Small businesses and non-profit organizations often overlook the importance of branding and marketing. Usually this is due to a few factors:
- Small Budget: revenue is too small to pay for quality Branding/Marketing.
- Small Staff: no one is qualified to lead the marketing effort.
- No Time: staff is too busy with development, management and customer service to have time to spend on promotion.
- No Expertise: no one knows where to find a trustworthy, affordable, quality company to hire for help.
- Ignorance: lack of value for the importance of branding, marketing and a good website that serves your clients and reduces administrative overhead in the process.
When a business is small, it can sometimes rely on referral business alone. But as it grows, it needs a larger stream of customers to support it's growing infrastructure and it can no longer support itself without proper promotion. Usually it takes some sort of crisis for a business to realize it needs help.
Case Study
We keep an eye on business trends and are particularly amazed how so many businesses (small and large) are handicapping themselves with poor branding, and/or horrible websites that do more harm than good. It's a touchy subject to broach without offending, but sometimes tough love is in order. Here is a case study we ran across this week. If you are the owner of these businesses, we apologize and mean no offense, but perhaps this will be helpful:
Company: McCaulou's (www.mccaulous.com)
Description: This family owned department store has 9 locations in the area, it's no small business.
Analysis: Despite the size of this company, their website looks like someone scanned it out of a Sears Catalogue from 1973 and hired their nephew in 1999 to put it online. The name is jagged, the links aren't even linked to any pages, and there is no design to speak of. They actually have a store that sells a few products, such as "Space Pen" with no clear rhyme or reason to what is posted. What's more bizarre is that out of this AOL era mess is an ad to follow them on Twitter! So someone is trying to be hip. I found this site by following a discussion on Yelp.com (http://www.yelp.com/biz/mccaulous-department-stores-walnut-creek) which specifically mentioned, "It is hard to understand how this store is able to attract new customers. It's web site is non-functional (few of the links work), and it looks like a high-school project."
Free tip: look yourself up on yelp.com to see what your customers are saying.
Conclusion: This is really a painful example of how bad marketing can actually harm you. It is better to have no website than to have a bad website that frustrates your customers and makes you look unprofessional.
Our Recommendations
Budget: $0
Have your nephew create a professional site using our Free Lite Version. Your team would add the sections and pages recommend below. You can do it, and it would look good. We would provide free support and training to help you every step of the way.
Budget: $1,000
Have us setup a simple site (up to 10 pages) using the Metro free design skin. We would add a few basic sections and pages (you would provide the content):
- About Us: a section with pages for "Our History", "Our Values", etc. Perhaps a section for prospective employees to apply.
- Specials: an online store section that lists current promotions and special internet featured products (assuming you don't want to list all your products online) organized by categories of "Men", "Women", "Juniors", etc.
- Blog: if someone wanted to be responsible to write a weekly or biweekly short blog article about the community, or other insider information, we'd suggest having a blog. This can be a great way to provide useful information to your customers and increase search engine traffic.
- Locations: a list of locations with maps, contact information, store hours, etc.
- Support: a section that lets people contact you and offer feedback, as well as pages for frequently asked questions, return policies, etc.
You would have a site that looked professional, answered 90% of your clients' questions, promoted your sales, gave directions, and provided a good mechanism for feedback. It may not have your own family store look, but it would be a great start for practically no investment.
Budget: $4,500
In addition to everything listed above, we could easily go through a basic design process ($3,500) whereby we created a totally custom designed website that capitalized on the great family business tradition, giving it a fine old community feel to it. We would add custom buttons and images that fit the overall design. The current logo is so old that it could actually be cool in a retro sense if it was integrated thoughtfully into a design. There is a lot of material here that could be exploited to make a beautiful, attractive site, worthy of your business.
Budget: $6,000
In addition to everything listed above we would also customize the look of the store and shopping cart checkout process, as well as your blog and other key dynamic content on the site. By default all our pages are SEO friendly, but we would also make sure that key pages were further Search Engine optimized with keywords, descriptions and page titles. We'd also submit the site to all the major search engines, and we'd setup a Google Webmaster and Analytics account to monitor the traffic, and give you tips on improving your online marketing
Extras: We'd also recommend applying your new custom design standards to your print promotional material.
Conclusion
As you can see, for a very minimal amount of money, a small business with any budget can easily take steps to improve their brand and marketing presence online. And to businesses that have been around for a while, you do need to realize that the internet is being used by most of your customers and they are forming an opinion of you by your lack of presence or by your unprofessional presence. It's a simple problem to resolve, one which will pay for itself very quickly.