Why in the world would you dream of using your company’s website for sales and marketing?
While it’s true that most companies have a website, we find that most companies treat their websites as a required "check-off" item that never gets revisited. They redesign their website, and it lives for the next 3-6 years without being changed at all.
Your website is more than a sales brochure. The potential of your website to create business for your company is real, and you should treat your website as a profit center.
Why you should treat your website like a profit center
- Websites are often the single most untapped source of leads and revenue. The sad thing is that most companies don’t even realize the importance of testing and measuring website results, let alone improving their websites.
- Your website is an extension of your sales team. Your website doesn’t sleep. Ever. It works 24/7/365, even on holidays. It never gets cranky; it never gets distracted by outside influences. It’s always consistent.
- You can measure everything on the web. Unlike other promotional tactics, you can measure important business metrics with your website with the right marketing software. You can actually understand how much revenue your blog, content marketing efforts, etc. are bringing in.
Hold your website accountable
Your website has the potential to generate real, tangible, measurable business for your company.
In 2011, we redesigned a website for a manufacturing company. Their old website was designed in the early 2000s, and hadn’t been touched or improved in several years! The result of the redesign was a 5x increase in leads. Sounds great, right?
If the company had stopped there, though, they would have missed out on half of the leads they currently get. By continual testing of calls to action, adding meaningful content and landing pages, we have doubled the leads they see monthly since the website redesign.
So how can you bring website accountability to your company's sales and marketing team?
- Set a monthly revenue goal for your website. Demand that your website generate a realistic, measurable number of leads and customers (you may need marketing software and integration with a CRM to measure the exact revenue impact of your website).
- Create a one-page, monthly “scorecard” for your website where you can track key metrics like visits, leads, and customers. From these measures, you can determine what percentage of website visitors become leads and what your customer close rate is.
- Hold monthly meetings to review results and generate new content ideas from your sales staff.
- Keep track of what you change on a monthly basis, and write a brief plan for what you want to change next month. The plan should contain some calculated guess of the impact the change will have.
Now that you’ve taken the first steps to making your website accountable for a portion of new business, the next step is to get in gear creating content for it and optimizing the website for more leads.
Are you holding your website accountable for results? What outcomes have you seen?