How to Snare Them in Your Web . . .Site

An Internet Marketer’s Secrets for Creating an

Online Presence That Captivates Customers

By Richard Nelson, CPSM

s your firm’s marketing program really cutting-edge, or barely cutting it?  You’ve tried everything you know – new brochures, new corporate identity, direct mail, getting published, public speaking, hosting special events targeted at your client market, aggressive business development.  But it still takes an enormous amount of your time and the firm’s money to pursue the work you want to do, and you’re still competing based on low fees, in the end.  What more can you do?  The rapidly developing practice of “E-Marketing” just might hold some answers for you.

     While marketing has always been about effectively communicating the depth, breadth and uniqueness of your firm’s  services to your prospects, e-marketing is all about making the practice of marketing and sales more cost-effective and efficient, thereby increasing the flow of work through the door and marketing’s value to your organization.

    Assuming your business is not yet ready to take the plunge into much more than a brochure on the Web, what can you and should you do in the meantime to keep visitors coming back to your Web site?  Here’s a quick list of Web site content items that can keep visitors returning as long as you update your site at least monthly:

7 Ways to Build It So They Will Come

•  News : Continuously updated stories about new projects, new people, project awards, project completions, and innovations that the firm has developed keep people interested.  Don’t make the mistake of putting personal information about employees on your Web site – it’s very “mom-and-pop-ish”, and your clients really don’t need to know that John Doe’s baby girl just took her first steps.

• Employment Opportunities: Company Webs ites pay back huge benefits for corporate recruiting efforts.  Information beyond just the job listing can make a potential employee decide whether or not to pursue a career with your firm.  If you’re proud of what you have to offer potential employees, don’t be afraid to scream about it!

• Useful Information: Nothing keeps visitors coming back like providing useful information that they may not find elsewhere, especially if it is targeted to a specific market.  If you’ve got the goods, there’s nothing like your Web site as a medium to tell the world. Of course, the challenge is to keep it coming!

• Business Opportunities: People will return to a Web site that provides business opportunities for them, plain and simple.  The 2000 SMPS MCA  3^rd Place Web site Award went to a tie between two firms who were recognized because they are using their Web sites to offer local businesses opportunities, through bidding their projects online, as well as collecting information from professionals wishing to do business with them.  Not only does this significantly increase efficiency for them and their clients, but this also dramatically increases their professional referral network by collecting contact data for complementary professionals.

• Web Cam: Not only are Web cams cool, but they are effective, too.  The James G. Davis Construction Web site had a Web cam focused on the construction site of the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., from groundbreaking to project completion.  It was fascinating to return a few times each week and watch the building go up – with the exact camera angle and zoom setting that I selected for myself!  If I was doing it, I can only imagine how many others were, too!

• Free Stuff: A bit cheesy for professional services firms (my opinion), but people like free stuff.  If you have a relevant gift to offer site visitors either through a subscription or raffle, go for it as a way to increase site traffic.  My company’s free HTML e-mail newsletter, DesignArchitecture.com, started off four years ago at zero, and now we’re up to over 20,000 daily subscribers!  That’s an average of 14 new subscribers per day, plus we get an average of about 70,000 unique visitors per month to the DesignArchitecture.com Web site—about 2,300 per day!

• Discussion Groups: Share your expertise with your client base.  If you specialize in a particular project type, invite clients and prospects to an online discussion through one of the many inexpensive chat room services out there.  Discussion groups are a great, inexpensive way to share your firm’s expertise and possibly pick up some leads for new business.  A good discussion group will have a subscription system, so that users can be notified by e-mail whenever someone posts a message; that way you can respond quickly without having to constantly monitor the system.

 And Don’t Forget the Power of E-Mail Marketing

    Even if you don’t have a Web site, you can take advantage of the Internet to sell your business via e-mail marketing. Talk about fast, easy, and cheap marketing!  If you’re not hip to e-mail marketing, don’t worry; it’s easy, and (for those bosses out there) it’s virtually free.  Probably the best argument for e-mail marketing, however, is this: Not everyone I know reads their mail every day; everyone I know does read their e-mail every day. Here are a few basics to get you going:

·         E-Mail Signature Files: This is one of the most often overlooked, yet extremely powerful, e-marketing opportunities available to every firm using e-mail.  Every e-mail system let’s you “sign” your mail with a pre-written message that you create.  (Usually you can find the signature file setup screen under your Preferences or Settings menu.)  Think about it: How many e-mails have you received with a little message at the bottom and a link to a Web site?  And how many of those  have you clicked on just to see what it’s all about?  Now, how many e-mails leave your firm every day without that little marketing message and a link to your firm’s Web site?  If you are a marketing professional who wants to keep your job within the next year, you’ve laid this article aside by now and you’re scripting a signature file for everyone in the office to start using immediately!

·         E-Newsletters:  As I mentioned above, an e-newsletter is a free, effective way to distribute useful information to your audience, while sharing your expertise and branding your firm.  If you’ve gone through the exercise of building an office mailing list database (collected from everyone’s Rolodex card file), or if you use an enterprise-wide e-mail system (like MS Exchange or Novell GroupWise), it shouldn’t be too hard to gather e-mail addresses of your clients, send them a note asking if they’d like to receive information and updates from your firm (more on permissions next), then start  sending.  DesignArchitecture.com went from zero to 20,000+ daily subscribers in this very fashion – and to this day, we are adding about  500-600 subscribers per month with no outside advertising or promotion.

·         Permission/Trust Marketing: E-mail Marketing Cardinal Rule No. 1: Get Permission.  The surest way to blow any chance of a relationship before it even starts is to “spam” someone with unwanted e-mails without getting their permission.  This is critical to e-mail marketing success.

    I haven’t even begun to get into all the great e-mail marketing tips there are to be had out there, but you can get a lot of information for free from this great e-marketing Web site, the ClickZ Network (www.clickz.com).  Find out about  things like how to obtain permission there—and, yes, ClickZ has a bunch of great free e-newsletters on various marketing topics that you can subscribe to!

    So what should your budget for e-marketing be?  Well, while e-marketing offers some very exciting opportunities for cost-reduction, there is still a lot of value to be gained by combining e-marketing with traditional marketing methods, such as sending a postcard mailer to announce a major update to your Web site.  With e-marketing, you can probably shave about 10 to 20 percent off your marketing expenses in your first year (not counting labor), with certain line items being drastically reduced or even eliminated.  A good e-marketing information system, like the one described above, can cut your marketing expenses by more than 25 percent and your marketing IT costs by 50 percent or more.

    What are you waiting for?

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Richard Nelson, CPSM, is Senior Vice President, Business Development for Cosential, Inc., an application service provider and custom web solution developer dedicated to the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry.  Richard is a marketing veteran of more than 11 years. He is a member of the board of directors of the Society for Marketing Professionals,

New York Area Chapter.

"Adapted from the June 2001 SMPS Marketer with the permission  

of the Society for Marketing Professional Services."

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