UK small business website design, website maintenance by Dave Wilkinson

3 weeks ago I phoned a roofing contractor to get someone to take a look at my leaking roof. They got back to me yesterday.

Last Monday I sent The Institute Of Marketing Management an email asking for information on a course I’m planning to take. I’m still waiting for a reply.

This morning, a prospect phoned to remind me that I haven’t sent him information I promised a week ago. Damn. Even though it’s an uncommon mistake for me to make, it shows that to that specific prospect, my customer service no better than any of the companies I like to complain about.

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I’ve designed a fair number of B2B websites in my time, and they all share one thing in common. Nobody reads 80% of the content. The hard truth is that nobody cares about your mission statement. People want hard facts that can help them solve a problem, and a way to get in touch. Nothing more.

So when a friend asked me to design a 50+ page corporate website for his startup, I had to ask a simple question:

1. Do you want to build an encyclopedia nobody will really use, or
2. do you want to build a couple of small, easy to manage websites that attract targeted leads every single day?

He’s going for the second option. Thought he might.

What is a microsite?

According to Wikipedia, a microsite is ‘an individual web page or cluster of pages which are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website’.

The idea is that you would build a separate microsite for each of the niche markets your company want to work in. Each site is individually hosted under it’s own domain and targets a small niche audience through extensive online PR, pay-per-click advertising, or a mixture of the two.

What does it cost to build a microsite?

Like anything else in this world, it depends. You can build a microsite yourself for just a few Dollars and rely on a monthly Google Adwords spend suited to your budget, and, if you do a good job, you’ll generate a healthy number of targeted leads.

Alternatively you can go high-end and splash out on a rich-media or Flash microsite, a professional copywriter and a PR company to get your desired result. It all depends on your product and the market you’re trying to penetrate.

Whatever you decide to do, bear in mind that doing it poorly could cause the whole thing to fall apart at the seams. If you can’t do a great job yourself, hire a professional.

For those of you who do know a thing or 2 about B2B microsites, I’d like to build a list of good ones. If you’ve seen, designed, or owned a good microsite, please let me know in the comments.

In case you didn’t know, there are probably hundreds of companies out there doing pretty much the same thing you do. So if you’re serious about making the most of your online marketing campaign, you’d be wise to devote some time to identifying who your online competitors are. This competitive intelligence can give you the edge online almost immediately.

Real world competitors

In the bricks-and-mortar world, your competitors are relatively easy to identify. You generally know who you beat and who beats you when you bid on a project or send your product out into the market. You and your competitors are all trying to secure a big slice of a market segment, and there are few surprises from year to year.

Online, things are different.

When you move from offline marketing to the unpredictable online landscape, things change radically. Competitors come at you from all angles. Not only will you be competing against your traditional offline competitors, you’ll also be up against competitors from other regions, virtual competitors with no offline infrastructure, online business directory results and even companies who market educational content pertaining to your industry.

Online you really only have 10 chances to get a prospect’s attention. And now you have to fight hundreds of other companies for the top 10 positions in any of the major search engines. Anything less, and you’ve lost.

On that depressing note, all is not lost. If you’re willing to wade through a pile of data, there’s an arsenal of easy-to-use tools just waiting to help you figure out who you need to beat to get to the top of the search engine results pages (or SERPs). I generally use 3 easy to use search engine tools:

1. Use Google’s ‘similar sites’ function.

There are 2 types of searches you you perform to make use of Google’s ‘similar sites’ function. The first type is to perform a standard Google search of your company’s name. Then, just below the first result, you’ll see a link labelled ‘similar sites’. Clicking this link will perform a new search of all web pages similar to your company name. If your company name includes a reference to your business activity (e.g. Acme Building Supplies), you’ll not only turn up a number of results for other pages related to Acme, Building and Supplies, but also a number of results related to building, which should include some of your online competitors.

Your second option is to perform a search for one of your website’s keyphrases (e.g. townhouse renovations) and perform a ‘similar sites’ search. This will give you a bunch of results for companies competing for the same web traffic as your company. Companies listed in these results are your true online competition.

2. Search for your keywords.

If you aren’t ranked #1 on Google for your chosen keywords, then performing a Google search will let you know who is in the top 10. These are the companies you’re going to be competing with online.

3. See who’s advertising.

Many companies will offer the same services as yours, and will be attempting to attract the same prospects as you. If they don’t have a high search engine ranking, they may have chosen to advertise using search engine pay-per-click advertising.

To see who is competing with you for prospects, try searching from a customer’s perspective (e.g. kitchen refurbishment Exeter) and see what advertising results you get. These advertisers are paying search engines good money to ensure they attract the prospect before you do.

You can get totally carried away with a competitor identification study, so you may want to limit your data mining to the top 15-20 threats. Remember though, things happen fast online, so a non-competitor today could become a serious threat tomorrow. For this reason I’d recommend carrying out this exercise at least 3 times a year.

Do you have any other competitor identification ideas? Let me know in the comments.

My Historic Barn post sparked a heated debate with a client yesterday. I made the point that every person in an organization is responsible for the customer service experience. She disagreed.

Here’s my logic, and why I believe I won the argument. Let’s say you have a small business employing 15 people. And, let’s also assume you serve 200 customers a year. Now think carefully about how these valuable customers interact with your staff, and who they come into contact with.

On any given day a customer may need to speak to the following people in your organization:

• your receptionist,
• your sales staff,
• your accounts department,
• your technical staff,
• your workshop technicians,
• or you, the business owner.

Work this out for yourself. 15 people serving 200 customers. Assume that 80% of your staff complement communicates with each customer. That’s a whopping 2400 opportunities to impress your customers each year.

Of course, there’s always the alternative; 2400 opportunities to annoy your customers each year. Which would you prefer?

Yesterday, while wandering through our manufacturing area I stumbled on a product to add to our line.

A few informal discussions with colleagues and a handful of A-list clients confirmed that the idea was great and they’d be happy to buy-in provided the price is right.

The weird thing is that the company has been offering this particular product for over 20 years. It’s just that nobody’s thought of marketing it until now. And neither has anyone else in the industry.

An added bonus is marketing this product should also help to improve the sales of one of our stagnated product lines we’ve been considering canceling.

While I’d love to take credit for identifying the potential for this new product through a rigorous market research study, that’s not how it happened. I simply saw something happening, asked a couple of simple questions, and got a great answer.

Now, I’m certain there will be a couple of mistakes along the way, but there’s an opportunity for us to help a lot of businesses save a lot of money. Our investment is zero and our product can go to market as soon as I can train our sales people.

When was the last time you tried to imagine one of your old products being used in a completely new way?

If you’re a regular Copyblogger reader, you’ll know that yesterday’s guest post by James Chartrand made mention of a really simple way to improve interaction with your blog visitors.

The premise is that finishing your post off with an open-ended question, rather than just a statement, gives your reader a reason to interact with you, hence attracting more comments and helping you to build your online community.

Told you it was simple, didn’t I? (not much of an open-ended question, but I’ll work on it…)