2009 is here, and the reality of a bad economy sits heavily on most businesses on and off line.
For many of us, it’s time to regroup and either come up with new strategies or wither on the vine. While I am optimistic that Barack Obama will lead the nation forward in a positive direction and infuse the economy with significant stimulus, it won’t happen overnight.
As business people, we recognize that we can’t count on help from government, although we may welcome it. As small business people, we know we arn’t in line for the big bailouts the corporate giants get. Instead we need to do what we do best, be quick of foot. We need to make changes and we need to do them now.
I don’t have all the answers, heck, I don’t have half the questions, but I do have a few.
When times are good, we tend as business people to go with the flow. Now that they aren’t so good we need to look closely at things we shrugged off in the past.
This past week I did a study of all the businesses in one zip code, 55417 where I live.
Mine is a residential area with relatively few businesses, so my conclusions may not be reflective of the entire country by any means. That said, I suspect my underlying conclusions hold fairly true.
Less than half of the businesses had their own web pages. When doing a Google search many of these showed up in various directory sites, and many others were probably too small or part time to even do that. While these companies could thus be found online, they were not effectively competing for business. When times are good, maybe they could get by just being there. If they are to survive they are going to have to compete or they will loose out to those who do. For many, that means they need to take the plunge and finally put up their own web page. But lets hope they do it right.
Of those that had web pages, virtually none had effective lead capture capabilities. Maybe that’s why so many others don’t have web sites. They have learned that having a web site doesn’t really do that much. That’s because of those I looked at, almost none of the web sites were anything more than a billboard on a dusty dead end road on the internet. Some were very attractive, but few were business getters.
The purpose of a web site is to get new customers.
Most web sites are brochures. In my zip code I even found one web site development company who advertised their service as creating web brochures. This is not what you want to do if you are in business. You want your web site to be a prospect gathering machine, not a brochure.
I could probably increase the businesses for those with web sites annual sales by 10-30% in less than a month or so, just by setting up a lead capture system coupled with an effective follow up system.
For those without web sites, I’m inclined at the moment to refer them to http://www.davidgoesonline.com There at least they would get a top ranking web site and a video to capture their viewers attention. A hard to beat offer at less than $800.
But the real way to improve ones business isn’t just by capturing new customers, as important as that is. It’s by getting more business from your existing customers. And that is where I intend to focus my offline business consulting.
And that’s one of the key topics I intend to focus this blog on this year.
Stay tuned.