“If you build it, he will come”
-- Shoeless Joe Jackson
The famous quote from the movie Field of Dreams is quite inspiring. All Ray has to do is build a baseball diamond in the middle of his cornfield for all his dreams to come true and his financial worries to disappear. Wouldn’t it be great if everything worked this way?
Once upon a time, the web worked this way. Just having a website for your business guaranteed you a bigger slice of the consumer pie. In the early days of the web many companies didn’t yet have an online presence, and just the fact that your business was online meant that you would be found by customers looking for your product. Get a website, and your business will prosper.
As the Internet became more mainstream, having your business online was simply a requirement; like having a phone line or getting business cards printed.
Welcome to 2009. Not only do every one of your competitors now have a website, many of them are also actively engaging in internet marketing and search engine optimization. Are you?
These days, the web is yet another marketing channel – like television, radio, or print – that requires as much attention, planning, and budget if you plan to succeed.
Every day we encounter businesses that hope by just putting up a website, they’ll be able to capture the attention of potential customers. Often times, they have little plan as to how they are going to make sure it is their business that is found and not their competitor’s. They think a website will be their field of dreams.
It won’t.
At the very least, you need to be doing the same tactics as your competitors; ideally you want a strategy that well help you overcome them.
If you’re a business owner or a website manager, you need to be thinking about this. Do some competitive research to see who’s online in your market. Find out if they’re ranking number one for your product, engaging on Twitter or Facebook, or running ads on Google.
Of course, if you don’t know where to start or what to do, that’s where we come in. Contact us if you’d like to go over your web strategy and help you start to outdo your competitors.