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Stage 7 :: Ongoing Support & Promotion
There's an old metaphore for website promotion. Think of a website as a
supermarket. It's state-of-the-art, service driven and an excellent
shopping experience BUT it's a supermarket in the
middle of a forest, miles from the nearest town. Unfortunately
there will be no passing foot fall traffic, it's a forest after all.
There is a road to the supermarket, however it leads only to your
supermarket and to nowhere else, so no-one will
travel this road unless they know about the supermarket and have
understood the benefit of shopping there. Congratulations - you're now
the boss.
So how do you get people to come to your supermarket?
Well, that gives you an idea of the challenge and here are a few ideas to get things rolling:
literature, direct mail, post card, posters, banners, adverts, word of
mouth, networking, etc, - inspiring, promoting and
informing the
townspeople (your potential customers) of the benefits of your
supermarket.
How to avoid the peak and inevitable decline
Getting a new website launched requires a huge amount of effort,
focus, and resources but equally it generates a great level of
enthusiasm. This enthusiasm creates its own momentum and with a good
dose of project management and hard work the website launches on
time and on budget. You've done a great job - the site looks excellent,
it works well, it's bang up to date - your MD is happy - life is good.
Now - here's the real danger - the project is finished,
momentum has expired and there are many other marketing projects, tasks
aims and goals in business that are urgent and demand your time and
resources and focus and, the bad news is that a year or so later,
despite best intentions and having the tools to update the website at
the drop of the hat, the site is, stale, out-of-date and unvisited.
Your MD is frowning, looking at the invoice for this website and you're
asking yourself what went wrong!
To avoid the doom senario with our clients we recommend and implement a
regular website review meeting on either a monthy or quarterly basis.
The meeting follows this broad format:
» Review Action Points from the last meeting
» Overview of site Goals and measurements
» Review of visitor statistics for the
period (comprehensive visitor stats are accessible from from our
in-house URCHIN server via your unique username and password)
We consider how users are using the site, what documents and pages are
popular and which are not. How are users leaving entering,
travelling through and ultimately leaving the site - compared against
the goal of the site (lead generation, product purchasing, etc)
Create action points
» Search Engine Optimisation Review
Where are referrals coming from - how is the site listed on the key search engines and how can this be increased
Create action points
» Review ongoing developments and feature requirements
Create action points
» Consider any new developments or
features required. Are there any developments within the industry,
technology or other that require consideration
Create action points
» Offline and Online promotion
requirements to promote the site (postcards campaign, specific direct
mail promotions, exhibitions, awards, etc)
» Any other business
» Date of next meeting
Take a look at the graphs of E against T for my observations on
website decline.
For a Professional/Corporate website that forms the
hub of a company marketing for Marketing Managers activity I suggest a
monthly review meeting. For a Smaller Business on a limited budget I
would suggest the quarterly review meeting.
Technical Support
Support is included in either support/promotion and maintenance
package and is available by telephone and email between Monday and
Friday (excluding Bank Holidays), 9:00am - 5:30pm to the team members
that have attended training sessions. Unfortunately we cannot offer
telephone support to members of the team that have not received
training. Training for members of staff can be arranged when required.
Maintenance
A website is not a hunk of granite, it's more like a tree. Given time and good roots it will grow
strong and stable, but it needs to be tended, its branches (database
data) trimmed periodically to keep it growing in a balanced, healthy way and every now and then a
storm (virus/software bug/hacker) comes along that might bring it
crashing down.
Luckily should the worst happen, unlike a tree, a
website can be replanted using a recent back-up and the only loss will
be any changes made since the last back-up. We design the back-up
process based on your type of website, but in essence one copy is kept
on a second back-up server disk and one copy is kept on disc, off
premesis. Maintenance appropriate to your website is included in each
package.
Working with the search engines to register and reference your website (SEO)
The site will be optimised, submitted (and amended and re-submitted)
to search engines/portals on a periodical basis dependent upon your
chosen package i.e. Monthly or Quarterly.
Optimisation is a constantly
moving target as search engines adjust their parameters for
inclusion. Whilst we use software that it updated daily for page
optimisation, targeted at specific search engines, we do not use
submission software of any kind for the actual submission process. We
keep the actual approach to ourselves for reasons of competition but if
you would like further information feel free to contact us and we are
happy to discuss it with you directly.
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