Marketing & Website Design

To some people, marketing may seem to be a separate topic from website design. However, marketing is at the core of website design; get the design wrong and you will find that marketing both your website and your business becomes much more difficult. To understand the relationship between website design and marketing, it is useful to understand the general differences between a traditional business and an internet business:

• Geographical Spread. The vast majority of traditional businesses have stores or services that cover a relatively small geographical area. However, internet businesses are often nation wide or international, even small 1-man businesses. The use of the internet to deliver information and postal services to deliver tangible products makes distance largely irrelevant.

• Local Market Share. Traditional businesses typically have a large piece of a small market. For example, each small town may have a handful of banks, grocery stores, plumbers, shoe stores and so on. Internet businesses, because of their wide geographical spread, typically have a small percentage of a large market. For example, an on-line jewelry store may sell products to clients in many countries but have a small fraction of 1% of the total market for these countries.

• Physical Presence. Although some traditional businesses do not have a physically visible presence (e.g. a work-from-home plumber), any business with a store is visible (especially if they are in the town centre or high street) and can attract potential clients in this way.

• Credibility. If one needs to order a product and pay in advance, one is much more likely to do so from a town centre store than from someone on the street corner. One knows that the store has been there for a while and likely will be there for the immediate future. Furthermore, the physical presence of the store implies financial assets. Someone on a street corner could simply take your money and disappear. Most internet businesses are like salesmen on a street corner; the potential buyer has found them by an internet search but has no idea of their history, reliability, financial assets, or trust worthiness.

There are of course many exceptions to the above. For example, some internet businesses serve only a local market and are associated with a physical store. Likewise, there are many companies that server international rather than local markets. Furthermore, some internet businesses (e.g. Amazon, Google) are so large and well-known that their reputation is more substantial than most traditional stores. However, this section is not aimed at website design for such large enterprises; rather it is written for people setting up new and relatively small internet businesses. For them, the above generalities are largely true, and have the following marketing implications for most internet site.

1. Finding Clients

For many internet businesses, traditional forms of advertising are not economical. The wide geographical spread (first point above) means that instead of advertising in a local newspaper or telephone yellow pages, they would need to advertise nationally or internationally in order to reach their market. This would be enormously expensive. At the same time, the small market share (second point above)  means that such advertising would bring in only limited incremental income, almost certainly far less than  the cost of advertising.

There are of course exceptions (such as Dell computers). Also, internet businesses that occupy certain market niches can sometimes find advertising in specialist magazines. However, such exceptions are notable by their rarity. In general, traditional forms of advertising (television, radio, newspapers and magazines, telephone yellow and white pages, billboards) are not economical. In addition, the lack of a physical presence means that one also cannot find clients merely through being visible (third point above), an option exploited by town centre businesses.

In fact, most internet businesses find that the only forms of client acquisition which are economical are internet based. They take a number of forms, all of which are dependent to some degree on website design:

• Search Engines. If you can secure a top position in the search engine results, you are almost guaranteed a good stream of visitors to your website. As explained in our SEO article, website design is one of the two main factors that determine your search engine position. The other main factor is incoming links; given that a good website design and content is more likely to obtain incoming links, one can say that both of the main factors which determine search engine position are largely based on website design. In addition, the website Meta Tags and Domain Name have an important influence on click through rates from the search results; people using the search engines will often skip over some of the websites and click on a lower down website if it has more interesting meta tags and domain name.

• Sponsored Advertising. In addition to the normal (organic) search engine results, you can also purchase a position in the sponsored search engine results. In the past, your position was determined only by how much you paid (the websites that paid the most got the best positions). This has changed, with Google (and other search engines) now determining your position in the search results not only by the about paid but also by the quality of your website (as evaluated against their criteria).

• Links. Links from other sites, especially if they are in the same business or a related business, can be a source of traffic. In general, other websites are more likely to link to you if you have a quality website.

• Advertising on other websites. If you purchase advertising on other websites, the main determinant of the advertising you obtain is the amount you are willing to pay. This is one area where website quality is not necessarily an important factor (although some people follow Google's sponsored advertisement philosophy and will take quality into account when determining advertisement placement position or price).

2. Business Credibility

As noted above, websites offer far less tangible evidence of business credibility than traditional physical stores. This can be a concern for many potential customers, particularly if they need to pay in advance or if they need to give their credit card details. With the increasing awareness of credit card fraud and other internet shopping issues, potential buyers will need reassurance that the website can be trusted. The website can provide reassuring indicators in various ways: a professional-looking design, good quality and quantity of relevant content, rich contact details, any awards or professional qualifications received by the business or its staff, associations with known and respected organizations or businesses. Alternatively, a website with almost no content and an unprofessional appearance is hardly likely to inspire confidence.

3. Sales Conversion

The first task of an internet website is to obtain visitors and the second is to project a professional and credible image. In the case of on-line businesses, the third objective is to convert visitors into buying customers. Success in doing this is dependent not only on attractive products and prices, but also on the design of the website sales process. A complicated subject, this will be discussed in a future article.