Like a star that’s losing its brightness at the centre of its solar system, your website may be losing its sparkle as the hub of your marketing universe.
Why? Because your audience is interacting with you in many different places on different platforms; in a more personal way; much earlier in the engagement process.
Online marketing is now a mass of opportunities for interaction and your website may stop being the principle way people learn about you or find you - and it is the general public and not business who are driving this change. Business has to learn, adapt and follow.
You may have wondered why so many marketers have been banging on about the importance of sites like Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter. It is precisely for this reason. The internet map has changed. New ways and marketing practices have become main stream business opportunities.
Okay, not all websites may lose their sparkle. Those involved in ecommerce will remain the centre for online transacting but when you look at these from the wider perspective of business-customer engagement, transaction comes pretty near the bottom of the sales funnel.
It is when you move further up the funnel that the most dramatic changes in business-customer engagement are occurring in almost big bang proportions.
Further up the funnel, customers are more than ever pre-selecting their choice of actions through social media or blogging, mobile or preference emailing, to compare offerings, read reviews, listen to mates’ advice and talk directly to brands.
When you meet your audience on a personal level, higher up the funnel and you build trust there, it will reduce the onus on your website to be the sole place to display your value proposition. And the higher up the funnel you truly engage with them the more likely you are to convert them.
And social media gets five times the traffic that Google search receives!
The ROI from social media can be difficult to pin down and while social analytics is still developing, not doing social media for this reason misses the point and power your customers are bringing to the changing face of digital marketing.
Planning your marketing has never been more challenging or complex. Understanding your audience and modifying your marketing actions goes hand in hand with usability issues to ensure your message is apposite for accessing burgeoning markets like mobile and Apps.
Your main content and value proposition don’t just now reside on your website but in multiple and quite different places than you have been used to - and may not involve your website to the extent it has previously been accustomed to.