Your website is so BORING!

I can appreciate that marketers are starting to understand that people are going online and visiting their companies website. So what the marketer does is build a website or redesigns it. Then they feel like they are marketing online because they have built a website.

Here is the story. Happy marketer gets fed up with everyone talking about online marketing and realising that they are behind the eight ball. So they talk to their advertising agencies account manager and says that she wants some website recommendations. The advertising agency account manager has absolutely no idea although she makes out that she does and assures the client that all will be well. So the account manager goes to her production team and asks if they can get some website concepts together. The advertising agency production team want to expand their portfolio and give it their best print go. What is presented back to the client is a website from 1996. You can find them all over the place. Here is one:



http://www.medtronicneuro.com.au/index.asp

Hey the imagery looks great and the copy is perfect but only in a Powerpoint presentation and is a dogs breakfast when translated to the web. (I personally know that website was designed by an advertising agency and if you ask me I will tell you which one.) Ok so the website is live and at least its all happening.

Now I come to my point. This website has been like this for over 1 year. It hasn’t changed. Is someone who is interested in this content going to return to the website or are they going to keep Googling more information and finding other websites with more up to date info.

Everyone who knows a little about websites hurls this phrase of "getting a visitor to come back" around. I am sick and tired of hearing it from people who have no idea of how to make it happen. If you are a marketer reading this I want you to honestly ask yourself. If you were a customer of your company or a potential customer would you return back to your website?

Do you feel that you have come to the end of your marketing requirement if you have built a website? Are you online marketing if you have built a website?

Sadly, if you answered yes to any of those questions then yes you have come to the end of your online marketing and I would start looking for another job. Press Control + d right now because you need to bookmark this website and religiously read it.

If your not sure if you are boring your website visitors here is the 7 point check:

1. You haven’t changed your homepage content in over 1 year


2. Your webpages are all static and do not provide any tools, forums or ability to comment.


3. You haven’t added a new section to your navigation ever.


4. Your news content is from when you opened up the website.


5. Your services/ products pages contents has not changed since you put the website up. Your services/products must have had some sort of addition, modification or change that your customers or potential clients would be interested in. Anything. It comes in a new box, there is a special running in Harvey Norman this week.


6. Zero freebies – you got to offer something for free online. A whitepaper, an ebook or a free enewsletter.


7. You haven’t looked at your website statistics since you opened up the website.
   

Online is a unique and liquid medium and it needs continous improvement, adjustment and adding to. Would you send a new client a brochure you produced 5 years ago? You have got to update your website. Change it. Add content that is relevant to the target market any time you come across it. If you just ran a seminar put the notes on your website, if you just sold your 1,000,000th box add it to your website.

If you are a General Manager / Marketing Director I would be ware of the following 2 marketer types:
Marketers who build a website and don’t commit to updating, evolving and improving it. They let their website go stale and instead of fostering all the people they have just got to the website they would prefer going out and recruiting 2000 more with a T.V. ad. I’m sorry but I am a relationship man, I don’t want 2000 one night stands.
Marketers who think that building a website is online marketing. Is designing a brochure marketing? You need to send that brochure out, get a customer to read it, send them a new one when its updated and ask them for feedback on how you can improve it. Does David Jones produce beautiful catalogues and just leave them sitting outside the stores waiting for people to pick them up?