An amazing thing happened with one of our client sites recently: we had barely completed the design and “thrown the switch”, when they started getting hits on the site and queries for the business. Quite literally within less than 24 hours…
An amazing thing happened with one of our client sites recently: we had barely completed the design and “thrown the switch”, when they started getting hits on the site and queries for the business. Quite literally within less than twenty-four hours of launching the site, the company had many hits and several incoming requests for information. This was before we did any publicity, before the client company started doing any advertising about the site!
So what happened?
The right content, for starters.
The right keywords, both in the content and in the “keyword” code.
The right domain name, for sure!
There are no guarantees in this business, and the target audience is a moving target. Technology changes, marketing techniques change and evolve on a daily basis, as a result of an enormous and continually growing body of knowledge about internet users’ habits on the web. Social networking sites such as YouTube, myspace, facebook, LinkedIn, and many others have changed how we reach out to our audience, and these sites have also changed how our audience reaches out to us. Listing sites such as digg, slashdot and stumbleupon offer ways to point out noteworthy content to the world at large. And people on both sides of the marketing equation are paying attention!
Technology has made “the personal touch” pretty much a requirement of doing business, and those companies that don’t alter their marketing habits to match this new expectation quickly get left behind. In some cases, as with our client’s site, you can still just build a site and be pleasantly surprised by the outcome. However, in most cases, it’s not that simple, and getting more complicated all the time. You must start with an understanding of exactly what your customer needs, and exactly how you can fill that need. But a customer’s need is not just about the product or service they want to buy from you; it’s also about how they expect to be treated at every step along the way. The term “customer relationship management” applies here, and has so much power over whether or not a company is profitable that entire curriculae have been written on the subject — “customer relationship management” (CRM) is much more than software; it is about every aspect of how a company manages their customer contact, from start to finish, from initial prospecting to closing the deal and beyond.
Why is this relevant to our amazing experience with this recent client?
Because this client demonstrated that they had exactly what their customers needed, and those customers knew how to find them because the company also demonstrated that they knew how to phrase their offerings in such a way that the search engines — and therefore prospective customers — found them.
You have a widget. Your customer needs that widget, whether they know it or not. You must reach out to them in more and more creative ways, because there are lots of other companies that also do widgets. The way to distinguish yourself from those other companies is to know your customer.
