Over the last ten years I have talked to hundreds of CEOs of small and medium-sized businesses about what works and what doesn’t in building a repeatable lead stream for their business and a marketing engine that delivers measurable business results.  I started to keep track of what CEOs were telling me and devised a list of the attributes of marketing programs that succeed.  My last post was about making the ask – how to use your website to start the buying process. Today we tackle the value of your website.

If you canvassed ten business owners, eight out of ten would have a website or some form of business marker on the web. Few people today would disagree that the most powerful way to reach an audience is online. Whether you sell to consumers or other businesses, the people who buy from you expect to be able to look up your company in a Google search bar.

But if you asked those same eight business owners how much time, money and resources they dedicate to their website, the answer would be varied. One might say they update something online every day via social media or a well organized blog strategy.  More than a couple will likely say they haven’t touched their website in over a year and have not done much with since the original investment in building it.

Statistically, 98% of buyers, whether shopping for themselves or shopping for their business, start their search online. So if your website is now your receptionist, marketing engine, sales rep and customer service support desk all rolled into one, what is the real value of your website?

I pose this question because I hear a lot of groaning and grumbling from business owners when discussing the cost of building and maintaining a website.

So what is the real value of a website?

Assuming your website at the very least contains:

• A representation of your brand
• A description of your company
• A way to contact your company
• A detailed explanation of why you should buy from your company and not the competition

Assign a value of $10,000 if you have all of the above.

• add $30,000 if your site provides a way to interact with your company such as a download, form, quote tool or mechanism other than a number to call
• add $20,000 if your site uses email marketing to push out content such as press releases, blogs or newsletters to alert people to new product or services at your company
• add $40,000 if you are actively alerting people via social media, group couponing, directories, portals or other places online on a weekly basis.

TOTAL = $100,000

Here’s the Rationale:

1. If you were to hire a designer to build you a glossy 20 page, eight by ten corporate brochure complete with copy writing, photography, printed 1,000 and distributed them across the geographic territory you serve monthly, you would likely pay much more than $10,000. But your website is performing that same function and working much harder for you from a distribution perspective. The average website receives 1,000 visitors per month and is open for those visitors 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Brochures, flyers and pamphlets cannot compare to the reach of today’s website.
2. Using your website as a way to contact your company and interact with your business is the equivalent of a full time receptionist and part time sales rep. Offering sophisticated ways to connect with your company online including tracking and analyzing content popularity and time on page, is an excellent way to gage how well people understand your company and what you do.
3. If you are also using your website and web presence as a way to push out content and connect with unknown prospects looking for your products or services, you are building a lead generation engine for your business that would cost much more to build and provide lower ROI. Telemarketing, direct mail, print advertising and other traditional forms of marketing cost much more in terms time, money and resources and are producing poorer results across the board.
4. If you are finding other places on the web to go and actively network online and drive traffic back to your website, this is the equivalent of about three people in your company out annually networking and trying to connect with prospects. The real cost of this effort is one that doesn’t get tracked at many companies but it’s costly and doesn’t help the business scale.

You need to look at your website as an employee: an employee who is there 24 hours a day, seven days a week and working hard for you. How much would you invest in an employee like this?

Even if you are a business that doesn’t have sales reps, support staff or marketing material, there is still a hard cost to keeping your doors open and selling something. The things you are doing today to support the sale of your product or service can be supported more effectively with a well organized website and detailed online strategy.

If you are a business with more than one million dollars in sales, you should be spending at least 5% of your annual revenue on the resources and costs associated with an online strategy for your business. You may have to stop doing other things with respect to sales and marketing but over the long run, I guarantee the results will be better and the return on investment greater.

In the next couple of posts will be providing the framework to help you design your online strategy, but if you haven’t already done so, take inventory of your current approach of selling to customers and interacting with them. Create a realistic budget of the costs associated with finding customers, getting them into the sales cycle and supporting them after they have bought from you. Think about how any of these activities get supported through your website and if you have invested the right amount of time, money and resources.

Whether you like it or not, today’s reality is that people are looking for you online. You can ignore this business fact or you can think about the real value of your website… pure gold.

Marie Wiese is founder of Marketing CoPilot, www.marketingcopilot.com and the author of the eBook, “Why marketing fails... and what you can do about it!” Marketing CoPilot designs and delivers online strategies that help companies find customers and keep customers. Marie is a 20 year veteran of the B2B marketing world, past Chair of the York Technology Alliance in the greater Toronto region and a workshop leader at Regional Innovation Centres (RICs) in Ontario where she teaches early stage companies how to build online lead generation engines that deliver measurable business results.