How will you manage the site once it has been launched?Building your site is only the first step in successful website marketing. Once launched, you’ll need to maintain it to get the most value for your outlay. You should think about content updates, hosting, domain name registration, security updates, managing interactions with browsers (blogs, contact forms, forums) and more.

Do you have the skills and time internally to manage this, or will your agency be responsible? If you are going to manage this internally, do you need to train up a member of staff, if so what costs are associated with this. Can your design agency train your staff, or will they provide a maintenance pack / instruction manual to help.

Choose your designers carefully if you think this could be a problem for your business. If you choose a cheap agency they may not have the capacity to provide ongoing support.

I’m a big believer that a good marketing organisation is one that puts the customers at the heart of its business. What I mean by this is when decision making is focussed on meeting the customers needs and wants, rather than that of the board or MD. But how to you measure your levels of customer focus?

A great place to start is to look at your communications. How much do you talk about your company and the services you provide, compared to how you understand and can meet the needs of your customers. For example, consider the following two examples:

1. Bean Counter & Co Accountants was established over 20 years ago to provide auditing and tax advice services. Our management team has experience working with small businesses from various industry sectors.

and

2. Bean Counter & Co Accountants can help you to reduce your tax liability. Our experienced audit team can help your small business to save costs and improve profitability.

Which of these is more focussed on the customers needs? Which do you think is more likely to attract attention?

If you want to find out whether your communications are customer focussed or self obssesed, then you should try the We We Monitor at http://www.grokdotcom.com/2007/03/25/how-to-measure-your-we-we/. Here you can analyse your website to find out if you are cusrtomer focussed or We We focussed.

Whilst this is not a comprehensive review of your communications, it’s certainly an interesrting start. I must congratulate Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now for putting this together.

Building a Website - 7 Essential Questions (part 4)

Do you know what content you want to include on your site?

You need to think about both the text and images you want on your website. Not only what you want to include, but how you will create it. For example, do you have the content in house already, or will you need to take some photos or write some new text. Will you need a professional copy writer to help put this together, or edit your writing?

Once the content has been created, think about whether you will want to change and update it regularly, or if it will remain fairly static? If you want to be flexible then you’ll need a content management system (CMS) running at the back end of your site. These aren’t particularly expensive (in fact you can get some open source CMS programmes that are excellent) but your designer will need to set them up to work on your site.

Think carefully here as the content will have a dramatic impact on the cost of building and maintaining your website.

A recent article in the UK’s weekly ‘Marketing’ journal discusses how big businesses are changing their approach to measuring customer loyalty. T-Mobile, American Express, General Electric, Allianz and more, are increasingly measuring customer loyalty using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) from management consultancy Bain & Co. Put simply, the NPS identifies the percentage of customers that are likely to recommend a brand or company and uses this as a predictor for future growth.

Marketing’s writer suggests this approach to measuring customer loyalty recognises “the power of word of mouth” in marketing. For all of us small businesses this is particularly true - it’s likely a good percentage of your customers, especially at start-up, come from friends, family and other customer referrals.

So what does this mean for you? Putting it simply, if you work on increasing the number of referrals / recommendations you receive, the more likely you are to achieve long term growth. It’s hardly rocket science. However, it does get interesting if you try to apply this to your business. The way to achieve this is something like:

1) Ask every customer to rate how likely they are to recommend your business on a scale of 0-10 (0 being not at all, 10 being highly likely). The top scorers are called promoters, the low scorers detractors.

2) Calculate the percentage score by subtracting the detractors from the promoters. If you have more promoters then you’ll have a positive score, if you have more detractors, you will have a negative score (and an awful lot of work to do).

3) Measure the percentage change between two periods, so for example over a year or two.

4) Identify what you need to do to improve your NPS. This might be done by team brainstorming, or more likely calling any detractors and asking why they had a negative experience. It’s likely that by examining every touch point a customer has with your company, you can easily identify areas for improvement.

5) Create a plan of action for implementing improvements.

6) Measure the impact of your action plan based on changes in your NPS.

I very much like the idea of the Net Promoter Score. The market research industry claims this is dumbing down customer research, but for small businesses it’s a simple tool for what can often be an expensive process. If you use this measure, it’s likely you’ll be doing much more than many of your competitors.

Remember, marketing is all about putting the customer at the heart of your business. What better way to measure if you are doing this well than by understanding how many of your customers are willing to recommend you.