If I build it, will they come?
Building your online presence is a lot like setting up your store and then turning on the “OPEN” sign. How do I get noticed? More importantly, how do I draw attention to potential customers?
Many organizations, spend loads of money to build the ideal website. Only problem being that no one is aware of it or it goes from “latest and greatest” to “same as it always was”. Much like your store location, you need to keep it fresh and relevant to keep people coming and coming back.
ColoteloLee was approached by a client who had a relatively well built three year old website. Their problem was that they could not get their customers and potential customers to use it. The reason being, customers found that it was not current and difficult to use, whereas, they were not apparent to potential customers.
ColoteloLee executed a two stage project for the client. The first stage was to introduce a process and application to ensure the website was up to date and relevant. One of the clients’ challenges was that technical staff was required to up date the website. ColoteloLee introduced a solution that allowed almost any authorized staff member to update the website, while still maintaining the integrity of the site and content, and complying with the clients’ content approval processes. Once, the client could confidently know that they had a web presence to be proud of, they went about attracting new clients. The second stage of the project involved the introduction of an aggressive Search Engine Marketing / Optimization Program. This ensured that the clients were prominently displayed near the top of search engine results and pertinent to the appropriate search criteria.
As a result of such efforts, average monthly site visitors increased nearly 40% with almost a doubling of repeat visitors.
Is there an ROI on my investments into my online presence or is it just a cost of doing business?
Not only is there an ROI, but at ColoteloLee, we insist there is an ROI, just like everything else a business invests in.
Utilizing the web as an additional distribution point has a number of inherent benefits over traditional points of customer contact such as:
- website can serve an unlimited number of customer concurrently, i.e. no busy signal, no waiting
- website is 24/7
- website is unemotional and doesn’t have personality conflicts
- website make significantly fewer errors
- website has designed in processes
- website is unencumbered by geographical boundaries
Recently, a client website project, effectively transforming a static electronic billboard to a dynamic business engine, allowed the client to:
Increased website advertising revenues 75%
Increased breadth of customer base from 89 countries to 124 countries
Reduction in operating expenses of 40%
Enhanced data capture allowing for more effective business planning and decision making.
Increased brand presence and positive awareness of 18%
Is online marketing more effective?
Historically, businesses have spent significant time and money on marketing themselves through traditional media. This can be very costly and in many cases largely ineffective. Some of the reasons being:
- Research has shown that 55% of clients / potentials do some kind of online inquiry regarding companies, their products and services, prior to any physical interaction with the company.
- 88% of internet users consider online information prior to any print or other media.
- 73% deem online information to be more credible and valuable than traditional sources because they view businesses that have a website as being more professional and established than those which do not.
- The feedback loop in traditional marketing is often incomplete and therefore it is very difficult to better target / optimize marketing efforts, (i.e. why market to someone who will never buy your product?).
A services organization approached ColoteloLee to find a way to manage its marketing more effectively and cost efficiently.
ColoteloLee implemented an email based solution for the client. The benefits realized were:
- Over 93% success rate in reaching target, since communications were directly sent to decision makers and not to mailroom staff, admin assistants, or general fax numbers.
- Increased reach by connecting with targets from over 75 countries worldwide
- Targeted penetration and frequency increases (user forwarding, repeat opens, longer retention)
- Only 4% discarded communication without reading
- Average 29440 user impressions over 7 day period
- The average repetitive impression rate was 3.2 times in 7 day period
- Average response rate of over 20%
- Lowered cost - $0.05 per impression - $0.17 per unique impression vs. traditional print costs of $2 and up per unique impression.
- Collected user submitted data, if any, as well as target behavioural data, to help better refine future marketing initiatives
- Overall marketing cost savings of 65% when compared to previous traditional tactics
Cooperating with the Competition
An industry association approached ColoteloLee with a unique problem. Not surprisingly, the composition of their membership was organizations that held substantively common interests, and offered similar products and services. Due to geography and other market factors, certain members viewed others as competition.
Occasionally, it was advantageous for subsets of the members to collaborate on projects, e.g. joint communication to industry stakeholders, business contacts and client base, joint marketing / promotional opportunities.
The main barrier to success for these initiatives was that members were unwilling to disclose and share their contact lists, which they deemed to be proprietary, with others, causing dissemination issues, and in some cases rendering the task “undoable”.
ColoteloLee recommended an email based solution to the client that allowed each of their different members to utilize the technology to work collaboratively with other sub groups of members leveraging the maximum number of contacts, without disclosing proprietary contact information to others. The immediate benefit was the ability to execute joint projects that were not possible before or required a significant amount of manual effort by association staff to act as a third party facilitator. Additionally, many members continued to use the system for their own individual needs.
