On an almost daily basis I’m confronted by sales and marketing heads at small – and not so small – businesses who, when I let them know as politely as possible that their web sites are great steaming piles of doo doo, shrug apologetically and respond with some variation of:
“We’ve been planning a revamp but it’s just not a priority at the moment.”
OR
“It’s just a token site. None of our customers are on-line, anyway.”
Got to love a token site. Perhaps this is a company that also does:
- token customer service;
- token business cards;
- token delivery vans;
- token packaging;
- token products.
If I buy from them, will they send me a token invoice?
Who’s Counting Your Tokens?
When I was a wee boy in Edinburgh, we used tokens to pay for our milk. Once a month I would go with my mother to the basement of the big Co-Op and stand around while she bought a set of tokens. I loved it in there: they had those great pneumatic message tubes, which would carry cash and receipts to and from the sales counters to the accounting office. Every morning, we would place a number of tokens in an empty washed milk bottle and put it outside. In return, we would get that number of full milk bottles.
You’ll understand why I get sentimental about tokens. The milk tokens of my childhood, however, had intrinsic value. The token web site, in comparison, has none. In fact, it’s true to say that, like a reputation black hole, the token web site is in danger of sucking your prospective customer’s every good intention into a singularity. The singularity of No Sale!
I would go as far as to say that No Site is better than a Token Site. At least a prospective customer can fall back on his or her imagination. Confronted by the full horror of your grisly web presence, however, it’s hard to construct a business case solely on the clever way you make me scroll through a lot of home page copy that says a lot about how your company was doing four years ago.
So, if you can’t really be bothered with a web site that presents your company in its best light, at least make your token something valuable. Give them a reason to follow up via phone or email. Make it a one page site that lures rather than distresses.
None Of My Customers Have Internet Access
Really? That’s an increasingly niche market to work in. Of course, that’s probably not what you meant when you said your customers were not on-line. I guess you meant that they didn’t use the web as a business tool.
Not yet. But, as they browse a few fun sites like YouTube and check the football results via the BBC, who knows when they may get the urge to search for some business information. It’s human nature to explore and pretty soon they’ll be looking for new services and prices and terms of business. That’s when they find a competitor with a site that is not in need of a revamp and is very much the opposite of token.
What then?
Ignoring Your Web Site Does Not Save Money
Revamping your web site and establishing a creditable on-line presence may seem like an expensive option at a time when cash flow is becoming less and less dependable. But this is exactly when you need to ramp up sales, establish your market leadership, and ensure that customers, prospects, employees, and shareholders see mention of the company name as often as possible on-line.
It may be hard to pin down accurate ROI for a web presence that meets your business objectives but it’s sure as hell a lot more cost-effective than traditional interruption marketing in trade mags and other print outlets with declining readership.
If you’re in a niche market where you believe that few of your customers inhabit the web, then all the better. For a start, you’ll probably discover new customers. It also gives you the perfect opportunity to define the way the web is used for your business sector.
Frankly, if your site needs revamping and you think it’s just not worth doing, you may as well close your doors and send the staff home now. Because your future sales are out there.
And they’re looking for more than mere tokens.
