3 (well, 4) BIG Web mistakes

Our real business finished, the client and I settled in for a bit of a chat. She asked what I thought were the NEW three worst mistakes a business could make with its Web strategy?

I pointed out that we’d come a long way if the old mistakes–not having a Web presence that’s more than a “brochure site,” relying on e-mail as your chief source of two-way communications with customers, forcing visitors to invest (with money or personal information) before they saw useful content, not having a content strategy in the first place, had fallen off the list. (I’m not so sure they’re not just about as pervasive now as they were three years ago). But between us we came up with a new list:

1. Separating online marketing from offline marketing. It’s still common to have Web marketing managed separately from “real” marketing, i.e., there’s a Web team and there’s a product marketing and/or marcom team (and probably also a PR team and a branding team and a customer support team if the company’s big enough, but that’s another story). The problem with separate marketing teams is that they tend to communicate but not integrate.

These days, if you’re not building a central communications strategy that hits events, online, press, traditional avenues, CRM, etc., you’re missing huge opportunities for reinforcement and extension. Yet integrated communications is still a buzzword, not a reality, as far as I’m concerned.

2. Stopping your online strategy at (or before) SEM. Search engine marketing is incredibly important, especially for businesses that are still establishing a brand or venturing into new areas. But it’s just the first step in a comprehensive online plan.

You need to at least pay lip service to SEM and if you’re smart you’ll use it to niche-market to the best and tightest customer segment profiles you can make. But there’s no point in advertising that you’ve got the right soup cans if there isn’t a great soup inside.

If you don’t capitalize on SEM with a richly interactive site, wise investments in social media and effective content, and the development of strong online customer relationships, you’re wasting your company’s time (and money).

3. Web isolationism. New Web tactics are moving us from “If you build it, they will come,” to “If you distribute it, they will buy.” Getting people to a monolithic corporate website is no longer the primary objective; getting them to see (and share) your message is.

I hesitate to call this “Web 2.0;” that term has been ‘way overused. Web user behavior over the last 15 years or so can generally be divided into three phases–Direct, Search, Share. Early on, in “Direct,” a directory site such as Yahoo was the first stop in a Web excursion. Users browsed a list of “best” websites, read the reviews and chose to visit a site on the list. They rarely ventured into the wild and woolly Web on their own. The goal of most marketeers–if they thought about it–was to get into those “best of” site reviews.

As more organizations began using the Web as a primary method of communication (and as search engines got better) we moved to “Search” phase. Directories weren’t specific enough; Web sessions now started with a search query. Users visited more sites, perhaps the top 5 or even 10 search results. Search engine marketing–getting into those top 5 results and driving (and holding) people to your website–became a crucial part of a Web marketing strategy.

In the last year or so we’ve seen the Web begin a slow and sometimes painful transition to the Share phase. Instead of sticking the message on the corporate Website and waiting for customers to come read it, you do the Web equivalent of putting your message in a bottle…lots and lots of bottles.

Own the content sources, freely distribute the content and the tools to use that content and let them proliferate virally across the Web. Users don’t have to visit your website to get your message; they can bring a feed of your content directly into their home page and be exposed to it on a daily basis. What’s more, they can share it, people you’ve never even heard of can share it…and you can start tailoring specific messages (and products) to very, very specific audiences.

If you’ve got a Google, Yahoo or MSN home page, you’re already sharing messages from 10, 50 or a couple of hundred sites. You have an at-a-glance view of what’s going on in your favorite sites, and visit them only if the feed is compelling enough to invest in a drilldown.

So the goal now becomes to get high in those feedstreams and make the messages you feed into user home pages (and mashups and any other site that uses feeds) compelling enough to drive more sharing (and in turn traffic). It’s kinda hard to explain that to a CFO who’s been beaten over the head with “more visitors, more time on site,” for years.

4. Web analytics=pageviews (not). She asked for three but we came up with a fourth: Ignoring the power of Web analytics. Many businesses track basic webstats. Some actually measure clickstreams and search engine queries and falloffs and entry/exit points. Too many, however, regard this stuff as a point of validation, not action.

Correlate analytics with good CRM data, treat your website as an evolutionary communications system, and all of a sudden you’ve got a living, breathing marketing engine. Each page on your site becomes a live focus group for product testing, messaging refinement, competitive analysis. I don’t think I’ve seen more than a couple of dozen sites that actually do that.

So that’s our list…what’s yours?

–cynthia

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