Show up for online success
Small business marketing online series
Originally published in Small Business Charleston, July 2008
By Tiffany Jonas
72% of the US population is online... and some of them are actively seeking what your small business offers. Are you online for them to find?
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The statistics in a recent Charleston Regional Business Journal article were eye-opening. In North America, internet usage has increased by 128% in less than eight years. According to the Journal's source, www.internetworldstats.com, 72% of the United States' population is online… and some of them are actively seeking what your firm offers. Are you online for them to find?
In April I attended the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo, a news-making event on the bleeding edge of web trends, in the same San Francisco convention halls that house Apple's famous annual conference. Social websites were all the rage there, with advertiser-supported sites like Flickr and Twitter extolled in nearly every session.
Charleston is not San Francisco, though, and our city does not yet sport a Flickr type of environment. Most firms here are small businesses in traditional fields; take a look at the annual short list of Charleston’s largest employers and you'll consistently find many government agencies and healthcare organizations. For better or worse, Silicon Valley we’re not… and I want you to succeed here, today. So let's put aside Web 2.0 and focus on the web, period.
Do you have a presence online?
It's a sad fact that if a firm doesn't have a website, it's often not considered by potential customers to be a real, viable business. And if a prospect searches for you online but comes up dry, they're usually off to whichever of your competitors does have a presence online, with a single click. (Even if you market to other businesses, you're not safe; according to Enquiro Research's Business to Business Survey 2007, 83% of businesses use the web to research and find potential vendors.)
Even if it was made in the early days of the internet and badly needs updating, give yourself a point if your small business at least has a website. Give yourself several points if it's optimized for search engines like Google to find.
What image does your website present?
Fully 75% of web users admit making judgments about the credibility of an organization based on the design of its website, according to the Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility. Consider the words of Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers and Prospects Into Leads authors Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus: "The sad truth is that most organizations view their websites and the people who design and build them as part of the 'cost' in 'cost center'. 'No,' they say, 'the people who are generating revenue for the business are the salespeople.' But how many people can even the best salesperson speak with in a given month? 50? 100? 200? …A web designer's work may be viewed by millions of people every month, all of whom make judgments about the organization based on their experience with the site."
The bottom line is investing in a website no longer places your business on the cutting edge; it has instead become a cost of doing business, akin to business licenses and bank fees. But there's no reason this has to be grim; it can be an opportunity to give your firm an edge. Take a look at your competitors' websites and see what value you can offer that they don’t. It can be as simple as placing photos of your products online and offering a straightforward "enlarge" or "zoom" function so prospects can view them in loving detail. And if your industry is less glamorous than others (home repair, construction, and the like), your local competitors may not yet be online at all, leaving a huge window of opportunity for you to reel in some of that 72% of web traffic.
About the author
Aio Design founder Tiffany Jonas graduated magna cum laude from the Missouri School of Journalism, a top journalism school, with a degree in advertising. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and has taken coursework toward an MBA. She is a member of Mensa, an organization for those who have tested in the top 2% of the population on a standardized intelligence test, and is also a member of the American Marketing Association and the eMarketing Association. She has been the two-time recipient of an 11-state award for design, honored at the Chicago Book and Media Show, and the New York Times called one of her book designs "well-produced and elegant." In 2008 she was named one of the Charleston Regional Business Journal's Forty Under 40, an honor recognizing individuals who have achieved professional success while contributing to the Charleston community.
