Last week we talked about the three major rationales for business web sites: marketing, sales, and product/services delivery. What if your company doesn’t have products/services that work well in an "e-store" and you don’t have digital stuff to deliver on the web? In fact, the huge majority of business web sites don’t actually sell stuff or deliver products. And there are literally millions of sites out there now, globally. Why even bother with a marketing-only site?

There are plenty of reasons that the web should be part of every company’s marketing strategy–even if you don’t sell or deliver products/services directly:

An effective marketing-only web site:

Differentiates your company, products, and services. Even with the millions of web sites out there, sites with good content (more on "content" in next week’s debunker) stand out from the masses; the percentage of effective marketing-only sites is appallingly low. It’s a big opportunity to be different than your competitors.

Forces a dynamic marketing discipline on your company. If you have a public web site, you must continually re-evaluate and update your messages and information--which is what you should be doing anyway. You can’t ever sit still and not be thinking about and adjusting your marketing strategies and tactics. The web offers a medium wherein you can easily, and cost effectively initiate, test, and implement marketing changes--almost instantaneously. It helps create a dynamic marketing discipline for your company.

Enables you to leverage and complement your marketing content efforts. Web sites are the perfect content foundation for your marketing initiatives whether they are print brochures for sales, direct mail pieces, email or fax campaigns, billboards, multi-media, PP presentations, etc. If you can create good web content, you can create content for virtually any marketing initiative.

Saves you significant print dollars. The web will never replace print, but for most companies these days--you really only need business cards, a portfolio cover and low-cost print "shells" as your print basics. Good sites can supplant most high cost product "slicks," glossy brochures, corporate annual reports, etc because you can both deliver them via the web and print them yourself (or at a low cost printer). Create good web content and a lot of your print costs disappear.

Lets you communicate more effectively than print or other marketing vehicles. Graphically and multi-media-wise, the Internet enables you to better communicate with your customers: paint vibrant pictures, show examples, and provide demos of real products/services, etc–compared to static print, PP presentations, etc. And customers can interact with your messages whenever they want 24 hours a day, at their own convenience and speed, and provide you feedback and comments–if you let them–even without having fancy CRM functionality.

Provides a basis to graduate to a sales and/or delivery web site.

As mentioned last week, actually taking orders and money over the web and/or delivering products and services is not applicable for all businesses. A strong marketing-only site, though, does enable you to graduate to a web store and delivery hub if that does become part of your marketing and business strategy.

A final word of recommendation for this week: If for some reason, you don’t take your web site seriously as a marketing vehicle or if you do not intend to integrate it into your other marketing approaches, you should deep-six your current site and put up a one page "contact" page with your bare, essential address, phone, email information. It’s really cheap as a type of Yellow Pages reference, and at least you won’t be publicly embarrassed any more. And you won’t waste time on your web site–until you’re ready to try again.

Here are some coming web site topics in the next many weeks (not necessarily in this order)

• Content is king
• Major web site pitfalls
• Getting the word out about your web site
• Search engine optimization–myths and reality
• Outstanding business web sites
• Terrible business web sites
• Web site design (from a non-designer’s point of view)
• What in a business name and url
• Sales and marketing web sites
• Delivery web sites

If you’ve got some ideas of web site topics that you’d like me to cover, please send me an email. And please send me your favorite and least favorite web sites.

NoSpin Debunkers are free weekly online newsletters written by Tom Ranseen. If at anytime you would like to be removed from the NoSpin Debunker reader list, please Unsubscribe. Otherwise, enjoy, join the conversation, and please forward this debunker to as many friends/acquaintances as you think may be interested–or send me their email addresses. Thanks.

Tom Ranseen NoSpinMarketing 615.383.7157