During the last two years, I’ve written and reviewed dozens of social media marketing plans for small and medium-sized businesses. Less than half of those businesses have understood they needed improved websites to make their marketing efforts worthwhile.
Without a website that’s easy to read, easy to navigate and full of reasons to buy from you, everything else is chaff. Writing funny, engaging tweets won’t help if those tweets send readers to a poor website. And the same goes for any other social media or online advertising campaign.
The weaknesses I’ve seen in small business websites fall into two categories — content and infrastructure. Content covers all of the text, photos and video that appear on the site. I’m also including site navigation because that’s something that site visitors interact with. Infrastructure includes elements “behind the scenes” in the website code and includes elements like page titles, meta descriptions and analytics tags. It also includes your content management system, the tools you use to post or edit content on your site.
When it comes to content, it’s important to meet your customers’ expectations when they visit your site. Can site visitors find complete descriptions of services or products they might want to buy? Is it easy to send you and e-mail to get more information? Are there photos, if appropriate. Is pricing information available? Is there some background information about your business and about its managers? Is there a blog? Is it easy to find the sections within your site and does the navigation make sense?
Is the content well-written? It doesn’t need to win a Pulitzer Prize, but words need to be spelled correctly, and your content needs to follow the rules of good grammar. Does the tone of the content reflect the personality of your business?
To explore the notion of meeting expectations, we need to go back in time to the early ’90s before most people had ever heard of the Internet. When small businesses wanted to advertise a sale, they turned to newspapers, television stations and radio stations. The ads or commercials were pretty much the same — Visit our store for special prices on our products. A print ad might have included a business logo and the address; a radio ad might have included a jingle; and a TV commercial might have included both.
After reading the ad or hearing the commercial, potential customers would visit the store. Inside the store, there were signs pointing to the merchandise that was on sale and giving a price. If the stars aligned, more customers visited the store and sales increased.
Moving into the 21st century, many businesses have shifted their advertising online, but they haven’t adapted their websites — the virtual version of their stores — to help visitors find the stuff that’s on sale. In today’s world, it does little good to advertise unless clicking on the ad takes the reader directly to something useful. In most cases, that needs to be a page other than the home page.
If you’re advertising a product on sale, the ad needs to link to that particular product page. If you want people to visit your site to learn about cremation or divorce law or solar-powered sidewalk lights, the ads need to link to special landing pages that deal with just those topics. A link to the home page will force the visitor to hunt, and they’ll likely just leave the site.
Here’s where the infrastructure becomes important. If you have a content management system that’s easy to use, it’s not hard to add a page to your site to correspond with a new product or service. But if the infrastructure is out-dated or requires you to rely on a web developer to add new content, the process gets more complicated. It affects the content on your site and your ability to promote new stuff.
And it’s harder to take advantage of social media if your website isn’t up to the challenge. It’s like trying to drive a new sports car on a dirt road. You’ll eventually get there, but the trip won’t be as fun and you’ll feel every bump in the road.
There are many benefits to marketing your business through social media. As you’re getting ready to make the commitment, take a step back and make sure your website has the content and infrastructure to meet your customers’ expectations.