How Good is Your Website?

Is your company website  designed to help sell your product and inform your customers, or is it designed to stroke the boss’s ego and show off the new warehouse?  Worse yet, could it actually be hurting your business? Answer the following questions and see how your company website rates.

Today, everybody has a website,  from the old lady down the street selling hand-knitted golf clubs covers, to General Motors, where you can order a brand new car designed – for the most part — to your specifications,  and in the B2B sector, the importance of the web is even more pronounced. According to ThomasNet, the industrial information firm formerly known as Thomas Register,  more than 93.4% of industrial buyers now use the Internet to research their purchasing decisions, and, perhaps more to the point, if buyers can’t find what their looking for on your website,  over 90% of them will look for somebody else to fulfill their orders!  Furthermore, a recent survey suggests that manufacturers who use the web effectively get up to 40% of their total sales from the Internet!  The numbers are big and getting larger, and the revolution is only just beginning, which is why ThomasNet has even begun helping their clients build websites. Over the past several years,  they have helped build more than a thousand B2B sites.

Susan Orr,  Director of Strategic Marketing for Thomas Industrial Network, emphasizes that the move of B2B to the web is growing exponentially. “Time is of the essence,” she says, “with real-time opportunities for buyers and sellers to come together in the virtual marketplace,  B2B marketers cannot be complacent about the integrity of their websites and how their websites deliver on the promise of all of the company’s marketing.” 
Like many in the vanguard of B2B web marketing,  Orr talks about the importance of becoming customer centric.  “The power has shifted to the buyer from the seller,” she says. “So B2B companies would be wise to accept that fact and deliver or they will be left in the virtual dust.”

Clearly, not everyone who’s looking for the promised land of Internet millions is doing a great business. In fact,  some websites are a gigantic waste of money. The question most companies need to answer is,  what about my website?

Your site may have been designed by a nephew home from college using an
Internet-in-a-box product he picked up at the local software store, or by an expensive design firm from Chicago, New York, or San Francisco who don’t know the first thing about your business and speak a techno-geek language you’ll never understand.  However,  spending more money does not always ensure you’ll get a better products. Occasionally, your sister’s pimply-faced kid knows the game better than the so-called professionals.
So, is it all just a game of chance, or is there anything you can do to make sure your company isn’t left behind in the cyber-races? To make sure you’re not bringing up the rear,  think about  the following questions. If you’ve been paying attention,  at the end of this short quiz,  you’ll won’t know everything,  but you’ll be well on your way to understanding what it takes to build an effective  — and profitable — company website.

 

1. Why do you have a website ?

First, let’s rephrase the question to place the emphasis where it should be. “Why do YOU have a website?” Despite the near universality of industrial websites,  companies still have very different internal reasons for building them. 

Some companies want to tell their story: featuring a company history, bios and headshots of founders and corporate officers, pictures of the new warehouse,  the mission statement,  and maybe a recent speech by the company president.  To paraphrase what a veteran publisher once said about such websites and publications— “nobody gives a damn except your mother.” As for your existing and potential customers,  such a website  will only irritate them.

If you have a website like this, one designed to stroke the boss’ ego,  don’t feel all alone. According to Travis Sherbine, the Director of Marketing — Content Solutions, at ThomasNet, thousands of other companies are in the same leaky boat.
 
“When the big dot.com boom came along, everybody went out, got a URL and threw up a two page website that their nephew built and waited for the millions to pour in, and it didn’t happen.” One of the big problems, says Travis, is that “most industrial manufacturers view their website as a function of marketing, rather than a function of customer support.”

Tim Harris, the president of Nexidiom, a web development  and hosting firm, goes a step further. “Most companies,” he says, “assume they are designing their sites for themselves, rather than their customers.”

 

 

1. How easy is it for customers to find what they’re looking for?

The graph above shows what  customers actually want  from a B2B website.  Not surprisingly, the most important thing to them is product information. Ninety percent of web visitors want product descriptions, and following close behind, they want pricing (84%), product applications (72%), and distributor locations (64%). These folks are hungry to do business with you, but they’re not that interested in your mission statement or your CEO’s most recent speech to the JAYCEES.

Can’t you have both, you ask?  Of course you can. The great thing about the web is that you can post almost limitless amounts of information at very little incremental cost.  The trick is to organize that information in such a way that your most visitors (your customers) can find what they’re looking for in the most efficient way.  Generally, this means devoting the prime real estate on your home page to things that matter to customers.

1. Are you putting lipstick on a pig?

Contrary to Billy Crystal’s catchline on SNL’s “Fernando’s Hideaway,” it is not better to look good than to feel good. When it comes to website design,  functionality is everything,  and cosmetics almost nothing. In fact, a beautiful website can actually be a detriment!

Okay, hold on, we don’t want your head to explode. A well-designed website will not only be functional,  but attractive as well.  Form follows function as the old saying goes. However,  if you invest in unnecessary frills such as moving type,  pop-up gizmos, and streaming videos,  it will not only be distracting to the user,  it will slow your site down significantly.  And there’s nothing worse than twiddling your thumbs while waiting for a feature-rich page to load. Customers hate it, and if they hate it enough, they’ll take their business to a website that doesn’t waste their time.

ThomasNet’s Travis Sherbine says this is something they take into account when  working with their clients., “We don’t develop pretty,  Flash intro pages, or little online commercials,” he says, “because all of our research has told us that customers skip by those or hit the back button. They want to get to the detailed information.”

Susan Orr concurs. “Many clients don’t distinguish between a good-looking website and a good-performing website,” she says. “By this I mean that simply because a design looks fantastic and makes the president of the company happy doesn’t necessarily equate to a website that delivers on the goals and objectives for that site. So, hiring a website designer or agency or allowing the web hosting company to “develop” a website can be a crucial mistake. Great design may be just that—great design but not lead to qualified leads and actual sales.”

For the last word on this topic,  we’d like to refer you to the irrepressible Ann Richards, the late Governor of Texas (before Dubya), who said, “You can put lipstick on a pig, give it a purse and call it Lurleen,  but in the end, a pig is still a pig.”
Sadly, the same thing goes for websites.

Have you done your homework?

Probably the biggest mistake companies make when building or redesigning their websites is to rush right in before doing their homework.  Susan Orr compares online marketing to building a home. “How can an architect deliver a home,” she asks, “that meets the needs of his clients if he doesn’t understand what their expectations are? Do they have young children, is someone handicapped, do they entertain a great deal, do they lead a very casual lifestyle and have no need for a formal dining room, etc.”

Orr stresses that rather than spending a bundle on high priced design firms, it makes more sense use your resources “brainstorming and research to help clients understand their customers’ needs and expectations and how can the client meet those needs and expectations.” To that end, she asks, “what do prospects and clients need/expect from a potential supplier? Do they need to offer white papers? Do they need to provide the ability to allow users to search for products by specifications? Do they need to offer CAD drawings, etc.?”

Like Susan Orr, Travis Sherbine says that this is one of the most important services ThomasNet offers to their clients. 

“The majority of our focus, aside from driving the general marketing message, and building all the marketing collateral,   is to talk with clients about who they sell to,  how their products are sold, what information is needed and help them figure out what kind of features and functionality they need on their website to support their existing customers and attract new business.”

1. Can your customers find you? And what will they find when they get there?

If your marketing people are worth their paychecks,  they’re going to make sure your URL or domain name (www. Bighonkingmachines.com) will be splashed all over your stationary, business cards, and collateral materials,  so your regular customers should have no trouble finding you.  But what about new customers?  If you’ve gone through the trouble of building a website,  you must been thinking about growing your business, that is, offering your products and services to potential customers that don’t know you yet.  So, what are you doing to reach them?

Today’s rallying cry among web marketers is SEO, short for “search engine optimization,” which basically means that when one of your prospects Googles (when did this become a verb?) your most important product,  let’s say, “medical grade pan head screws,” your company name is one of the first few that pops up. 

This can be accomplished one of several ways. First, you can pay to make sure that your website gets a high listing by either creating ads that pop up when certain keywords such as “pan-head screws” are searched, or you can buy keywords which will give your website a high ranking during a search. Another way is to design your website with “discoverable” keywords embedded into it.  Yeah,  it sounds complicated, but it’s really not.

Search engines such as Google send out bits of software code known as “bots” and “spiders” which look for key words  and phrases on websites,  which tell them what  the site is all about.  If the bots find lots of words relating to screws,  medical devices,  titanium,  orthopedic surgery,  chance are excellent  that when somebody searches for a supplier for medical grade screws and fasteners,  your site will  rank very high.

However, there is an important caveat.  Remember what we said about sites that are too fancy hurting performance?  Well, cool-looking visual effects can not only make the site load slowly, but they can actually prevent  new customers from finding the site!
Paul Gerbino,  the publisher of Thomas Industrial Newsroom,  warns against an over-reliance on graphic intensive software such as Flash. He described a situation where the daughter of the company president (yes, another reference to the dangers of getting the kids involved with the business ) was a graphic artist and really liked Flash. Since text is converted to art in programs such as Flash and Photoshop, the search engines couldn’t find anything inside it to report on, and an opportunity was lost. Unfortunately, this is a relatively common mistake.

“There’s not a lot of discoverable information on such sites,” says Gerbino. “They may have some pretty pictures, generally of their warehouse or their office doorway, but there’s not a lot of discoverable information that makes it easy for the visitor to the site to understand what they do.  The other big problem is that they’re not being picked up by search engines because they don’t understand search engine optimization. They don’t understand the importance of having well-written  key phrase rich copy. When I say key words or key phrases… I’m talking about the key words and key phrases used by your customers and prospects,  not that you use in your office. Because there are a lot of companyisms that you’ll see on a website that have absolutely no meaning to a prospect.”

1. What’s on your home page?

Because of their experience  on the B2C world , buyers today know how good sites should work,  and they’re not very forgiving if you’re not up to snuff. At a minimum, they’ll expect to see certain standard items, such as your phone number on every page,  standard navigation,  and a live logo (one that takes you to the home page when you click it).They will also expect to see either your product line,  or links to your product line on the home page, and the fewer clicks to get there, the better.  And as Susan Orr told us, one of the biggest misconceptions companies have is that a potential customer will contact you if they don’t find what they’re looking for on your website.

“In fact, we know that if a potential buyer doesn’t find what they need on a company’s website that they buyer will go elsewhere,” says Orr. “If clients think about their own online experiences this will not be hard to understand and accept. In reality, do any of us pick up a phone or send an email to get more information from a company? No. We want the information when we are online at that exact point in time. We are not patient and this is particularly true in the B2B world—we have jobs to do and cannot afford to waste time and wait for someone to get back to us.”

 

1. Who owns your website? 

 

Simply put,  this question asks who’s responsible and who’s held accountable for the performance of your website.  If your answer is,  “some kid in the marketing department,” or “some geek in IT” (if you have an IT department),  you’re probably looking for trouble.  Why? Because if you’ve assigned your web business to a support department,  it means you’re not serious about the web yet, and you’re probably not investing enough to be competitive  online.  You might be surprised to find out that some companies in the industrial space invest well into six figures annually on their website development,  whereas  the companies that “don’t get it” have trouble doling out a thousand bucks a year.

Does this mean you have to spend a bundle to have a meaningful presence of the web?  Not necessarily. There are some excellent companies out there who can build you a functional website and give you the professional guidance necessary to make your Web business viable with costing you a fortune. (see sidebar)

1. What do you measure?  How do you know how you’re doing?

 

There’s an old saying in the Internet world,  “you manage what you measure.” Another way of expressing this truism is to say, you can’t improve your business if you don’t know how you’re doing in the first place.  This is where website “metrics” come into play.

Most websites have at least a rudimentary means of measuring performance through their web host — a tool that shows how many “hits,” “page views”, and “unique visitors” your Website receives.  Depending on the nature and sophistication of your measurement tools, you can also discover, which  of your pages get the most attention,  what time of day your visitors come to the site,  and where they come from, which is why the folks at ThomasNet stress the importance of measurement.

“One of the most important tools for our clients is a client-side website tracking solution,” says Susan Orr.  “This is critical for clients so that they have the intelligence to evaluate their online marketing and determine whether their website is meeting the goals and objectives that they have set for it. Understanding where their website is succeeding and where it is falling short allows our clients to be proactive to improve their online marketing ROI.”

When you think about it,  running a B2B website is  a lot like managing a baseball team (either fantasy league or the real thing).  A manager chooses a lineup based on certain baseball metrics. He looks at batting average,  slugging percentages,  RBIs, and on-base percentage  to determine his batting order; and on defense, he looks at errors, passed balls (for catchers),  and earned run averages (for pitchers). All of these statistics, plus lots more that we don’t have room for, give him a gauge of performance against a certain set of known variables.  The Internet is no different.  The more information you collect, the better decisions you can make about your online business.

           

1.       Searching for stuff in all the wrong places?

It’s impossible to put everything  of importance on your home page. The best you can hope for is a well-thought out architecture of  links and categories that will get your customers where they want to go with a minimum of fuss — the fewer clicks, the better.  But what if they want to find something truly unusual, that special titanium screw used to keep people’s heads screwed on tight — an item so esoteric that you only sell fifty of during the course of a normal sales year? And to make it more difficult, your customers don’t know the specs; they just know what  its used for.  This is why you need SEARCH on your site,  and not just any old garden variety search – although a basic site search is better than nothing –but a “parametric” search,  which gathers information or metrics from the customer/searcher in order to serve them better.  If you’ve ever booked a flight on Orbitz or Expedia,   you’ve used a parametric search.  You give them some basic metrics, such as your city of departure, when you want to fly, and your destination,  and they will give a range of highly relevant options. 

Our friend Travis Sherbine gives an example of an engineer looking for screw needed to build a new product.

“From an engineers perspective,” he says, “the first thing is identifying the type of screw.  Head style. You might show a whole page that just has images of all the different heads: socket head, hex head, Phillips head, pan head – all the different things, so they can visually click on one and say that’s what I want.
 
“Material:  Okay so I’m at the point where I know that I want a stainless steel socket head shoulder bolt, then I would most likely implement a solution where I can select my thread size, my overall length…any other features that are important. This is one way of doing it.”
And of course there are other approaches to search. Companies such as Dell Computers make hundreds of millions on the Web each year by first routing potential customers into those looking at laptops and those looking at desktops and then letting them compare features and prices, and, in effect, build their own computers. The flexibility they offer the customer – which is represented by their search function — has become their market differentiation, and a very profitable one at that. Sherbine’s point is that every company has some point of market differentiation that adds value to the customer.  The goal is to highlight that value when you design your website.

So, how did you do?  Are you ready to rake in Internet millions on your website, or, like most people, do you still have a ways to go?  If so, the good news is that most of the work you need to do in order to get up to speed is cheap. All you need to do is invest in a couple of legal pads, some pencils and book a conference room, and then do some brainstorming about your business. With some time behind closed doors, you should determine the following:  Why you have a website (what business are you in?) ; who your customers are, and what they’re looking for;  and how to organize your information to make it easier for customer to do business with you.

There’s more to learn, of course. There’s all that stuff about database architecture, ecommerce platforms, hosting arrangements, etc. But there are people out there like ThomasNet and Nexidiom that can help you with those questions, but only you understand your business and where you want to take it.