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. This series is about lessons learned and best practices. Today, we discuss  a real life example.

A couple of posts ago, we talked about the work we were doing with business owners to help them develop a web presence that would deliver measurable results for their business. Today, we want to share one company's journey.

ET Group is a company that has been in the Toronto, Ontario market for more than 20 years selling audio/visual equipment to other businesses. About three years ago, new owners bought the business and began to transform the company.

Along the way, some tough decisions were made.

When you acquire a business, one of the things you are acquiring is the customer base, but there is always an opportunity to assess what you are selling and to whom and to determine your preferred business strategy. This created a great opportunity for ET Group to redo their web presence. The old website did not reflect the customers they wanted to serve and the solutions they wanted to sell.

Step 1: Define Your Ideal Customer

When we start our work with business owners, we ask them to fill out a customer scorecard that allows us to determine their best customers, their attributes and why selling to more people like them is good for the business. For ET Group, this exercise was extremely important because they had determined that their best customers were large enterprises that wanted more than just equipment. These customers also wanted to understand how to use technology to provide better collaboration opportunities for their employees. For ET Group, this meant repositioning how they sold their products and services.

Lesson 1: To attract your ideal customer, you need to let go of part of the business that just won't appeal to your ideal target customer.

After ET Group had made some tough decisions about their target customers and the people they wanted to serve, it made the work of understanding keywords and content much easier. In our last post, we talked about what a person sees when they do a search for audio/visual equipment in a search engine. There are lots of companies hawking products at the "lowest price" but this is not where ET Group wants to compete.

Step 2: Understand exactly what your ideal customer is searching for and how they search.

This is likely the most important thing you can do when building a web presence for your business and often the thing that most business owners get wrong. Not only do they not understand how people search for a product or service, they completely misunderstand how they buy the product or service.

Lesson 2: Mapping the buying process of your customer leads to a great website set up.

When you know exactly what your target audience needs to understand when they look for a solution, it makes it easier for you to decide what content to put on your website and what themes to push out in your web strategy.

Step 3: Figure out what you want a potential customer to do when they land on your website.

Too often companies selling complex business solutions use product information as the backbone of their website and any content that can be found about them online. ET group suffered from this trap on their old site and there was nothing a potential customer could do on their website other than struggle to understand ET Group's differentiation or pick up the phone and call them.

Lesson 3: Create tools or processes on your website that allows someone to do something or show interest without picking up the phone and calling your company.

There are many stages in the buying process and customers today want to educate themselves with many points of information online before they take a next step with a company. Allowing someone to download something, take a quiz, leave a comment or engage online  in a way that tells us where they are in the buying process, allows us to understand how to nurture that relationship online: Right down to the pages they look at, the time they spend on the site, where they came from and what pages they left from.

ET Group launched their new website last week and for the company, their We Presence Journey is just beginning. Over the next six to eight weeks, here are the things that the ET Group sales and marketing team will be watching to see how their new strategy is engaging the marketplace:

1. The search engine rankings for their top 10 keywords.
2. Where people are coming from to visit the site (direct traffic versus referring traffic versus organic search).
3. The bounce rate of visitors (currently they are sitting at 50% and they would like to get this down to 35% which means a better match of keywords to visitors).
4. Length of time spent on the site and the content they are viewing. This gives an indication of how well they are painting a picture of what can be accomplished with their products or services.
5. Whether they are getting traffic to the site from other activities they are doing such as e-mail marketing or social media.

Of course the most important metric will be whether people download their new conversion tool, watch videos or leave comments on the site. Engagement is the most important activity in the short and long term that needs to be tracked and measured to determine if the web presence is working. Ultimately, the online strategy should engage past, current and future customers in a two-way dialogue.

We'll have more on ET Group and their Web Presence Journey. Stay tuned.

Marie Wiese is founder of Marketing CoPilot, 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 using digital media. Marie is 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.