The Internet Is Your BUSINESS.com
By Kelly Cook – first published in Family Ties, Newsletter of the Canadian Association of Family Enterprise, Ottawa Chapter, Issue 3, Winter 2003 – 2004
Just like phone, mail and email, the World Wide Web has become a necessary channel to assist those looking for information about your company. Would you ever have an unlisted phone number for your company? Not having a website today is essentially the same thing. A few statistics about the state of the Internet nation:
- 72% of Canadian adults have Internet access. Of those, 91% go online to search for product information (versus any other activity) .
- Worldwide, more than 600 million searches per day are executed on the Internet. Of that search market, Google dominates with 55% global usage share.
- 8.8 million Canadians per month are ‘active’ Internet users and per capita, 52% of Canadians are online (#2 in the world – ahead of the US) .
To decide if you can afford a website, begin by thinking of websites as a relative (not absolute) marketing expense (not technology) and ask:
- What is my total marketing budget?
- What percent am I spending per marketing vehicle? E.g. business cards vs. direct mail vs. advertising vs. sponsorships, etc.?
- What percent am I willing to test on the Internet? E.g. 1%? 5%? 15%?
Web site launch costs should typically break down as follows:
- 50% Technology: domain registry, hosting, ‘building’ (HTML) and testing / quality assurance
- 20% Design: the “look and feel” of the website (page layout, colours, fonts, images and graphics)
- 20% Planning: competitive analysis, budget, site map and copy
- 10% Marketing: promotion of website and analysis of web site performance reports
Assuming a five-page website (Homepage, Customers / Clients, Products / Services, About Us and Contact Us), an annual website budget of $1,000.00 allows you to ‘lease’ basic web page templates with your copy and logo inserted. With $2,000.00 you could ‘purchase’ web pages built to your specifications. With $3,000.00, your five-page site can be professionally designed and built, updated and promoted. The latter step is critical if you intend to measure Return on Investment (ROI) for the project.
There are four consecutive steps to launching a website: planning, design, production and marketing. It is critical to follow this order; otherwise timelines and costs will spiral out of control. Planning begins with competitive analysis, showing you to position yourself relative to your competitors’ presence online. Based on the analysis, develop a ‘site map’ (a visual snapshot of the site hierarchy and proposed number of web pages) and then a budget to identify all likely expenses in advance of actual expenditure. Finally, write the full site copy including the web page body copy for human visitors and Meta tags for the search engines. Typically, a five page website will need approximately 2000 words of copy.
The second step is design – and I cannot state strongly enough how critical it is to pay a professional to complete this step for you. The Internet is a visual medium, and you should play to its strengths by presenting yourself in a visually compelling yet professional manner. A designer should present you with optional ‘looks’ for your site and once you settle on the ‘best of’ elements of those options, the designer will create a ‘final’ digital file of the pages. Next, the ‘builder’ or HTML producer will take the designer’s files and build’ each page formatted to the design specifications and ‘pour’ in your copy. Finally, the producer should test the site with you and make final ‘fixes’ before launch.
You’re back in the spotlight for the fourth and final stage – marketing. To achieve the established ROI, it is your responsibility to drive traffic to the website. Do so by printing your website address everywhere (business cards, brochures, invoices, stationary, packaging, uniforms, trucks, etc.), thus building the awareness of those who already know about your business. Next, include your site in search engine results so users looking for your product or service category will also be directed to your site.
Following these steps will allow you to make informed decisions about your Internet strategy, without feeling pressured into spending more than you are comfortable with.
Kelly Cook is an Internet planning consultant with Online Authority and a CAFÉ Member through her family’s business, Morrison Lamothe.
Sources:
“Canadian Netizens”, NFO CFgroup, January 2003.
“CyberTrends”, ComQUEST Research, Winter 2003.
“Searches Per Day”, Danny Sullivan, Editor, SearchEngineWatch.com, February 2003
“Search Engine Ratings”, OneStat.com, May 2003
“Population Explosion!”, CyberAtlas, September 2003
“Multi-Country Report”, comScore Media Metrix Canada, March 2003
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