Do You Seriously Think, Your Website Can Generate Business For You? Part 2

Hi Everyone,

We are back again from last week.

Our meetup had ended up with an exercise for our entrepreneur friends.

They had to go back and talk to their teams to evaluate how their website was benefitting their business, if at all?

The monsoon season has gripped the nation and its raining heavily all around.

So, our discussion this week obviously started around the monsoon, the economy around this period and of course the politics associated with it J

Before the discussion turned into a debate, someone smartly diverted the group’s attention to our last week’ topic:

Do You Seriously Think Your Website Can Generate Business For You?

And he started the discussion with his own reading from the last week.

“My website is developed in WordPress technology and we are currently parked for 5 years on GoDaddy servers”, he said with a swagger , “we receive some insight emails from our hosting provider regarding the traffic on our website. As I see it, we are currently hitting around 1000 visitors a month. For my business (industrial packaging), I feel good about it.”

“Wow”, said Ms. Y, one of the three lady entrepreneurs in that group, “My story is a bit different. I went one step further”.

Everyone was expectant.

“I asked my marketing team to prepare a presentation on Why? What? How of our website. I spent an hour or so with them trying to understand if this investment was making any business sense? Am not sure I understood much except for points like – we are ranking high on Google search, we have some reviews on our products on the website and there were some phone calls received on numbers given on our website. The sales team validated that most of these calls were indeed requests from potential buyers but unfortunately very irrelevant (way below our minimum order quantity and low quality material requirements). This tells me nothing really.”

Mr. X, the savvy one, now stepped in, “using Google Analytics, we found out that we are receiving a lot of traffic from Google search and this traffic is coming mostly from mobile devices. However, we are not seeing any conversions happening i.e. phone calls, emails or form fills on the website. This makes me upset because I am not getting my traffic to convert to business.”, he sipped his piping hot tea and started looking at me as if to say … Over to you.

Well, I had to step in now.

“Great job gentlemen. Much appreciate that effort. It tells me, everyone really wants this marketing channel to work for them. Right?”

“YES” came in a chorus response.

“Rule #1 – Start with a Plan – What applies to your offline business model, applies here too. Only medium changes and hence the approach”

“How many of you developed a website because it had to be done? Or because someone told you it had to be done?”

Sheepishly, 10-12 hands went up.

“.. and that’s where problems begin. You either just outsource it for a certain budget, get your marketing team to build something because your client asked for a website or because your friend raved about his website doing great business for him.” I continued, “we need to get over that as a business first. Our website is our business. Come up with a game plan for your website.”

“How do we build a game plan?” asked Mr. X expectantly.

“Lets do this for the coming weekend:

Write down your top 3 expectations from your website? Hint: Generate 50 leads in 3 months, 10000 Traffic over next 6 months, 30 sales in next quarter, 500 reviews to our products on Google, Top 10 ranking on Google for 5 of most important key phrases, etc. Make sure they are measurable. Most importantly, they should be measured by YOU, not your team or hosting company or SEO provider or any other consultant. This is strictly about you.
What according to you are your customers’ expectations from your business? Why do they choose you over others in business deals?
Try to correlate these two sets of expectations.”
Once this is done .. we will proceed to next step of creating our game plan. Does that sound interesting enough? Hope you find the time to do this.” I questioned.

“Interesting, let me try”, said someone.

“Don’t know if I will get time but let’s see…” another remark.

“We know our business game plan for years … why do we need one for website?”, came in a query.

“Yes Sir, and we are going to use all your business knowledge and experience into creating something very interesting. Trust me.” I affirm.

“Ok then. Lets catch up next Sunday over tea and pakodas. The weather is super! How about the next meetup at Lonavla?” came in an exciting suggestion.

“Too crowdy .. but we can go to Mr. Z resort there. Mr. Z, is it booked or open?” Mr. X quizzed. Mr. Z was not sure and said he’d talk to his manager to find out.

“Business opportunity missed Mr. Z” I sneaked in …

“Why? .. it will take me a minute to confirm with my manager and reserve our slot.” Mr. Z retorted.

“In that one minute sir … I can find 3 other resorts in Lonavla for the same day and confirm my booking immediately by paying online…” I explained.

“This is a very small example of the power of web. As a business, we need to leverage that to the fullest to stay in tune with times and also ahead of the curve at times.”

Mr. Z has confirmed our booking in his resort for Sunday and we’ll be meeting up there to take this discussion further.

Keep you posted on that soon. Do stay tuned…