Sadly, the headline says it all. Far too often, companies invest a sizable sum to create, expand, revise or update their websites and get nothing in return. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Whatever notion you as a business or marketing leader may have of the Internet or websites, put it aside. The state of the art is far beyond America Online of the 1990s or even the birth of Facebook in 2004. The Internet, like rock n’ roll, has become part of the fabric of modern world society. And if your website is only a frayed thread in that fabric, you’re not going to be attracting the attention your business deserves.
The Internet today is a crazy patchwork quilt of hundreds of millions of websites. Unfortunately, like bulletin boards in cyberspace, the majority of business websites gather electronic dust. For every Amazon site, there are tens of thousands of duds. Yours may be one of them. The content on these sites, like that faded newspaper clipping on the bulletin board in the office kitchen, is dated, irrelevant and no longer interesting. Without fresh content, your business website is not paying for itself, let alone producing a return. It’s just a black hole in cyberspace.
One of the most important (and seemingly difficult) changes for companies with websites since the dawn of the “Interwebs” is the competition for prospects’ attention and, more importantly, adapting to the evolution in how they use the Internet, especially search, social media and email.
Some statistics to put this in perspective: Research shows that worldwide, we conduct 88 billion searches a month on Google, and 46 percent of those searches are for products or services. Your business has to show up on the first page of results, though, to earn the attention of someone searching for what you do. Some 75 percent of searchers never look beyond the 10 results on the first page of results. How do you make that happen?
You need a robust content creation strategy that places your business in the top 10 search results, gains the interest of potential customers, and brings them into a conversation with you in social media and on your website that leads to a relationship and purchase.
This is the science of inbound marketing. Unlike traditional marketing, which dominated before the rise of today’s Internet/social media/web world, inbound marketing focuses on putting your products and services in front of those who need them when they are looking for them.
Traditional marketing, often called interruption marketing, focuses on a spray and pray strategy that put ads, direct mail, spam, etc., etc. in front of prospects (and many others who are not prospects) whenever and wherever possible, without much regard to interest or the possibility that they might purchase your goods or services.
HubSpot, the leading software platform company in inbound marketing, puts it this way: Traditional marketing is about driving a message into a crowd over and over again like a sledgehammer, whereas inbound marketing attracts highly qualified customers to a business like a magnet.
The biggest magnet in your attraction arsenal is your website. If it’s just a faded version of the office bulletin board, gathering electronic dust, how on earth are you going to engage potential customers and generate a return from your website?
Here are five steps to make sure your website is earning its keep – and then some:
- Understand and implement inbound marketing: Even if you are heavily invested in traditional marketing, experimenting with inbound marketing can be fruitful and can start small.
- Optimize your website content: A faded, irrelevant website (in other words, one that’s not been updated in the last few days) will be crawled less frequently by Google, which doesn’t bother wasting its computing power crawling websites every day that haven’t been updated in months or years. What happens to your website then? If you figured you would drop off the first page of search results, you’re right. Your site must contain content that’s relevant to your prospects, content that’s frequently refreshed, if your prospects are to find your business on the Internet.
- Blog: The most critical element in making your business website into an ROI machine – and improving search rankings – is to create remarkable content on your website. Your website can be hundreds of times more vibrant and productive simply by blogging regularly. Consistent blogging drives web traffic, improves social media success and leads to new prospects and customers. Research shows businesses that blog generate 67 percent more leads than those without blogs.
- Get active in social media: Oh yes, social media. Not every business needs a Facebook page or a Twitter account. But every business needs to be active in the appropriate social media channels – and I’ll guarantee you, a sizable portion of the prospects your business hopes to reach are active on one social media channel or another. Research shows that 53 percent of business-to-business companies have acquired a customer via Facebook, and 44 percent through Twitter.
- Make your website an online sales engine: What happens when you’re driving prospects to your website? If you’re not creating a conversation with them that leads to a relationship and a sale, you’re missing out. According to one study, nurturing leads on your website can increase sales opportunities 20 percent.
If you’re thinking about redoing your website (or thinking about your website at all), consider these five steps. How does your business website stack up? Is it a faded bulletin board in cyberspace, gathering electronic dust? Or is it an online sales engine with solid ROI?
To learn more about making your website into an online sales engine, download our Inbound Marketing 101 whitepaper.
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Paul Furiga is president and CEO of WordWrite Communications. 
You can find him on Twitter @paulfuriga.
(Outbound/Inbound graphic courtesy of HubSpot)
