Web Marketing In Context, 2003 Survey

Most businesses follow the Kevin Costner “Field Of Dreams” visionary model for their website:

“If You Build It, They Will Come”.

Annoyingly, this model usually fails. Let’s have a look at how people think about their web marketing and why they end up either ravingly happy or cynical depressives about their efforts. Web Marketing, or Internet Marketing, requires a different set of techniques than those that work offline - and it is a learnable skill.

We started Merjis in 2003 and in the course of that first year we did a survey of web sites. We picked 100 businesses in the same English county, Bedfordshire, with a website. We looked at companies with a size between 10 and 250 employees, with a turnover of less than £25M (about US$30M then, about US$50M today). We checked first to see if the business was focused on the company’s desire to talk about itself, or the prospects’ needs to find out about the company’s products and services; what the conversion path would be for identifiable prospects; and finally how the company ranked for searches of its own name and for identifiable products and services (with and without a geographical location in the search query).

It was a terrific and illuminating piece of work for us. 98 out of 100 companies shared a common problem. They had put up a site that was focused on what they wanted to talk about, and that failed to present their goods and services in a way that prospects would want to know.

For example, for an engineering company, should the home page offer an unavoidable Flash walk through of the new factory? Probably not… it takes 20 seconds for the walkthrough, for every new and returning visitor - so it should be an option for visitors. The same company could have instead explained their ability to turn ideas into products in shorter times, or at lower prices, or with higher quality - or whatever it is that their clients normally emphasise as the reason to continue doing business with them - playing to their strengths and triggering recognition in prospects of the value and customer focus of the company.

The other thing that became rapidly clear was that well over 90% had no significant presence in the search engines, for any search that should have lead to them. This was caused by a combination of poor site design, and a lack of “current engagement” - they were not visibly doing anything in their industry and had no visible customer endorsement or interaction, nor were they apparently involved in any projects. Some of the sites had clearly been developed in the dot.com bubble of the late 90’s and not updated in four years afterwards. A handful of the companies had paid to appear in various directories, such as Kelly Search, but none were using the staple directory of that period, Yahoo! - at $300, much less expensive than most of the UK based directories that we saw. All that, of course, meant that these sites had really, really low traffic. The few visitors that turned up on the site would not have seen a compelling reason to engage with the business, after seeing self-obsessed material about the MD’s life history or similar poorly focused material.

These businesses had thrown money at the web and pretty much without exception would regard the web as a pointless waste of money. Further investment in the web would be likely to be seen as throwing good money after bad. But we knew, from almost ten years of previous activity, that new niche businesses could be grown to several million turnover, in a few years. What was the basic problem these companies really faced, and what were the components that could be addressed?

Categories of Web Site

We attempted to classify web sites according to the purpose that the site should and did serve for the business. We recognised that some sites would have multiple competing categories - so we might end up with more than 100%, after the categorisation. We were able to recognise:

• Vanity Sites - built to flatter the CEO or Marketing Director, these sites do nothing useful for visitors outside the business - this is the completely dominant category that we found, at 98% of all sites in the survey.
• Validation Sites - Showed that the company was in business and active in a claimed area - about 80% of sites needed a validation role
• Sales Sites - had products for sale on the web, with a store and payment system - in this sample, a handful
• Lead Generators - typically for brokers and other organisations with complex products - about 35% of the sites had something too complex to sell online or regulatory controls
• Subscription Sites - news, information and advice sites, possibly to a small paying audience, with lots of hidden content - not even a handful of sites in the sample

Very small businesses - often management consultants in various specialities - may have no easily defined service, other than being a specialised consultant. They often can’t talk about what they’ve done for a specific client, so the best that most of them can offer is some description of what they do and their claimed client list. Their web site acts as a verification for offline discussions and business cards handed out at meetings.

With defined services and products, larger business need to focus on selling whatever they have, in a way that suits the needs of their customers. This may differ online from the sales and selling mechanism offline - and that can provoke problems. However, these businesses will tend to drive people to an online catalogue and online ordering system, or to an offline sales order entry system based on an online catalogue - these are both Sales Sites. Some of the sites in the sample had a split model - probably because they had not found a way to combine efforts cost effectively, in which the web site acted as a mechanism to request an offline catalogue - essentially functioning as a lead generator, though the business intrinsically needed an online catalogue.

Some sales are very complex, such as is typical of financial services products where a responsible broker may have to collect a wide range of conditional information that would be difficult to collect online. In these cases, the dominant online approach is to develop a lead generation site - this validates the business area for people in receipt of direct mail or other communications, and can be used to generate leads from walk on traffic. These sites have some specific problems - for which there are marketing answers, but the solutions are rarely offered by web site designers.

Subscription sites may appear to be rare businesses - but they are much more common than is usually recognised. Most newspapers and offline news publishing businesses have an online equivalent with a subscription mechanism - Harvard Business Review, The Economist, New Scientist and daily papers, for example. But this model also works for other silos or aggregations of users with specialised interests - dating sites being an interesting example, where the product for the subscription is a listing of categorised members, with member generated content. Don’t you love it when the product sells itself, and spends money to do so?

There’s a few other types of site, such as the “Art Installation”, where the objective is to exhibit largely online material, the “Game Site”, such as World Of WarCraft, or an “info site” such as Wikipaedia. Perhaps the most interesting of these “also rans” was represented by a single example in the survey - a mass product manufacturer; these guys have an intriguing problem - they want to be seen to offer advanced products, but do not sell directly to the public. The example that we saw also failed to offer a directory of retailers, and offered no phone number to find them, either. It would have been a major exercise in frustration for a prospective purchaser!

The rest of these site types were not represented in our sample - a consequence of the size of the sample, and the location. Had we been covering parts of Silicon Valley, the representative sample would have been quite different!

All this of course, is subject to some basic principles - known in Marketing as the Four P’s (or the Seven P’s, depending on what market and product you have). There will be some businesses for which the only sensible web site is a Validation Site - because even with a large volume of sales, the product should only be available through offline channels and the best that a web site could offer would be a location service to find a retailer or distributor.

Traffic, Conversion, Currency, and PR

After talking to a few of these businesses, it was clear that none of them had any idea how people would end up on their web sites. To some extent, this is understandable. Businesses of this size, at that point, did not have internet marketing specialists on staff. There may be only one person or even none, with an explicit marketing brief.

The problems are, of course, linked. Interesting and well designed web sites, useful to customers will generate a certain amount of traffic simply because they exist. Expending effort to drive visitors to the site, without creating compelling value for the visitor, will result in disappointment.

Web designers tended to hand over static sites, with no mechanism for the client company to update the content. Without visitors, the business would see no good reason to pay for the site to be upgraded.

Public Relations was also invisible for these businesses. Universally, they neglected to post press releases online, failed to note any successful projects to which they had contributed, or even flagging large sales. There’s a rule in marketing that one of the ways that customers recognise a safe business to buy from, is knowing that other people are doing so. Hence the importance of stuff like top 10 lists and testimonials - it says that you won’t be regarded as an idiot, because other people will be making or have already made the same choice.

Initial decisions about the choice of the site could create a negative feedback cycle in which further investment in the site would be seen as merely wasteful; and at the other extreme, a virtuous cycle could result in an upward progress and increasing business emphasis on internet activity.

Sites were not built to allow businesses to inexpensively change content - resulting in no evolution of content. Design was essentially based on “Your Brochure Online” - translating a printed brochure to an online presentation. Usability and accessibility were universally ignored or treated as an alternate text-only presentation. Content was self-obsessed rather than focusing on customers reasons to engage. No advertising could be found that lead to any of the sites, except via mostly UK based paid directories. PR was not used. No identifiable engagement in forums or other discussion channels. A handful of sites used any web analytics - identifiable by a JavaScript web beacon; we could not directly infer whether any businesses used web server log file based analytics. No companies in the survey were using a special phone number to indicate a query that had arisen from web contact.

I’ll survey these referenced techniques of web marketing in another article - but the key ideas to carry away are that the nature of your business, products and services will affect the ways in which you communicate; that the web site design itself affects and is influenced by, marketing strategy; that the web site itself is not the only online tactical effort to use.

A crucial question to be answered elsewhen: Five years on - has the state of play changed and in which ways?

Summary

Building successful online businesses involves different skills online from those offline.

Most businesses were building ineffective sites that dissuaded them from additional useful online efforts, and doing nothing else online that might generate traffic or provide evidence to guide improvement of effort.

The overwhelming majority of web sites in the survey sample, appear to have been bought because they flatter the sites’ owners, rather than because they did anything useful for prospective or returning customers.

Businesses will tend to divide into two main camps - those who stumbled on to or were smart enough to plan a growing online business; and those who bought a site that did nothing and regard the web stuff as hot air and a waste of money.

Internet marketing strategy and tactics were not a widespread skill in 2003. What will the 2008 survey show?

Updates

2008-03-11 Edits for clarity. Clearly flagged in the title that this covers the 2003 Survey. Technique usage description in the penultimate section has been extended.