Recently, one of my clients told me that he wasn’t convinced that his website and certainly any other eMarketing tools were important to his engineering firm. He did not believe in their value, had spent thousands over the years on the website, and he certainly wasn’t going to invest one more dollar on refreshing them. His point was that because the construction business is so collaborative and relationship-oriented, the website seems like a “nice to have.” 

While I can sympathize with his frustration, I don’t agree with him. The present and the future focus of communications will be electronic. Do you want proof? The postal service is considering dropping service to five days per week. Newspapers around the country are bankrupt or changing their delivery formats. More and more news, music, mail, and marketing are being delivered electronically. That said, not every electronic media innovation may be for you or your firm but a website that is strategically designed and updated regularly is essential. In fact, most people do not realize how important their website is because they never get their web traffic reports. They do not realize how many people are going to their website to review their projects and services before they pick up the phone to make the call and inquire about their services. As a former director of marketing for several architecture firms, we often made decisions about which engineers to select for teams based on our knowledge COMBINED with the projects we found on the various engineers’ websites. The developers that contacted us mentioned that they had found us or qualified us based on our website projects. So those firms that have dated websites are doing themselves a disservice.

There are three key reasons (from a marketing perspective) in a business to business setting that people use the internet. Those are to research, search and buy. For many professional service firms, especially those that serve exclusively other businesses, the research aspect is more important than the “search” or “buy” aspects. No electronic media will ever replace the value of personal relationships and networking. However, the website significantly augments those efforts. For example, suppose you have spent hours, weeks, or months on business development. When the time comes, you want to know that when they visit your website or forward it to a colleague, it accurately represents your firm and persuasively communicates the reason they should hire you. Clients and potential clients do their “research” by visiting your website.

The “search” aspect of the internet is important to firms (especially consumer-oriented) where their prospective clients don’t know their web address. They just want to find an excellent attorney/accountant/dog sitter, etc. If you are a consumer-oriented firm, or you don’t have a significant business development effort, search engine optimization (SEO) is a must. In short, SEO is the group of techniques that are used to promote and rank your site with the search engines (like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask!) So, when someone searches for “structural engineer Tucson,” if you are search engine optimized, you will be pulled up on the first page or two on the search engine on which you are optimized.

·    Take a look at your website (you’d be amazed how many people never look at their sites!)

·    Visit your competitor’s websites.

·    Then, decide your goals for the website. Is it to persuade people to call you for more information? Is it to answer clients’ easy questions? Is it to gather resumes? Is it to proactively or reactively market your firm? Do you want a place to communicate with clients online?

·    Objectively ask yourself if your website meets your goals. Does it have the functionality you want? Is the content compelling, accurate, and current? Does it reflect your company’s culture? 

·    Next, ask your IT person or whoever hosts your site to provide web traffic reports. Those reports will provide information like how many people visit your site, where they are visiting from, the pages they viewed and how long they stayed on the site.

·    If you decide you need a refresh, talk to a professional (not a friend’s kid who just graduated from college) about your goals for the website. Make sure the person you hire understands not only web development or design but also marketing and how the website fits into your overall marketing message and plan. Investigate search engine optimization (the various techniques that are used to ensure your website is found on the web,) key words (words people use to find you on the web, if they don’t already have your web address), and the impact of various decisions on your overall goals. (e.g. if you are interested in search engines finding you, don’t develop your site in flash.) 

The word blog is short for “web log.” It is a way for you to update your website, add some dialogue and engage in conversation with your website viewers. Blogging has become extremely important in the world of politics, journalism and search engine optimization. Because blogging is almost instantaneous publishing to the world, in any industry where information is critical, and speed matters blogging can move opinion and seed more traditional journalistic publications. For search engine optimization, when websites are updated frequently, they are more likely to get higher page rankings, meaning they are more likely to be optimized. The most common arena for blogs to be indexed is the website: www.technorati.com. It is the “Google” of blogs. If you want to find the latest information, and you have found a blog that you really like, you can register for a Real Simple Syndication (RSS) Feed. A RSS Feed is essentially a subscription to the blog. When new updates are posted, you either receive the post or a notice that a new post is available for you to read.

The last part of the website information you should be aware is the importance of website analytics. Every marketer needs to have an understanding of where your web traffic comes from, who visits, when they visit, where they spend most of their time, and how they found you (i.e. which search engine, directly typing in your address, etc.) Every good marketer should request web analytic reports, understand them, and use the information to improve the website.

All of the previous concepts, the website, analytics, blogging, SEO are all related to people finding you. Next article we will discuss you driving people to you as we discuss email marketing.