The Web is Your Main Salesperson

I've spent the last 3 weeks reporting on the outbreak, the state of emergency and rapid change. Every evening I watched the charts where the numbers of infected were growing. They are overwhelming, urgent, crisis. Ideal for journalists and politicians. But not for me.

This will not be another article about COVID-19, I am writing it for those of us who have already stopped panicking. We are in suspense because we know that changes await us. And we perceive what is happening around.

And that there is. The streets are empty, except for a few worried people in disguises, but online it lives. Webinars, blogs, video interviews, more content and activities were created in a few weeks than in the last quarter. If there was a struggle for attention before COVID, now we are in the middle of a regular tank battle, in which many new actors have appeared.

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The online environment is the new reality

Everyone is at home & online. Teleconferencing is now almost the only way to meet at least a little. The alternative has become a reality. We go for a beer via ZOOM, we do remote workshops, we advise, we consult. And we trade -- whether through teleconferencing or over the phone.

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The world has changed and the site has been your main marketer for a few weeks. Instead of a nice main party, you want to do business. Instead of liking/disliking you start to deal with non-existent demand. Instead of reconciling every word, you want traffic that converts. But she doesn't, and it's not COVID. It's your website.

Previously, the site for many companies was an adjunct to marketing communications and suffered upholding business team. In the consultations, it was decided whether there would be such or a poppy lampshade next to your photo on the main page or whether it was necessary to have a less boring header.

Where attention goes, that's where money goes. We will have the graphics drawn by the pros, the texts will be written by the assistant.

Due to this, the site does not attract relevant clients, does not communicate with them in the right way, does not help them in their life situations, they do not manage to use it, it is not trustworthy, it is not fast enough or even breaks once in a while. Businesses basically ignore their website because it was one thing in a lot of fields. But this game is over.

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How good is your current website?

The website consists of three basic parts:

• Content — texts, photos, videos that evoke emotions and answer key questions from visitors
• Technical solutions — speed, safety, reliability, the ability to flexibly change anything,...
• Graphics — user interface interpreted according to your visual style

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The quality of individual parts of the site depends on the invisible and neglected input. Your website needs to be really well thought out and improved over the long term after launch. The specification of the site and its content have the greatest influence on whether the site will carry the requests or not.

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Quality does not mean unique

But the attention of many website owners was somewhere completely different from the specification of the site and the quality of its content. They wanted to be unique (You need to be unique!), so they were letting vendors come up with unique graphic creations. But they throw sticks under the feet of visitors who do not know how to use them. Uniqueness is important, but above all in the fact that you are able to handle customer needs exceptionally well. Unique graphics are counterproductive in most cases.

At first I thought it was a pharmacy, but now I see that it is cosmetics.

— quotes from testing within Audit of the site

It was enough for COVID, not today. Business turnover has fallen, entrepreneurs have begun to cut spending, and established businesses are tightening their belts and revising what to invest in. But that doesn't mean the deal is over and that it will never come again.

Where to take money for the site, when the company was throttling everywhere? Move resources from offline marketing, printing, gasoline, sales team expenses, etc. There is no choice but to set aside a budget. navigate the real state of the site and then do what needs to be done.

The website of many companies is not ready for a new era. Some of them are still in a panic. The part is in tension and looking for a way forward. Companies do not have a relevant comparison with others and therefore no certainty that their website is good. He may feel better than his competition, but that doesn't mean he's good enough.

In one Site Audit, we found a publicly accessible database of customers and e-shop orders.

-- Robert Kania, Nehoupat.cz

It's very likely that the web today can't even answer Marty Neumeier's basic brand questions from Brand Gap — who we are, what we do, and why you should care. Let's talk about the more complicated, but even more important questions.

The web is the central touchpoint of marketing communications, into which social networks, Youtube videos are integrated, and its structure reflects what people are looking for in Google at different stages of the shopping cycle. The website helps to establish a relationship between the company and potential customers. Unlike other touchpoints, the firm fully controls it.

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If I had to summarize the situation...

• there are significantly more players online competing for attention,
• traders have a somewhat flattened charm in teleconferencing or even more flattened after telephones,
• companies didn't pay attention to what was really important about the web, although now it's just starting to matter.

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Part of the new pie will go to whoever reacts faster and adapts.

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How are we at House?

We are in the House of Cutter, by the way, in the same situation as everyone else. In the coming week, we are launching a series of internal workshops and user research, we are revising the product mix, sharpening the positioning of all products and our communication about them. And also our website.

We started organizing online workshop Mini-audit of the site that helps people to get a picture of the status of their site. It's free. We send dates Subscribers to our newsletter and so far they have always been filled by turns. For readers of this article I offer other terms at this link.

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The second option is to catch up with our online course Strategic web design which we are until the end of April they have discounted in half. We hope it will help kick in the right direction all those who need their site to capitalize right now.