The Web Marketing Universe

Confusion about successful web marketing is rampant. Even for those in marketing, there's an ongoing war to maintain clarity about how the web universe works and how successful web marketing is executed today. Building an outperforming web platform is very much like building and running a retail store whose primary objective is providing a product or service.

• The store must be attractive, have a good location and be unique to attract visitors.
• The store’s layout, personnel and operations must serve the customer and make the sales process as easy as possible.
• The experience must promote the visitor to return to the store.
• The experience must transform the visitor into a customer.
• The experience must provoke visitors to tell others.
• The experience must promote customers to become repeat customers.

And while the foundational recipe for a successful website is very similar, getting there is completely different. Life happens faster online. While visitors peruse a physical store, website visitors “use” an online store. They can leave just as easily as they walked in. Their attention spans are much shorter, and their tolerance for a confusing layout or arduous pathways is low. There are no roads leading to the Internet storefront. The idea of “getting there” is completely different. The straightforward “location, location, location” mantra is replaced with a myriad of new approaches and considerations to gain the foot traffic you need to be successful online. So, from the never-ending minutia of terminology, buzzwords and techno-jargon, let’s clear the air for once and get some things straight about what makes a successful web marketing machine.

Metrics

Before anything is done, before the first photo is taken, before the first line of code is written, you must take account of what you know. In the web world, everything is in the numbers. From the unaware prospect to the loyal return customer, all possibilities and measurements must be mapped out within the sales continuum. Where do your customers come from? How much does the average customer spend with you in a year? How much is spent to gain one customer? What has your past advertising and marketing efforts yielded? Who are your repeat customers? Why do customers come back? Why do customers leave? Are you doing everything you can to measure all elements that directly and indirectly affect sales? There is much inventory and soul-searching in identifying your metrics. You must be honest about what you know and what you don’t know. You must be critical and able to grade yourself. Doing the homework here will not only guide the purpose of all your web marketing efforts, but also allows you to measure your return on investment, make adjustments and out-perform your competitors.

Utility

In the vastness of the Internet, there are two classes of websites: the digital brochure and the utility site. Most websites are the first kind––the online equivalent of a printed flyer. Yup, all the computing processors, memory, software, hardware, power and communication lines for people to read the same information that they would get from a brochure. The brochure site states its case, makes its pitch and then its done. That’s what many companies do with their brands on the Internet, and their website’s performance is a reflection of it. Your website needs to be useful, not just informative about your primary business objective. Many websites waste inordinate amounts of time and money promoting a site with no utility. Its visitors see no reason to return, and it dies right there. The precious opportunity to turn a casual visitor into a return visitor—the web version of true branding—is sadly wasted. Your website needs to find its place on the Internet. It needs to be known for something. Awareness and traffic on the web is cumulative, and all the time used to gain a visitor is wasted if the site is not worth bookmarking, sharing, remembering or revisiting. To achieve this, you must be prepared to invest in your site’s utility. You must have an offering to the public at large, without the visitor needing to be a customer. Your website needs to find its place on the Internet. It needs to be known for something.If you sell lawn fertilizer, offer a lawn care calendar for the visitor’s geographical area, e-mail alerts on care stages, free weekly lawn care tips and write a regular article. Create a place the visitor can count on, all the while promoting your brand and selling your product or service. Comparative shopping listings, mortgage amortization calculators, games, a “rare word of the day” and “your lawn care tip of the week” are all beginnings of utility for a website. If your competitors are already introducing utility in their online store fronts and developing a reputation for having a website that’s worth returning to, then you have something to worry about. Don’t wait until then. Up the ante and don’t waste another visit to your site.

Content

Many times the utility of a good website resides in the content it offers. Now this is where many websites have an identity problem. Most view their website’s static “brochure” text regarding their product or service as the website’s content. It isn’t. Content has purpose and application to the visitor beyond your primary offering. It may not apply to everyone, but it needs to be content that your audience wants to read, see, play, view, hear and interact with. Content has been and always will be king. As a result, the content maker is king. Believe it or not, writers are usually the single most important factor to the successful website core. If your website features piano playing tips in video form, then the video producer owns the role of king. Don’t regard your website as a one-time sales pitch. Invest in content and the long-term rewards will be exponential.

The idea

The challenge of utility and content represents the stage where the good idea is born. If your website doesn’t present any reason for a visitor to return, then it’s useless. Your website’s success is based on its core concept. What is it going to offer people? What is its reputation going to be? What about your content is going to make people talk about it, forward its web address, bookmark it, share it and most important, what is going to make people come back to it? This is where a good web development firm shines. The responsibility of your web development firm is to make sure the idea around your utility and content is sound and executable. Web professionals work hard to stay abreast of what the Internet landscape—and all competitors—provide. They know what people want, what’s lacking, where the opportunities are and where to drill for maximum gain.

Presentation

You’ve got your idea, you’ve found your niche, you’re creating great content––now we can talk about building a beautiful and functional website. Crafting a superstar website is its own discipline. Professionals that build memberable websites master a craft that is like no other. Once again, the Internet’s vast array of possibilities and potential are the reason so much more must be considered. Take, for example, reading a magazine. The magazine contains a catalog of content. It employs the simple interface of a table of contents, page numbers and the action of turning the pages—that’s it. In contrast, a website has multiple dimensions and depth. It does more than display your content—it’s functional. It stores content, catalogs it and queries it. It reacts. It allows for conversation and builds community. Your 24-hour Internet house is, in short, a working engine that must reflect your brand proudly, be functional and easy-to-use and run itself without you in the room. Your website is a working engine that must reflect your brand proudly, be functional and easy-to-use and run itself without you in the room. But with great power comes great responsibility—in design and function. It’s very much like building a unique, first-of-a-kind car from the ground up, combining art and precise engineering into a beautiful, functioning machine. There is a metric ton of considerations in any given website, right down to the psychology of choice. As a result, there are many amateur web designers, but very few great web builders. Still, many companies rely on traditional marketing agencies who see web development akin to the linear development of print material, television commercials or radio spots [see our article on the fall of traditional marketing companies]. In other cases, some companies employ a single individual––usually a programmer or a designer––to build a competitive website that in reality requires experts from many disciplines. Both of these extreme approaches to web building leave a trail of failed websites littered around the Internet landscape. The memorable and over-performing website requires a unique and specific combination of expertise from an array of web professionals, all working in concert on the details and all joined together on the big picture. That doesn’t mean you need teams of people working around the clock, but you will need portions of their knowledge and interactive specialties to craft it the right way the first time. In fact, the right way costs less upfront and makes your investment that much more powerful.

Traffic Building

You’ve established a good foundation with your web marketing strategy and metrics; you’ve got an online building that’s both beautiful and very useful; now the focus turns to building foot traffic. While the traffic building plan is part of the web marketing strategy, its execution is on an ongoing basis. The exact strategies and tactics for traffic building are different for each business, brand, product or service, and covering all the possibilities would be beyond the scope of this article. Effective traffic building, however, depends on one key element: the relation of a website’s utility and content to the community at large. Food for thought: In the beginning, you will start with any traffic. However, the public does reside with other websites. Those other websites have provided a platform for community. There are an endless number of online communities on everything from aardvarks to zucchini that people bookmark, remember and participate in––weekly, daily, hourly. You need to be there too. Identify those spots and begin participating in them. Be real and helpful. Promote your brand when appropriate, and promote your personality in the process. Link to some of your good content. Extend an offer outside your primary objective. Create and build a reputation. Again, there’s more to this than a simple example can convey. Simply put, there must be regular engagement with the public outside of your website. People engage with companies through the best form of advertising: word-of-mouth. The Internet just sets that on fire.

Visitor-to-Customer Conversion

The science and art of converting a visitor into a customer is unique to each web marketing plan. It begins with identifying, marking and sometimes even coding-in conversion points within the site. Conversion points can be the creation of an account, the point at which a product is sold, the submission of a contact form or the making of an appointment. The array of possible conversions are unique to the business; however, they tie directly to the bottom line. This is where the experienced web development agency brings metrics back into play. All efforts in traffic building and advertising are mapped; traffic from websites, search engines and other sources are cataloged; traffic is tracked to conversion points within the site; analysis is taken and actions to improve traffic and the rates of conversion are continuously implemented. Such complexity is beyond the expertise of traditional marketing firms or the one-man-band.

Getting Started - The Big Picture

Yes, at first glance this is a lot to take in. That’s why it’s important to interview your marketing firm to make sure they not only recognize the web marketing universe, but that can also execute on it and show results. We’re here to help. Call or write us. We promise to answer all of your questions in a straightforward manner and help you understand it all. If you’re already engaged or under contract with another firm, at least ask your firm—and yourself—the tough questions:

• What is the plan?
• Why will people come to your website?
• What will keep visitors coming back?
• What will make visitors tell others?
• What will convert visitors to customers?
• How is it performing?

And most of all: What will make people fans of your website? This is ultimately the goal of any web marketing campaign, and it's indicative of any superstar website. From local dentists to international corporate brands, anyone can reach the apex of online marketing, win more customers and gain market share for less money. Remember: fans do the marketing for you.

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Left in the Dark? The Pitfalls of Taco Bell’s #OnlyInTheApp Social Media Stunt

Taco Bell recently unveiled a new mobile app, available for both iOS and for Android, that “gives consumers complete access to every Taco Bell ingredient to create what they want, when they want it – all in the palm of their hand.” The app allows customers in drive-thru or in their dining room to order and pay for items directly on their mobile device. The app itself may be a great idea, but the marketing push behind this new addition from Taco Bell is certainly raising some eyebrows. The company decided to “go dark” on their social media platforms and on their website, replacing their normal content with a black background and a large message that says that “the new way to Taco Bell isn’t on the Internet, it’s #onlyintheapp”, using a hashtag that they have created for this campaign. While I can appreciate the company’s desire to focus heavily on marketing this new feature, doing so at the detriment of all their other messaging and marketing channels is short-sighed. In this article, we will take a look at the possible benefits of this “all in” approach and why Taco Bell may have done this, as well as the pitfalls of this type of campaign and putting all your eggs, or in this case all your tacos, in one basket.

Information on demand

We live in world where immediate access to information is now expected. Have a question? You can whip out your phone or open the web browser on your desktop computer and hop over to Google for the answer. The same holds true for the services we use or products we buy, including menu items and locations or contact information for restaurants. Having worked on websites for restaurants in the past, I can tell you from experience that this information, menu and locations/contact, are some of the most heavily requested pages on those sites. Taco Bell’s current marketing approach, and their decision to “take down” their normal website in favor of a marketing message and nothing BUT a marketing message, is not a customer-friendly decision because it runs contrary to the information on demand culture that our customers have come to expect from websites. Now, to be fair, Taco Bell did not actually take down their entire site. If you run a search engine query for “Taco Bell Menu”, you can find those pages still live on the Web, but you have to work for it! Their current homepage, which is where their visitors will likely go, includes no links to the other pages of the site. If a customer needs menu information, or if they are looking for something like a location’s address or phone number, they will have to go out of their way to dig that information out. That is asking a lot of a person and few customers will go to those lengths.

What they want versus what you want

Taco Bell’s current campaign is a perfect example of placing a company’s needs before their customers’ needs. The marketing message that now dominates Taco Bell’s media properties is what they want people to know about. There is nothing wrong with promoting a new service or product, but by removing easy access to the rest of the information their customers may want, they are ignoring their needs in place of their own. What if a customer comes to the site to find nutrition information, only to be greeted by a message to download this new app. Is that a good customer experience? Perhaps they do not have an iPhone or Android device. This message is lost on them and they are at a dead end. This is a lost opportunity. Saying that this information is “not on the Internet” and instead forcing them to download an app is like saying “we don’t care how you want to access this information, we want you to download an app and we won’t give you that information unless you do so.” That may sound harsh, but that is absolutely how this decision comes across. Yes, there is value in putting a marketing campaign front and center in big way like this. Taco Bell’s new app is certainly being talked about, but most of the chatter I am hearing is not about the app itself or how great or convenient it is, it is about the company’s decision to market it in this way, with the rest of their messaging and information absolutely non-existent. A better approach would have been to market this new app in a big way with a bold, prominent placement across all their media channels, but to also include easy links to the normal website and social media content. With that approach, they could still ensure that their message comes across loud and clear, which is what they want, but they would not be ignoring what their customers want because that information would still be easily accessible.

Ignoring the conversation

Another interesting (and not in a good way) aspect of Taco Bell’s “going dark” campaign is what they are doing on social media. Their Facebook page currently includes only 1 post with a message similar to their website about the new app. The Taco Bell logos and everything else have been removed. What this page does have are comments – 1,194 of them as of this writing. If you read through those comments, you will find people complaining about the removal of the website content, the lack of delivery services, and many random slams on Taco Bell in general. Bottom line, there is a lot of negativity on this page, but Taco Bell is nowhere to be found in those comments. Their “going dark” campaign also includes them removing themselves from the conversation. This is not how social media works. Social media is all about engagement and conversations. If you put something out there, especially something like a new service like this, you should be prepared to answer customers’ questions and have those conversations. Taco Bell has yet to do this. Instead, they have “gone dark” and are nowhere to be found.

A better approach

When you have an important message to convey to your audience, you want that message front and center. There may be the temptation to take the same route that Taco Bell did and remove all your other content in favor of that message. Yes, people that visit your site will see it because that is all that there is to see, but is that the end goal? No, you do not want customers to only see your message, you want them to see your message and take action. Preferably, you want them to take the action that this campaign is focused on, but if they cannot do that, you do not want them to hit a dead end. In the case of Taco Bell, someone without a mobile device that can download the app, or someone with no interest in downloading that app, has hit that aforementioned dead-end. There is nowhere else for them to go other than away from Taco Bell. That is a lost opportunity. For your own marketing campaigns, you want to ensure that if you put a message front and center, you also make other paths available for people who that message may be lost on. Bottom line, you do not focus on one message or campaign at the expense of everything else you have to say and offer – and you never take yourself out of the conversation! When customers are talking about your company and what you are doing, that is a golden opportunity to respond and start a conversation. If you instead decide to “go dark”, you miss that opportunity completely.

In closing

I expect that this campaign is a temporary one for Taco Bell. Soon enough, their website and social media will be back to normal, but in the meantime, all I see in this marketing push are missed opportunities and ill-informed decisions. When planning your own campaigns and messages, speak to your marketing team or agency and always ask yourself whether your plans focus too heavily on what you want instead of what your customers need. The key to a successful campaign is finding a way to address both of these needs and tie together your company’s goals and those of your customers.

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