Smart B2B Marketers know the power of their website to do more than simply look good and be their online brochure. Good site design, ongoing management and maintenance is about one thing and one thing only, driving good quality leads for your business.
Or at least it should be.
Many firms outsource part or all of their online presence to an external agency, however too often these agencies are concerned about style over substance, good looks over good leads...or they are good at just one piece of the online puzzle, for example SEO, but don't excel at the other key components of a successful website.
So here are the top 5 tough questions you should ask
your agency. Ask them to explain:
1. How would you go about generating more traffic for my site?
Their answer should include how they would develop a keyword strategy, on and off page SEO, a content strategy, a blogging solution, how they would suggest you engage with social media.
2. How would you go about converting visitors to real leads?
Their answers should include building landing pages, using forms to capture data, how they would manage lead data in a database, email marketing follow ups, tracking leads activity on your site and so on.
3. How would you analyse what's working best and what needs to improve on our site?
One of the best parts of website marketing is you can capture a heap of data very easily on what is and is not working and then change what isn't working and do more of what is! Your agency should be able to tell you, what pages are drawing the most traffic, the landing pages that are generating the most traffic, the blog topics that are proving most popular, competitive analytics ie how you are doing compared to your arch rivals, and finally your social media reach, how many people are reading your tweets, blogs, LinkedIn or Facebook posts etc...Oh, and then make recommendations for making incremental improvements. Your agency should be able to demonstrate the ROI of every dollar you are spending with them.
4. What technology are you planning to use for all of this, and what content management system (CMS) do you plan to use?
Its very important that the CMS is super easy to use, otherwise the agency will hit you with fees every time you want to change anything.
5. Finally, integration. How do you plan to integrate all of these components into one unified approach?
If they plan to cobble together a solution from a number of disparate systems, a keyword grader from here an email marketing tool from there, Google analytics and so on, guess who will be paying for them to make sense of it all? That's right...you!
Using your website to:
- get your business found by attracting traffic to your site
- nurturing those visitors to become leads
- providing a suite of powerful analytics to measure what is and is not working
are the three pillars of good website marketing. This rapidly emerging discipline is called inbound marketing. If you would like to read more about this revolution sweeping B2B marketing around the world, please download this free whitepaper.
If you are struggling to find someone to help feel free to check out our inbound marketing solutions or contact us.