The days when organizations were more concerned with the façade of their buildings than their websites are coming to a close. Today, businesses large and small need to embrace web-marketing plans and inexpensive cloud-based solutions to optimize their efficiency and improve profitability.
Let's review some important tips to creating a more profitable (and virtual) operation:
- Website. Your website needs an easy-to-understand value proposition; prominent, above-the-fold call to action; large, social-media sharing buttons; on-page HTML; SEO; blog; and video. Today these are the basics, and a business owner should assume that every prospect, partner, client and prospective employee will visit his website.
- Web meetings. If your business has yet to embrace web meetings, particularly for initial prospect meetings, you're missing a great opportunity to leverage an inexpensive web selling and marketing tool. Qualify your prospects before driving 60 miles round trip for an initial meeting.
- Webinars. Leverage webinars by providing an educational call to action. Succinct, content-rich, educational webinars provide a superior platform to showcase your knowledge. (But remember, with a webinar, your job is to educate as opposed to "sell.")
- E-marketing. Leverage e-marketing to reach out to highly targeted prospects with a very specific and measurable message. Your marketing message should be clear, concise and compelling and include a call to action that benefits the registrant (as opposed to yourself). Offer white papers, case studies and webinars to educate your prospective clients.
- Video conference calls. To borrow from Bell Telephone's ad slogan, "It's the next best thing to being there." Skype video calling is very much like being there. I use Skype frequently for face-to-face communication with contractors, clients and prospects. Skype also offers multi-party video conferencing and screen sharing for a fee. Or, if you have GoToMeeting, you can offer video conferencing with greater screen sharing capabilities.
Businesses that leverage these tips can become more virtual, more efficient and more profitable. Focusing on web-centric, reusable solutions improves the operational efficiency of any organization, regardless of size.
