Sensible Marketing for Small Business

Now that the calendar has rolled over, many people are reviewing their approved budgets, evaluating their project lists and setting their B2B marketing and communications priorities based on last year’s results. Management has handed down its business goals and objectives for the year and it is now the job of marketing to support those objectives. If social media is part of supporting those objectives, remember that all online engagement drives customers and prospects back to your website. This is the perfect time to review your website and make sure that it is in line with those business objectives as well.

As many websites have been around a while, they may not reflect your marketing initiatives and business strategies for this year. We offer the following suggestions to help guide your review of your site. Some of these may be small fixes to your site that can be easily accomplished. Others, however, may require you to shift your priorities and make a site redesign part of this year’s tasks.

1. Home Page Clarity and Functionality

When prospects arrive at your home page, it is clear what products or services your company offers? Objectively review your home page and view it as a first time visitor, whether your primary offerings have changed or not this year. You may have optimized your search results to drive great traffic, but if people can’t tell what you do at a glance, they are not sticking around. And by the way, if you have an animated flash landing page or auto playing music or video, remove it today. These outdated and slow-loading bits of media only slow down your site visitors and make it more likely that they will leave your site without taking action. Check your analytics to see what sites people came from or what keywords they searched to understand who stays on your site and who leaves.

2. Clear Path to Information

Prospects and customers arrive at your home page and they know they are in the right place, but can they find what they are looking for? As web sites have gotten fancier and technology more advanced, gadgets, widgets and sliding navigation have made it harder to find what your site visitors are looking for. Make sure your site has a clear path to get people to the information they need, whether it is product specs, customer service or finding a distributor. Again, your analytics tell you what pages people go to after your home page.

3. Call to Action

Is your site generating leads for your sales force? Are you trying to get new subscribers to content via RSS or to an email newsletter? Are you selling products directly from the web or passing all these prospects to a distributor? Whatever your call to action on your site is, make sure it is on every relevant page and customers and prospects know what to do. And make sure this is all trackable so you can match this up to your objectives. Review these numbers on a regular basis so you are not surprised by either success or failure. Your website is a living entity that should be easy to change to make it more effective. If you are constantly fighting with your IT department or a web vendor to make changes, you need to reevaluate that relationship. Your company’s success cannot be held back by technical limitations or the whims of your internal or external partners.

4. Social Media Profiles

Last year you started a blog, joined Twitter and created a Facebook fan page. Now is the time to get those social presences to the home page of your site. You want to grow these social communities and burying their existence on your about page, contact page or some random page that no one can find is not the way to do it.

You’d think the world would have had enough of silly love songs, but when Paul McCartney looks around, he sees it isn’t so. I feel the same way about social media crisis management. By now it should be like the Heimlich maneuver: Everybody sort of knows what to do, even if you haven’t actually had to dislodge a chunk of prime rib from your date’s windpipe, and you’re just hoping your skills never have to be put to the test.

But the topic is worth continually revisiting because we marketers learn something from each fresh crisis. It’s an opportunity for marketers to check their crisis readiness while indulging in a little schadenfreude, which is a fancy German term for taking pleasure in the misery of others, and its social media equivalent, schadenfacenbooken, which is pleasure in watching someone else’s brand get flamed on Facebook. (This is not to be confused with schadenfacenbooken der zuckerberg, which is pleasure in knowing that while Facebook’s CEO is a 27-year-old billionaire, he’s still a dweeb.)

Most advice on social crisis management quite rightly focuses on prevention because an ounce of prevention… you know the rest. I can recommend several good reads on the subject here and here, but my aim is not to provide an analysis of the barn door after the social media horses have escaped. Let’s assume instead that the horses have already run amuck, are trampling the vegetable gardens, and that your CEO is calling to find out what you plan to do about it.

I’ll outline four common crises in ascending levels of severity and offer advice on how to remedy them.

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