Aaron Wall has an interesting post today about the value of a website visitor and the non-focus of investment by marketers into actually making the sale.

It’s an interesting point. Should we, as many marketers do, continue to spend thousands of pounds in attracting traffic, or thousands of pounds improving our sales process online? Surely, the benefit comes in the conversion.

When you are one in a hundred thousand choices in Google you not only need to attract your website visitor, you need to engage them and drive them to sale. Windows shoppers may be great for attracting more business through popularity, but unless someone buys something, the shop doesn’t stay open very long.

Two things happened to me this week to do with need (in relation to a product).

I have had Sky TV for about seven years. Then Sky Plus came out and let’s face it, it’s a great product. In fact, the only issue I had with it was the ongoing cost, which for me was up to £45 a month.

The problem was, I thought I needed it, so I never got rid of it. Then a couple of weeks ago my Sky Plus box broke (the second one) and before I knew it I realised I didn’t actually need it at all, especially when it was costing me £540 per year.

On Thursday I missed a TV programme because I was out and have no way to record programmes anymore, but hey, BBC iPlayer allowed me to sit and watch it this morning.

Secondly this week, I did a client a favour. I had mentioned in a meeting that I didn’t understand what their product (telephone headsets) did exactly and why I would ever need one. So they sent me a GN9350 to write about and to be honest, I love it.

This sounds like a contradiction because in reality I don’t need a headset. But, the cost isn’t prohibitive compared to the value.

This raises two further questions for me from a business marketing perspective.

Buy-in

Getting initial buy-in to your product or service has barriers. How can you break them down? What if, for instance, you had qualifying statements, video, instructions, case studies, peer-to-peer communication to allow people to understand why they need your product in the first place?

I think we have done that really well recently for a company call Magic Mitre. They sell a unique mitre box DIY product. But people need to know they need it in the first place, when they are investigating their problem. They may not be looking for the product, they may just want to fit coving, or skirting board, etc. We achieved this well with Top Tips and a You Tube Video channel, which is drawing traffic.

Choice

Any business or industry faces fresh challenges. I think very few of us are immune. Sky used to have a monopoly, but how long for with things like iPlayer and video streaming on the web? It’s one thing getting people to buy in long-term but what if the price doesn’t continue to offer perceived value and a new kid on the block turns up?

Route to market and choice could make a lot of middle industries (the deliverers) redundant.

Well, that and a week of consultancy for a client - Advanced Inc.

31st March - 4th April I will be in Toronto, Canada, to spend a week talking web strategy with Advanced, part of which involves me delivering my seminar “Web Strategies“.

I have Thursday free if you are local and fancy hooking up to talk web. If I get no takers, I will be sight seeing (all advice welcome).

What interests me about this trip is that I can post a Blog article about visit on The Escape Blog and come first for Web Consultancy in Toronto.

You never know, this time next year, we could have a second office!

So, it’s March and I am finally ready to stick my neck out - something I don’t tend to do - because there are a few trends I am seeing that could be opportunities for someone, somewhere.

E-Commerce

I would expect to see a few e-commerce sites go this year - mainly from the lower end of the market. The once cost-effective pay-per-click model isn’t so cheap anymore and unless companies have built a customer database that can be leveraged, they have no asset. The price comparison market is already taking casualties and search is being dominated by the big boys that have the budget and the scale. I realise I am only one person, but I find myself going to Amazon more than ever for any product.

The only way to combat this is to get niche - even more niche. I find with one of my e-commerce solutions, most of the sales come from one product range. Perhaps I should scrap the others, stick to one single range and completely focus my marketing? Less income, but more profit.

Content is rising

Content’s where it’s at. Rich, value added information that builds trust, authority and credibility and gets attention from search and social sites. It’s a hard one to sell to a client but I am telling my clients to invest their marketing money into quality content for their web sites. I would also make sure I am not forcing it behind walls such as “you must give us your e-mail”.

Growth of the subscription model

Online websites with real quality information as their model, such as the high profile Bloggers, seem to be moving into a subscription model for the real quality (premium) content. This kind of goes against my last point but these are channels with solid information that have built a reputation over a number of years. They have eclipsed traditional publishers online to become publishers themselves and now they have authority, they are charging for some of it. It didn’t happen over night though.

Competition may be free

Do you use Google for search? How much do you pay them? Their whole business model is based around giving stuff away for free, yet they have managed to monetize what they do. It is a model that is being copied with a lot of online companies and it may transfer to a business model near you. Are you ready? Sound unrealistic?

The Escape competes with Indian companies doing the job for a fraction of the cost. We compete with “my sisters son who has just studied web design at college”. We also compete with Mr Website and software like iWeb.

Our value proposition needs to stand out and is defined with two clear points: The market sectors we approach and the level of which we operate; and secondly, the value proposition. That is the added extra we offer above and beyond a website - a website that delivers relevant traffic that converts to business. That takes proving so we can use my second point above.

Summary

It’s interesting times on the web as technology moves forward and the way we use the web matures. Ideas that would once make a marketer choke are now at a stage where they are real and if you are not doing them, perhaps a competitor is.

Yesterday, I had to chase someone for a reply to an e-mail one week old. His answer was that I should appreciate that he is extremely busy.

When I suggest Blogging to people, many say they won’t have the time.

Are we all really THAT busy? Really?

How about making time?

Yes, it’s a case of priorities but both examples to me contain elements of personal marketing. What are these actions saying about that person?

Great article here by Chris Anderson (Author of The Long Tail): Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.

It’s a hard philosophy to sell to a client, but if you can life your head above what will happen in the next 2, 4 even 6 months, you may begin to see the longer term value, and, the sustainability of the model.

The Google Effect! When is the last time you paid them to perform a search? $1.21 Billions later…

Why is it that trashy mags and Red Top newspapers in the UK follow the lives of ‘celebrities’ whilst some people with genuine talent struggle to get noticed. The skill of self-promotion and personality can go a hell of a way whether we ethically like it or not.

If you can then back it up with some genuine talent, then you have something special.

The normal route in society is to chase the bucks as quickly as possible and make serious money. Others choose a different route and arguably manage the ultimate goal of credibility and marketability - enabling sustainable avenues of revenue rather than a crash and burn approach.

Take Google. They spent a good few years delivering search free, concentrating on making the product better and better, while relying on word-of-mouth. They had marketability and credibility before they even began to make money.

Without the luxury of VC funding, small businesses are under pressure to deliver revenue pretty much straight away. If you have a great product though, it’s just a case of adding a bit of personality to your offering and doing a bit of self-promotion.

Twenty years ago you couldn’t imagine a company with a name like Google, Yahoo or Squidoo but now they are common. They ooze personality.

I often talk about the need for great content. I don’t often talk about the other side of that - how you write it.

A little personality goes a long way.

I have a friend who approached me recently for an all singing, all dancing website with a budget that couldn’t even raise a tune.

Anyway, not a project for The Escape, I produced it as a favour with the help of another friend.

It just goes to show what you can do to create a content-management system with Wordpress.

CBS Recruit does just that, allowing my friend to update his case studies and jobs, keeping his website relevant for less than £1000. I am now trying to teach him the fine art of content creation.

There are a whole host of cheaper ways of doing this of course if you can keep your website structure simple in Wordpress, using off-the-shelf templates.

Then you have Joomla (I’m not a big fan of this to be honest) or plain old blogging.

If it was me setting up a new business and I didn’t have a budget, I would actually go for a Blog.

Wordpress, hosted on your domain name. You need a little knowledge of how to do this but it’s all out there if you are a bit savvy.

I reckon the cost of a .co.uk domain is £2.99 for the year, Wordpress hosting I have found for $70 per year (£35). A free wordpress template and you have a web platform for less than £50 per year.

And, coming back to the situation with my friend’s website… it’s the content that is the real investment required.

Polaroid are to stop making the film for their iconic cameras (they stopped making them last year).

A client asked me to put their fax number on their website this week. When’s the last time you sent or received a fax?

Our design company in Basingstoke is ten years old in April. When my partner Rob and I started off, under the staircase, we got excited about £30 orders for business cards. We used to have to get our films produced in a town 20 miles away, take them to a printer 15 miles away and then deliver them to the client another 15 miles away. Looking back, I wonder how we made money!

Anyway, our industry, like those of the camera and fax world, has also changed. Many litho printers take your files by e-mail, send them straight to plate, or even digitally print. Technology is killing a lot of small industries.

In fact, 2007 was the first time for us that our web revenue has exceeded out revenue from print. Our customers don’t want what they used to. And, If we don’t give them what they want, how they want it, they also have a friend called Google who will tell them anywhere in the world where they can get it.

Competition is getting just that little bit harder… are you flexible enough?

This is a cautionary tail of ‘expertise’ vs. expertise and something I see a lot of in my own business as I pitch against other companies who do what I do.

As you may know, I am a Director of The Escape. We turnover about £1.2m and had an appropriate accounting firm for our needs. They got bought last year so we became a smaller fish in a bigger pond.

We felt we weren’t getting value for money and the meetings that we had to pay for by the hour consisted of someone having a general chat. An hour and £500 later we realised that it was time for the change.

So, we approached a guy that we had dealings with a couple of years ago. At that time he had pointed out something in a deal we were doing, something that our accountant back then had missed.

So we started 2008 with a new firm and already our new accountant in Basingstoke has found a glaring hole in our VAT returns to the tune of nearly £40k, which we can now claim back.

Value is always great when you can clearly measure it. I guess that’s why I love online marketing so much.

And, as a bonus, offering value creates a happy customer and word of mouth, arguably the best form of marketing… hence my little Blog post.