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Positioning means one thing: your customers understand, accept and embrace your core value proposition, i.e. why your business exists in the first place. If you want to learn more, pick up a copy of "Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind" by Al Ries and
Jack Trout
and memorize it. We're not here to tell you what to say in your marketing communications. We're going to tell you to say it loud and proud in the most important forum since someone flipped a soapbox in London's Hyde Park: the Internet (aww, you peeked!).
From now on, your client's web site is the point of entry for prospective customers, employees, stockholders, partners, suppliers and the media. That means whatever is on the home page of a company's web site will be the mission-critical first impression. If you think your client's web site sucks, so does everybody upon whom your future now depends.
This is so ridiculously important, any other marketing efforts should be immediately shelved until the web site is absolutely, perfectly excuse-proof. Not perfect, mind you…there's too many subjective opinions that go into a web site's design for everyone to be satisfied with the headline type font. Excuse-proof means never having to apologize for a balky
Java application, a confusing checkout process, five clicks to find a phone number, and other crimes against
HTML committed every picosecond by every web site in the Fortune 500 and below.
We are continually staggered by the number of companies that spend millions of dollars to promote an Internet presence that isn't ready for the middle of a Monday night, much less prime time. Broken links, outdated products, haphazard coding, superfluous pictures…check any big corporate site, and you'll run out of fingers to count the mistakes on the home page alone. And every time a customer gets lost, confused or
404'd, his or her opinion of your client plummets accordingly.
Ultimately, your client's personality is reflected by its web site. Are they a slick, professional outfit that understands their customers' needs and how to best fulfill them? Or a bunch of sloppy losers?
More importantly, has the site been updated in the last 12 months? If not, do it. Now. No delays allowed. You wouldn't watch a newscast or read a catalog from 1998. Why would anyone do likewise on the Internet, especially when the content comes from a company that positions itself as anything other than a museum?
The first step is to call in a group of professionals to evaluate your client's web site objectively. Obviously, if your agency played a major role in the site's development, a third party (hint: Mainsail) should be brought into the picture to provide expert testimony without carrying all the baggage of the battles won and lost in the site's evolution.
Next time, we'll take a closer look at the absolute bare minimum requirements for a competent corporate web site even Mom can navigate successfully. We'd also like to see what you think works on the web, and what doesn't. Send those URLs to
mainmail@mainsail.com, and don't forget to see "Dr. Seuss' How The Grinch Stole Christmas" at theatres everywhere (do you think Jim Carrey and Ron Howard knew they were filming a documentary?).
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