Is your website making your business invisible?

How many times as a business have you heard from your clients “I found you through your website.” or “I liked what I saw on your website.”? If that answer to that is not greater than 50%, then you may be missing some great opportunities. Why do I say this? The internet is the avenue of choice for most sourcing inquiries today. Therefor my first assumption to why you are not seeing more connections from your website is you are not working on your company’s online presence. Take a look at these quotes to get a sense of the opportunity you could be missing.

• “Email/Website marketing has a 2x higher ROI than cold calls, networking or trade shows” – MarketingSherpa
• “Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads” – ANNUITAS Group

 A quality online presence needs to be viewed as a “strategic asset” available to everyone regardless of your company’s size. Sure there are costly website enhancements that everyone could not afford. But ask yourself if you can afford to not have a great platform to generate customer leads and filters?

During my tenure as a strategic supplier manager working with hundreds of suppliers, a quick “hack” to reduce the number of potential candidates down was to check what the information available on the supplier website. Regardless of the suppliers size the website was my quick filter to dig through a few key facts, validate potential fit and identify a good contact to reach out to. Approximately 1 out of 5 suppliers were easily eliminated from my list because they were missing some basics or it was too cumbersome to find what I was looking for. Sometimes these sites required visiting several links or other websites to get what I needed. I didn’t have the time if they didn’t take the time to make it easy for me. You are probably wondering “what those missing things are” so I’ll identify a few in the next paragraph, but remember that knowing your business and the type of customers you market to is key to help you identify what needs to be on your website. As I said this was my hack, but I know several peers who also did something similar. Put that knowledge to work for you on your website. Don’t get me wrong; if my list was down to 2 or 3 suppliers, I went out of the way to vet them all. But if my list was 10 -15 suppliers I would work to quickly dwindle my list down to the ones that I could focus where needed.

My first pass across a company’s website I would start by looking for:

1. How quickly could I find the website of the company. Once there do they have an “about” page that I could quickly validate what markets and customers they served along with some other key details like how long have they been around, what their leadership structure is…etc. There are many examples out there so look around for examples you connect with.
2. Is the website “Polished” or does it look like an after thought? (A lot goes into this but most people know when they find a website they can navigate. For an example of good vs. bad sites, see below.)

For the complete article, list and examples, please visit the link on my blog at: https://www.theawardsolution.com/onlinepresence/ . If you have any feedback or questions, let me know. I'd love to hear from you and your opinion.