Marketing 101 – Your business website
I’m probably the last guy in the world who should be blogging about sales and marketing, I’m a techie after all (and like most techies, for a long time, I thought if you did good technology the customers would follow without any persuasion required). But maybe some of what I say will resonate with other techies out there more than if it comes from a sales and marketing guy. This blog started out as Marketing 102 – Business cards but as I wrote the introductory paragraph I started talking a little about the preceeding step of preparing your business website and, well, here we are.
I’ll get back to the business cards in a later post including some recommendations for who to use to print a small volume of nicely finished cards and what you should put on the cards.
I guess for a technology company (large or small), I figure your first step in marketing should be putting together a website for your business, possibly accompanied by a blog (if you have the time and energy to write regularly and you have something useful to say). At a minimum, your website should answer the following questions,
- Who
- What
- Why
The who involves telling the customer a little about you, your background as well as providing the obvious such as contact details (email, phone and physical address) and maybe some details on what your company’s mission is.
The what involves telling the customer what you actually do. When you start on this, if you’re a techie, you’ll enter a brief fugue state where you start spewing technical terms and concepts that only other level 7 nerds will understand (hey it’s ok, I’m one too, I understand). Once you get over this, step back, and translate these terms into plain english that a (non-technical) customer can understand (so, while Atlantic Linux can deploy a large-scale event management framework utilising SNMP, IPMI and active and passive agents to quantify the availability of your enterprise infrastructure – in plain english we do remote system monitoring or even Linux systems support).
The why is the little bit about why customers should be talking to you instead of the company down the road for the services they require. This is similar to what you do but more about the customer than you. It can be summed up in three words,
Benefits, not features
So, rather than telling the customer about your 20 years of experience with Linux, tell them about how that 20 years of experience means that you’ve seen all the things that can go wrong in their systems and you know how to fix them. Rather than talking about how you’ve used 15 different Linux distributions on 10 different types of computer, tell the customer about how you have enough knowledge of Linux distributions to know which one will suit their needs (obviously, if you’re a software developer or a Windows consultant then you might want to talk about software development or Windows rather than Linux but you get the idea).
Putting a good website together is a long, painstaking process and will involve frequent rewrites and pruning (I reckon it’s a good sign if you find yourself taking stuff out rather than putting stuff in). We’re still working on our one but I think we’re getting close now (for the last year or so :).
2 Comments to Marketing 101 – Your business website
I would add a couple of points here:
1. Sloppy marketing gives the impression that the work/service provided might be too. Typos are the obvious failure here but a spellchecker is not enough. I received a proposal from an interior designer yesterday which at the end listed his title as “Principle”. Spending a whack of money on a consultant to give you nice graphics and fonts rather than on better educated staff that can catch these kinds of issues before the public sees them is a bad call.
2. Stale content – there are few things more annoying than clicking on a “Latest News” link on a commercial site and finding something from 2006. If it’s not from the last six months, it’s not news.
Good points. On balance, I think I’d prefer a consultant that knew what she was doing over one that could spell properly, but ideally you’d get both. In practice, a lot of what a consultant does is communication – from preparing detailed technical documentation detailing work done on a customer’s systems (or detailing work done by previous consultants on a customer’s systems) to translating customer requirements from plain english to useful technical requirements (for developers and system engineers).
Thankfully with Atlantic Linux you get both of those!
The stale news issue is another good one. There is a strong temptation when putting together a business site to mirror the big companies who have such news sections (frequently filled with bland, information free press releases, but I digress) but I’d agree if the news is stales, it serves to give the impression of a company that is either not in business anymore or doesn’t have much of interest going on.
We’ve tried to strike a balance with that in Atlantic Linux by having a news section on the front-page and using the news from the blog to feed it. I’m not entirely sure a lot of the blog content is news in the traditional sense but it’s the best solution I’ve come up with so far.
April 16, 2009