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 addressed why a website is so important to the future of your business. Today we address how redoing your website can challenge your business model.
We are currently in the process of launching new online strategies for three companies that sell business solutions to other businesses. Their current websites are typical brochure-ware, meaning there is lots of detail about what the company does, but very little detail with respect to why it matters to the business processes of their customers.
We have worked through their respective value propositions and mapped the buying process of their customers. We have designed the home page to reflect the buying process and carefully placed the value proposition in the main eye-tracking area of the site as we do using landing page optimization techniques. I have detailed elements of this process in previous blog posts. But a curious thing has happened. While we were taking care of all of the technical aspects of a website, we discovered that:
- Creating a website forces business owners to re-evaluate their business models.
In this post and ones in the coming weeks, we are going use these three companies as examples of how business models can change as result of redoing websites and creating online business strategies.
As these three companies sat down to write copy from the perspective of their customers and how their customers buy their products and services, they have come to realize that what they are selling has little differentiation in the marketplace, is highly commoditized in the industry and the actual product is not something someone is searching for in a search engine. Therefore, people searching will never find them and if they do, they won’t understand what they would be buying.
In other words, their business models no longer work in this new era of search. Bolting online tactics to an old model is no longer enough.
If this sounds familiar, read on:
- Your company sells complex solutions versus “off the shelf”.
- You don’t sell your products online using an eCommerce engine.
- You have been in business for 10+ years and have a well established client base.
- You recognize the value and impact a good website and web presence has on your business.
Don’t read on if you still believe...
“But my customers don’t go on the web to make purchasing decisions.”
Oh, but they do and this is why paying close attention to your web presence forces you to evaluate your business model. (See my last post on the way people are buying anything today and the 11.2 pieces of data they are using to make their decisions). In a world of infinite customer choice and the ability to learn about anything using a search engine, the way you position your company and communicate about it lets you break away from what everyone else in your sector is doing and changes what you sell and how you sell it.
When you start to build a new website for your business, you will likely be faced with these types of questions and challenges:
- How to do I present the context of what I do and why it matters without jumping to features and functions and product details?
- How would I navigate a potential buyer through the story?
- What are prospective customers seeking that would get them to my site in the first place?
- What are they going to find when they get there that sets my company apart?
Answers to these questions impact your business model. Take a look at these examples:
Example A: Sells training courses. If you are a big company, you hire them to help train your managers. But this is a cluttered, highly commoditized space. Now the way they discuss, package and sell their product has to change. Just taking course listings and dumping it on the website, isn’t going to tell the right story. How they tie together courses to create leadership solutions changes the story and the model.
Example B: Sells point of sale systems for retailers. Again, this is a highly commoditized industry ranging from selling cash registers to highly sophisticated systems that track what, how, when and where a customer buys in a retail outlet. If you do a search on “POS Systems”, an infinite number of search results are returned. For this client, just listing a series of products on the website is no longer an option. They are really in the business of selling retail intelligence and their site and sales process needs to reflect this change in the actual value of their solutions on their website and keyword strategy.
Example C: Sells audio visual equipment, another competitive space full of people who sell and set up equipment. This client needs to use their website to sell the vision of what a company is trying to achieve when they buy audio visual equipment - a collaborative ecosystem for their employees. This means their business model changes. It’s no longer just about recommending equipment and setting it up. It needs to be about selling the value of achieving business goals and outcomes.
Stay tuned as we follow their journey from concept to real website and how it transforms their business.
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 provides outsourced marketing services to business owners that want to create a two-way dialogue with past, current and future 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.
