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Read the title again; we are NOT talking about how you can sell
stuff on the internet. While you may find things that your customers
are ready to buy through your website, or affiliate programs that
make it worth your while to sell their products through your website,
the website has a LOT more value to offer. And, nowadays, trust
has a lot more to do with visitors buying from your website, no
matter what “shopping cart” functionality you use or
how much you pay your hosting provider for merchant-level support.
Yours is not the first website most of your visitors will have
visited; they have seen lots of others; they have basic expectations
when they check you out. Few people want to put their credit card
online with a merchant who seems transient. How to show visitors
that you’re serious enough to trust? Committed enough to consider
“reputable?”
Use the web as an integral part of your business. Make it easy
for people to engage themselves in the various facets of your business
if they want to, or to make a breezy visit if they are only seeking
something specific. Even if you think you have no competition in
your specialty, you ARE competing for that customer’s attention,
for that expenditure, for that potential business relationship.
How to do that? You don’t need to buy anything; you don’t
need to hire another expert (you already have a web person and a
hosting relationship); you don’t need to research anything.
You need to create a map. An information map. It’s easy because
you know the details – it’s your business, after all;
but it’s harder than it sounds, because you’re probably
too close to it every day. You know the subject matter so well that
it’s hard to stop speaking in industry short-hand.
Set aside assumptions, get out of the “forest” of the
business for a few minutes, and let’s start inventorying the
“trees.” List every information exchange that you or
your employees have with prospects and customers (let’s keep
our eye on the revenue-producing relationships to start with). If
it’s hard to do this at the end of a busy week, do what you
can and carry a notepad or handheld dictation recorder throughout
the work week to enable you to make notes on the fly as new information
exchanges occur. These are the “trees” in your business
forest.
These interactions with your prospects, community thought-leaders,
fellow professionals among architects, builders, contractors, business
owners, drop-by browsers, etc. will cluster around a set of issues
(every conversation you have is not absolutely unique!) on which
people turn to you for expertise, advice, referrals.
This is where to start in building onto the basic informational
website you have created, really tailoring it for use as a business
tool.
Once you have a firm grasp of these issues underlying your business
(and your unique personal interests, strengths, curiosities), you
can start to organize information around those issues on your website.
You’re on solid ground here. These are issues that bubble
up from serving the business every day. These aren’t projections
or extrapolations.
Let’s illustrate this approach with an outlandish example.
Perhaps you find that you have ten people on an average week who
seek your advice on some topic. And they invariably raise the same
issues.
You may not have chosen to emphasize this sub-sub-topic of your
business, but for some reason almost a dozen people per week are
asking you about it. Maybe it’s something in the water, but
you should take the opportunity to serve this need.
Take the most commonly raised issues, and your answers to them,
plus whatever guidance you would normally provide to someone starting
to consider the issue and draft up some text for your website on
this topic. Then get with your web resource. They will help you
sort through how to incorporate this information into your website
– in a context that makes sense for the customers, not just
pasted on somewhere.
Continuing our example, fast-forward several months. You have continued
to pay attention to the issues.You’re also discovering that
other businesses are linking to this area of your site and that
some repeat-customers have tried your advice and would like to offer
some refinements or extensions to your recommendations.
You could stand to gain a lot of business and a lot of free awareness-generation
by finding a way for the people interested in this topic to interact
with each other, in a way that you could shape and manage, to ensure
it stayed on-topic and remained useful for people (and productive
for the business). So, you start an email newsletter on the topic.
Based on how you and your web resource manage this, the sky is
the limit – you may find that you have reason to develop interactive
tutorials to supplement in-store instruction classes, pursue webinars
on specific topics, virtual walk-throughs via the web of some of
your more dazzling work, or perhaps the business will push you to
enable online forums via your website, to permit people to exchange
information with each other via your website (all well branded and
respectfully managed by you, of course).
The point is, by pursuing the web business tool “bottom up”
identifying the issues that produce business rather from “top
down” by inventing something artificial to fill up your web
page template, you are serving notice to your market that you are
confident, accessible, trustworthy, credible, however they want
to access your offerings. Exactly the kind of thing you want them
to say about the work you perform for them.
The best example of this “blended value proposition”
where the web is an inseparable part of the value proposition is
the DIY channel (available by satellite and cable). The TV shows
are a good walkthrough of various projects, and deep information,
drawings, photos, links to related info is available on the web,
where extra “space” doesn’t cost what extra broadcast
minutes does. And the on-air hosts repeatedly refer viewers to the
web for additional info. Likewise, each topic area of the web contains
links to related and some not-so-related issues, to pique curiosity
and cause furniture refinishers to check out the gardening shows.
Using the web to drive real business relationships and growth centers
on the blended value proposition; not the afterthought-website.
Talk to us. Let us know what aspects of this vast topic are helpful
to you and which would be worth spending some more time. Drop us
a line.
ABOUT GROWINGCO, INC.
GrowingCo, Inc. is an advisory firm -- a trusted provider and facilitator
of peer-driven intelligence, insight and interaction.
Study, forum participants and sponsors use GrowingCo data, forums,
surveys and white papers to benchmark against peers and competitors,
evaluate demand drivers and understand individual customer requirements.
CONTACT
Ben Bradley
Managing Director
GrowingCo, Inc.
ben @ growingco.com
Direct: 630-221-9844
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