Take Back Control Of Your Site   by Tim Giles

Many of you may be aware of a move by organizations to refocus their efforts into B2B strategies and are pulling back from their B2C strategies. This is largely because it is perceived to be safer, is more lucrative in the short-term, and more easily justified to the bean counters.

I can assure you that true B2C is not dead. It just means that those who stay will be ahead of the game when the sheep wander back.

It is important to point out, though, the differences between B2C and B2B are not that great. It is just the technology and the environment of those you are targeting that is different... after all, people in the business sector are still consumers.

Firstly, what is a business to consumer online business? It is providing an online service to your end-user. Ideally, it shouldn’t mirror what the offline business is doing but, importantly, it should leverage and support the business’s offline activities.

The successful online business does not work in isolation from the offline business. It reinforces branding, drives sales, but is not solely revenue driven. A true B2C business will have online and offline elements.

Firstly, develop a strategy.
Within that strategy it is critical to determine what the organization’s expectations are up front.

Is the online business primarily a…

• Revenue generator
• Marketing tool for an offline business or a...
• Brand builder to use as leverage for offline revenue generation

Once you are ready to build your online business, there are basic elements to consider ensuring it stays relevant, current and working for you.

The successful online business includes…

• Relevant and current information. People will not keep coming back if there isn’t something new or useful to them.

• Attractive look and feel. It is no different to the offline world. People expect to read attractive magazines and enter well-designed outlets.

• Simple user editing capabilities. Have simple user editing capabilities. This allows you to make simple content changes to the site without having to pay a web developer to do it.

• Low ongoing maintenance costs. Have low ongoing maintenance costs. Often the cost of developing the business is eventually exceeded by maintenance costs.

• Adaptability. Allow for further content development and editing. This is critical to ensure the online business is always dynamic, allowing for changes in your business and industry.

• Consideration for your audiences technical infrastructure. Consider your audience’s technical infrastructure. There is no point having mind-blowing graphics and content if it takes your visitors 15 minutes to download. They will lose interest and go elsewhere. The whole point of going online is the convenience and speed factor.

• Getting the .com. Think globally and get the .com if you can. The Internet makes the world very small. It offers a virtual level playing field, which means anyone can do business on the web, regardless of size... however, ‘.com’ gives the impression of ‘beyond Australia’.

You’ve built your online business, and need to generate traffic. But, you don’t have a huge budget.

What do you do?

Public Relations
If done well, Public relations can assist with the branding process, build credibility and drive traffic to your site. It is a very cost effective way of raising the profile and credibility of your online business.

Joint Ventures
This is more than just link swapping with other sites. The objective is to develop an integrated promotional campaign with a site bigger than you so that you receive a higher level of traffic. However, it is very difficult to negotiate with a business that doesn’t need you, and if you don’t have money to burn.

The alternative is to spot an emerging online business. We have struck gold on a couple of occasions where the sites we have negotiated joint ventures with now have traffic two to three times more than our business.

To spot an emerging business you need to do your research. And this can be done part of the way by monitoring sites like Hitwise which rates the performance of sites based on traffic.

Permission Marketing
Direct e-mail is more than just forwarding emails to your customers. The onslaught of SPAM, which is sending unsolicited emails to people, means that consumers are very sensitive to what is being forwarded to them. This has seen the emergence of Permission Marketing. More of this in the coming weeks.

Search Engines
Register with search engines. The only cost involved here is your time. As outlined in previous editions of ‘Directions’, if you apply a generic branding strategy, you will see even greater returns from search engines.

Permission Marketing
100 years ago, the world was populated by small businesses.
If you owned a cheese shop and received a new batch, you would notify the customers you believed would be interested. It was very much a one-on-one relationship.

Advertising today = Interruption Marketing
The emergence of national and multi-national organizations, competitive forces and technology in the 50s and 60s saw the rise of advertising, and the end of the personal touch.
Traditional advertising is often referred to as interruption marketing.

Permission Marketing = 1 on 1 and 2 way
Permission marketing gives customers something in return for providing information about themselves. And as we all know, information is a powerful asset, as we try to re-establish the closeness we had 100 years ago with our customers.

Information for information
The sorts of things an online business might offer in exchange for information includes:

• Information on new products and services based on a customer’s profile
• Birthday and Christmas greetings
• Newsletters
• Invitations to special events
• Discounts and special offers

Opt out clause
The critical element of permission marketing is the customer always has the option of opting out.

What to look out for…?

Plan for success
Firstly, plan for success. This may sound strange but you need to ensure your ISP and IT infrastructure are equipped to deal with large levels of traffic.

We used to use a small Internet Service Provider, but found that it was too slow and could not handle the level of traffic that our online businesses were generating.

It was taking forever for pages to download… which meant visitors gave up and moved on… which meant fewer pages were being viewed… which meant that the level of traffic rated lower.

At the end of the day, traffic is an evaluation criteria, and you don’t want external elements like your ISP affecting this.

We eventually moved our hosting boxes to a better ISP. Far more people were able to access our businesses, but our own IT infrastructure was unable to cope. Our servers were falling over every 8 hours. We are currently in the process of upgrading these servers.

Justifying the effort
After building your online business and establishing your marketing program, you will be expected to analyze the performance of the business before moving onto the next stage. There are many products on the market that can help you with this.

The best strategy is a combination of analysis tools and online rating sites. The analysis tools allows you to measure the health and popularity of your business, which URL or web-address visitors use to try to get to your business, and which pages are the most successful. One of the best personal analysis tools is Web trends.

The online rating sites, like Hitwise, illustrate how you are performing compared to other online businesses, and alerts you to any PR activity in the marketplace because of the spike in traffic. The statistics shown in our weekly newsletter are from Hitwise and are a great measure for the ‘health’ of our incubator web sites.

Invest in Security
The other thing to look out for is hackers. We had a mail bomb planted from an external source that sent out 40 emails per second with one of our online business’s name attached. This was disastrous because the content of the email was highly suspect. We were unable to shut down the bomb for 20 hours even with the assistance of the Federal Police and Telecommunications Ombudsman. There is a limit to what you can do, but it is important that every effort is put into security.