Great people create great websites.
Stress diary in the marketing department
We need to optimize the website for search engines and integrate it with social media.
We have to create our Facebook page, gain followers, and advertise on Google.
Even more, we immediately need to launch email campaigns and test different versions of our web pages. These generally need a redesign and adaptation for mobile devices.
Does all this sound familiar to you?
Welcome to digital marketing in 2011
There are more and more consultants every day, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that your online communications are falling behind.
The only solution seems to be a thorough analysis and then optimization of everything. If necessary, from the ground up.
Of course, we must not forget that we need to be better than the competition. Right now, immediately.
Effects of website optimization?
To make matters worse, every website optimization consultant will tell you everything that’s wrong with your website. And believe me, a lot of things are wrong. That’s why tools and consultants exist, to help you find out what’s wrong with your website.
The only problem with these tools is that they focus only on the website. Or on web communications, if you get a broader view (your presence on social media, and so on).
And because it’s very clear what’s wrong with a website (the most typical finding being that we’re not on the first page of search engines for certain keywords), the solution seems obvious. We’ll redesign the website to fix these mistakes, and revenue and profit will rise. "Conversion" will improve, there will be more subscribers to the newsletter, and the entire success story will be clearly visible in front of us. In fact, after a good website "analytics" presentation, we can already see how, in a few months, we’ll harvest the fruits of our new website strategy.
Of course, this won’t happen. Most likely, it won’t. At least for two reasons:
1. You're not the first to think of optimization
Nor will you be the last. Very likely, your competition is doing the same thing at this very moment. Or they already have. It doesn’t really matter. You need to be aware that there are many consultants. They use the same tools, similar models, and processes. It’s true that there are differences among them, but in the end, the outcome of this race will be determined by the amount of investment. Whoever invests more, gets better consultants and better results.
2. You've overlooked a pitfall in optimization interpretations
Your revenue and profit also depend on other factors. What is most often forgotten is the question of who will take care of the online communications. Who will create content, write articles, and design email campaigns? Who will respond to the increased number of inquiries? Who will analyze website traffic and adjust the site to make it even better? Who will manage the Facebook page and who will manage the Twitter account? These people will need time. Time is a cost. And it reduces profit.
People create, technology just works
Websites and communications are not technology. Even a poorly designed website can achieve the best results if it has excellent content. Excellent content is created by people. Your employees, colleagues, customers, business partners. Therefore, the key questions you need to ask yourself when embarking on a website renovation (optimization) or any other web communication project are:
-
Why are we communicating online?
-
What and how will our employees contribute?
-
What and how will our employees contribute?
So before you blindly jump into a project and start designing, think it over