Most websites are a waste of money
Most websites are a waste of money because most so called “advertising” is a waste of money.
This is because advertising to most people means “getting their name/brand out there”. The reasoning seems to be that if you do that long enough eventually people will stumble through the door and buy something from you.
The biggest problem with brand advertising
The big problem with this “brand” advertising is how to figure out if it is working or not. Anything good that happens in your business tends to be claimed as a result of getting your name out there. If there have been no results then you need to do more advertising and wait for longer.
YOU: “How do I know if my advertising is working?”
BRAND MAN: “Did anything good happen in your business this month?”
YOU: “Yes. I had a customer refer a friend to me. ”
BRANDMAN: “That’s just one of the benefits of getting your name in front of people.”
YOU: “But apart from that one job I’ve had no new work.”
BRANDMAN: “We need to spend more money getting your name out there.”
That’s fine if you can afford to bleed lots of money with (at best) a wishy-washy return. However most businesses that spend a dollar in advertising need that dollar to come back multiplied as soon as possible.
Don’t blindly follow the Big Boys
Google recently lost $726m on an investment in AOL. You and I cannot blindly follow the the big boys.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/04/google_and_aol/
The reason that when most people think of advertising they think of brand advertising is because this is the kind of advertising that the big boys do.
As smaller business owners can we just don’t have the money to follow around the big guys with this kind of advertising.
You also need be careful assuming that this works. As I write this I’m sitting across from a refugee from an agency that specializes in this kind of advertising. He’s now working here a day a week because his agency has seen its work fall off a cliff. It’s hard to see, especially in this climate, that if this form of advertising is truly effective at making money, that this would be dropped.
Bet at the Casino, Not on Your Business
Advertising, once a gamble, has thus become, under able direction, one of the safest business ventures. Certainly no other enterprise with comparable possibilities need involve so little risk.
- Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising
In 1923 Claude Hopkins wrote a book called Scientific Advertising in which he argued that the days of blindly pouring money into advertising with your fingers crossed and hoping for the best have ended. By following the methods he’s developed with painstaking experimentation you can promote your business with the confidence that your money will be returned many times over.
The secret: measure your results. You will be able to tell what is working and what is not, or else it is a giant gamble. Once you have this information you can stop doing what doesn’t work and crank up what does.
To do this you need an advertising system that provides solid, direct and timely feedback on how it is performing.
Measuring Your Website
A typical (flawed) website development process used looks something like this:
- Consultation (phone or face to face)
- Proposal
- Gathering of Requirements
- Design
- Development
- Testing / Fixes
- Deployment and Launch
From this the developer then makes the surprising claim "We don’t build websites – we develop strategic online solutions with real results". How do they know if their job is done once the site is launched? How do they know if they have no formal process to measure results?
It is for this exact reason that we concentrate on measuring and formally reporting your website results. It is not an afterthought but the method we use to ensure that your website is a valuable tool to your business.
Measurement and reporting should not be an afterthought. While many developers can provide automatically generated website statistics, we analyse them and provide suggestions for improvements. By bringing to bear our wide experience and current knowledge to your unique website situation your website can by constantly improving and becoming more effective.
