Top
management has approached your marketing team with a report stating the
following:
- Revenues from your online store are non-existent
- The number of visitors to your site has been rapidly decreasing since
the launch two months ago
- Your two main competitors are present on the main search engines using
the popular buzzwords in your industry and your site is buried amongst
thousands of results
(article continued below ...)
No matter how many times you read the report, the fact remains your
marketing strategy for your online store is not working. It is up to you to
examine why. Management has mentioned that it is tired of reading dull
S.W.O.T analyses that lack insight, as well as reports produced by software
applications that cannot add anything to the numbers they churn out on a
daily, weekly or monthly basis.
This article will provide you with a practical approach to analyzing your
online presence for short-term and long-term planning purposes for your
e-commerce strategy. Instead of applying "the run-of-the-mill"
marketing analysis tools, it will examine some important elements that
should be included in a successful Website.
These are:
Balance of
Content
As an online marketer, you are responsible to push or pull customers to
your Website to buy online. Without the personal interaction that
"bricks-and-mortar" stores have to offer, it is up to your Website
to lead them though the purchasing process. Content is king, and providing
the right amount of information is the key. Too little product / service
information will prompt more questions from the customer, and too much will
simply create clutter that will bore buyers and lead them astray from
completing their online transaction. What is the ideal balance of content
and how do you properly assess what is posted and read by interested
customers?
Analyze your key selling point. Locate your key selling point
within the text of your site. Where is it and what are you telling your
customers?
Ideally, your key selling point should be upfront and center on your
Website. Customers are constantly faced with promotion clutter while
surfing and can be easily confused by the different sales pitches they read
from numerous Websites. Websites that are bold enough to state their key
selling point on their front page will catch the attention of customers and
lead them though the beginning of the online buying process. Companies that
tend to bury their key selling point in their Website will be
forgotten.
Answer the obvious questions. Information overload can lead to
confusion for some potential customers. Does your Website offer too much or
too little product information? To answer these questions, consider the
following regarding your product and target market:
- Is your product new or revamped to require in-depth
explanations?
- How educated is your target market? Do they require "hand
holding?"
- Is your target market familiar with similar products on the
market?
Along with answering specific customer questions, you can create a
page of FAQs to answer inquiries that are likely to be asked about your
product. As a result, information regarding the product will be kept at a
satisfactory level for all potential consumers.
Search
Engine Strategy
Paid or free listings in directories or search engines are key sources of
traffic to your Website. To take advantage of the most used search tools,
assess your current search-engine strategies by asking:
- How can we properly analyze and evaluate our strategy?
- How can we improve our ranking amongst the results of the top search
engines?
How can we properly analyze and evaluate our strategy?
Ignoring the countless number of software applications that can supply
you with necessary data to be used in your analysis of your strategy,
consider the following pieces of information that can be found online:
Search engine rankings: Assuming that submissions have been made to all
the main tools, attempt to find your site using the keywords to describe
your product. Track where you have been placed in comparison to your key
competitor.
Download the following template. This template can assist you in tracking
and analyzing your positions on each tool. For the purpose of this article,
the template was created to track Toys R Us.com, using the keyword,
"toy."
Links on the Web: Monitoring the number of links leading to your site is
key to search-engine strategies. The more links located on the Web, the
higher ranking your site will receive on some search engines. To have an
idea where links are posted on other sites on the Web, you may consult Link
Popularity. Applying Link Popularity to Amazon.com, one can see that there
are 2,833,507 external links pointing to the Amazon site using the Altavista
search engine.
How can you improve your ranking amongst the results of the top search
engines?
It might sound strange but your competitors might be able to help you
improve your ranking. By viewing and analyzing your competitors' meta tags,
you can use the same or alternative meta tags and keywords to enhance your
own keywords strategy. To discover your competitors' strategy, log on to
their Website and right click on your mouse and select, the "View
Source" option. The following MSWord file reveals the meta tag strategy
of Amazon.com for its online music store. After further reflection, one can
see that Amazon has used its brand name, "Amazon.com" as a
dominant keyword.
Navigation
Whether or not visitors make a purchase at your Website, they
will always remember their experience surfing through it. Some may find the
experience easy while others may find it frustrating due to number of mouse
clicks they have to perform before buying. The only way to reduce this
barrier to buying is to have a look at your site map and see if there are
any possibilities of creating shortcuts. While examining the site map,
consider the following:
- Are individuals comfortable surfing through your
site? Do they become impatient when they wait for a page to load?
- How
many clicks does it take an individual to get the desired page to buy?
- Is
it difficult for individuals to find information regarding customer support?
- How long do individuals spend on your site or on a specific page?
In
order to gather these facts, you will need to find past focus group reports
and Web-user-tracking applications. Live focus groups will give you a fresh
outlook on the facts and provide you with an opportunity to receive feedback
on any past or current analyses.
Updates/Modifications
Updates can reveal a number of things about your
Website and strategy. Here's what updates can tell your customers and your
competitors.
Pros:
- New product additions to the site shows innovation and
product-line growth
- Ability to deal with online glitches that may lead to
the loss of thousands of dollars. Your Web design team is pretty strong and
flexible to address any glitches that may arise, especially when security
problems pop up
- Flexible to modify content at times of an emergency (i.e.
out of stock postings, urgent product news notices)
Cons:
- Constant change
in prices for one product signals lack of a pricing strategy
- Changes in
the "look and feel" of the site can convey a lack of coordination
of the image of the product (s)
In order to minimize the cons presented
above, thinking before doing is critical. Ask yourself:
- Is the new update
or modification forced by a competitor's strategy and how will it affect our
long-term Website design plan?
- Will the change affect the way repeat
visitors navigate our site?
- How much will this modification cost and
what's the expected ROI?
Conclusion
On occasion, traditional analysis tools cannot be applied to
assess Website strategies. To properly assess a Website strategy, the
Website should be broken down into its different fundamental elements. This
article highlighted a few elements that a company should examine when
confronted with disappointing results from its e-commerce division. To
diagnose your current situation:
- Build a framework that is flexible to
examine short-term and long-term problems
- Establish a source of
information to be used in a framework to answer specific questions
-
Prepare to deal with additional issues that may arise from preliminary
analysis
| 
