A closer look at making your website the central hub for customers.

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The Potential of Web Centric Marketing
By Kevin Masi
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We've said all of your marketing should be focused on your website. But let's be clear: web-centric marketing certainly doesn't mean giving up all other media and only building a website. Sales tools, advertising, media relations, event marketing and every other marketing activity should also be tied to a company's website.

So how does everything tie in with the website? Let's start with search engine optimization (SEO), that much-misunderstood, ever-changing bastard child of black art and science. Page rankings (how high on the list of found items a link appears, in response to a search), are developed when the search engines comb the Internet with their "bots" or "spiders." Bots process and prioritize information on the basis of complex and evolving criteria, storing extensive information on that data, and relations between data, for use in performing searches.

Achieving first-page ranking (your link appears in the first screen when someone types in a keyword you've chosen to be associated with your business) involves both building the website to be easily searched as well as promoting the site on the Internet. Designing a search-engine friendly site begins with the selection of keywords relevant to the business, then using them throughout your site at the right density, prominence and word count. Also, the use of live text over Flash and graphics and other design techniques keeps keywords visible and prominent.

A link relevancy program (in which a company gets other websites--preferably highly trafficked sites--to include a link to their site) is an example of site promotion. Pay-per-click programs display your site in advantageous locations during searches. There are many others, and the process is ongoing.

Web advertising, email-marketing programs are also Internet-based marketing activities that take advantage of the Internet and bring traffic to websites.

Tying offline programs to the web:
In addition to online marketing, programs in any media can be linked to the web; ads can invite visitors to learn more or redeem other benefits online. Sales materials can do the same. What makes it really work is setting incentives to come, while simultaneously reducing distractions that might lead them elsewhere. Why make this investment? You're spending the money anyway. By bringing greater focus to your website, you can extend the dialog, create community and strengthen your brand image.
We've seen clients stumble over setting up call centers because they wanted to offer advertising viewers the option to call as well as go online. Unfortunately delays led to missing the holiday sales season, and also distracted them from integrating the ad message with the website. This led to very disappointing responses.

Manage ongoing customer relationships through your website.
Maintain dialog with current customers with as much impact as new prospects through your website. Do this by making account information available. Release news and information about your growing business. Keep customers informed about new services, changing rules and new opportunities. Distribute resources to your sales force, and encourage them to bring customers to your website. Be sure to create clear motivation through a payoff or other benefit.

Unfinished masterpieces.
Unlike print or broadcast media, your company's website is never finished--nor should it be. And not just because you've run out of time or budget. After all, neither corporate brochures nor sales manuals are truly finished...but they must get finalized to be printed and distributed. How many print pieces go out of date shortly after they ship?

The web's infinite flexibility allows for constant change and updating, making it a perfect vehicle to economically publish very high quality information as rapidly as your staff can create the content. Organizations that use their websites as living, real-time conduits to continually update key audiences are the ones getting the most from them.

What better way can you imagine to send news releases about your company, post important documents such as white papers or the transcripts of seminars presented by senior management, or statements in response to negative public opinion? How better to keep prospects and current customers excited about your brand?

In many ways, the web is a living nervous system connecting people in all directions. Tapping into that network is vital to the future success of your business.

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The power of the
web 12 advantages that just . . . click.

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Putting a Web-Centric Strategy to Work
By Kevin Masi
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One / Audience Tribe Relevant
Content can designed, organized and managed in ways that suit the particular need or interest of every tribe an organization may want to address, or around specific uses and applications. Information can also be organized on the fly through site customization tools and content organization schemes that group content areas based on user interest or use patterns.

Two / Measurement
The web offers more visibility of user behavior and response than any other media. Unlike Nielsen ratings and other sorts of user info that require voluntary human survey submissions, the Internet can track each page and link clicked, and the amount of time spent for every user. This powerful, far-reaching stream of data provides enormous insight into customer preferences, the success of your company's offers and products, and can go far beyond demographics or even attitudinal studies.

Three / Control
An organization's website content is always under its own control, not subject to the biases of sales force or the limits of media placement or other delivery channels. The only limitation is staff resources for revising, releasing and updating information. On websites, all audiences get the same information, and only the information an organization wants to release. And access can be managed through unlimited layers of access. In addition, websites are flexible and can be updated, expanded and revised as often as needed without increasing the cost or limiting an installed user base or audience.

Four / Reach
The Internet can be accessed anywhere in the world, anytime. The number of businesses online: 100%. Number of US households online: 60%. Number of portable Internet devices in use, including Internet-ready phones and handhelds: 5 million.

Five / Commerce
Online commerce (having a "storefront") has redefined sales channel expectations. For larger brands such as Home Depot, the web has actually helped bring more customers into stores, dismissing early fears of channel cannibalization. Sophisticated catalog retailers use direct-mail catalogs to bring customers to brick-and-mortar as well as online stores.

Six / Interactivity
Interactive websites mean more than slick animations, video clips or other effects triggered by mousing and clicking. True interactivity is an intellectual and emotional exchange, one that leads participants towards a discovery or other type of payoff. Interactivity has enormous ability to create connections and engagement.

Seven / 1-to-1 customization and personalization
Websites can be set up for individualized use, such as myyahoo.com, saving settings, organizing content and much more. These time-saving personalizations will be at the core of sites with thriving communities and users interested in getting the best value from their sites by getting exactly what they need from the vast mass of data available.

Eight / A smorgasbord of rich media
The web can deploy video, audio, text and graphics in unlimited formats. Pod casts, streaming video and downloadable documents are revolutionizing the deployment of timely information to large audiences. And users are ready: those with browsers supporting Flash and other advanced web programming features: 79%. Broadband users now outnumber dial-up users and publicly available wireless connection speeds are accelerating.

Nine / Economy
Bring in as many new visitors as you can attract at no additional cost. However, be aware that high traffic places its own demands on web servers, which may necessitate upgrades to dedicated hosting and redundancy...would that we all had the problems of high traffic! Beats printing and mailing thousands of corporate overview brochures; beats having call centers.

Ten / Searchability
Find data within websites. Find data on the Internet at large. It won't be long before none of us keeps our own archives of data, or printed and bound matter. Rather, we will resort to the Internet for new searches and subscribe to news and published sources for all of our information.

Eleven / Maintain Current Information
With centrally managed data, all audiences will get current information at the same time, and get as many updates as needed. Through extranets and web applications, distributed groups and customers can work in sync with each other using only the information released by the organization.

Twelve / Tie to Business Systems
Increasingly, businesses are implementing web-based enterprise systems for access to remote staff, customer and vendor organizations to efficiently and automatically interface with them. You see evidence of this every time you see a "customer login" field. With the arrival of online business transactions comes a wealth of ways to also market to the customer with as much creativity and flexibility as the entire practice of integrated marketing brings.

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