Surely that is an experience worth investing in.
Most of our clients are well beyond this point, of course, having already invested thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars into the design and development of their sites.
But so far, I’ve yet to meet anyone whose site couldn’t use some optimization. Whether it’s to make the site more findable, more usable, or overall more profitable, nearly every site has opportunity to improve.
Moreover, there’s nothing you can do with your dollars today that is more likely to pay dividends than improving the effectiveness of your web presence. It’s what smart marketers are doing. It’s what we all should be doing.
If you are ready to make improvements but don’t know where to begin, or if you have ideas but no resources, or even if you just want help for the staff you have in place, contact us. Let’s dream big together and make your business the next success story.
Filed under: Marketing Techniques