In Singapore, the words “good returns” , “marketing tool” and “corporate website” are seldom used together in the same sentence. Tell a business owner that a website is an investment, and he’ll be quick to retort that something only qualifies as an investment when it has a potential to generate returns. Most of the time, this cynical skeptical view holds true. Well, the first step to solving a problem is recognizing one. This week, we identify some of the main problems plaguing corporate websites in Singapore.

Poor Homepage Design

The homepage is usually the single most important page on your website. Inbound links from external sites, marketing material (i.e your business cards) usually link to this page.  For many businesses who market themselves on the Internet, the homepage creates the first impression of their business to new visitors.  If you are unable to capture a new visitor’s attention with your homepage it is unlikely that they will navigate to the other pages in your website.

Flash Intro

Do you want your customers to visit your site again and again? Of course you do! Repeat visitors contribute to more than 70% of online sales. Start building relationships with your visitors by not tormenting them with a Flash introduction.

Inconsistent Maintenance

Frequent maintenance and updates is seen by visitors as a sign of commitment and continuity.  If your last update was in 1996, visitors may not know if you are still in business.  Instead of calling to find out, they may just skip over to a competitor’s website.

Information Overload

Some website have too many things on site. Mostly it’s multimedia, too many glittering ads, animated banners, videos all vying for the visitor’s attention at the same time. Oh, and while we’re talking about multimedia, remember to do away with any cheesy music on your website.

No Clear Message

I’ve seen a site where an accountant offers her professional services, introduces health supplements and offers to walk your dog.  Don’t confuse your visitors!  Your website should have a core message that is instantly understood by visitors within seconds.

Not Informative

On the other hand, there are sites that have too little content to be helpful to a potential customer.  A common mistake is to list products by their model numbers with an accompanying image and no description.  Unless you’re selling to your peers in the same industry, visitors have no idea what the TYH-928273X Deluxe Model is capable of.

Too Technical

On the same note, make sure the copy on your website is not full of jargon or too technical, or you will be turning away visitors who do not have much understanding about such terms.

No Call to Action

This is the online equivalent of going to a sales meeting, describing your services for an hour and then leaving without attempting to follow up or close a sale.  A whole study has been devoted create landing pages that entice visitors to perform desired actions, be it picking up the phone and calling you, registering for your newsletter or making a purchase with your website’s online cart.

No Contact Information

I’ve been to sites that have no phone numbers or emails listed. You can only get in touch with the site owners through a one-way contact form. These sites create the impression that they are fly-by-night businesses.

No Human Voice

People like to work and interact with other people, not faceless corporations.  Add in a human tone in your articles and content.  It’s the age of social networking, so stop worrying that doing so “is too informal”.

Loading Time

Internet speeds today are very, very fast making all of us very, very impatient.  Optimize your image and other multimedia sizes.

Cheesy Music

Oh, did I mention No Cheesy Music?

Content Formatting and General Website Design

Poor background and font contrast, too many font colors, use of pop-ups, use of frames etc.  Here we are more concerned about the user experience when they browse a particular website.

Poor Navigation

Make it easy for your visitors to find the information they need.  It is frustrating to search for a page that you were just surfing minutes ago but just can’t seem to find again.  This happens often when you have a large website with lots of content.  Have your friends, colleagues perform a usability test and see how well your navigation system holds up. Add a search bar if needed.

Broken Links and Graphics

Internet Explorer browsers point some of these out with a box and a red “X” in it, this affects the user experience on your website very negatively.

Poor Browser compatibility

With so many browsers it takes more time optimizing your website for compatibility.  Start with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari, since these are the most popular browsers.

Too Much Advertising

Too many contextual ads in the content leads to a poor user experience.  Having Adsense on your corporate site may project a negative impression on any potential clients.

So, there.  If your website is not performing the way you planned, look through the list and see if these are any contributing factors.  For an in-depth analysis and report on the performance of your website, you may also want to consider our web analytics solutions Your website is a potential goldmine, make it churn out some returns!

I can’t remember the last time I had Skittles, the rainbow-colored sweet and sour candy.  I had all but forgotten about it until I saw mention of it on Twitter.  And then I saw it on YouTube, then Wikipedia and then Facebook.  Then I heard about it on Twitter again.  Finally, it was picked up on the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and the rest was history.

Skittles made waves in the online marketing community early last month when it decided to relaunch their website.  What was special about the website was that it was in fact a collage of different websites.  It had an “about us” section that was pulled from Wikipedia, videos from YouTube, a “chatter” section that pulled posts (tweets) from Twitter, among other user-created content from various Web 2.0 properties.  By leveraging on these social media properties all at once, the Internet community was suddenly hit from multiple channels about Skittles.  What quickly ensued was a sharp spike in buzz around the brand.

Within 48 hours, everyone from blog owners to internet marketers were discussing Skittles.  So were spammers and pranksters.  The internet marketing campaign soon started a negative downward spiral.  Users exploited the twitter-skittles “hack” and started to post comments ranging from the purely unrelated to profanities about the candy.  Skittles eventually took down the Twitter portion of the site.  Even then, the Skittles campaign had already achieved text-book case-study status.

Skittles is a generally well-known brand.  If a lesser-known brand were to pull off the same tactic, it may not have suffered/enjoyed the same results.  What Skittles managed to do, was to gain critical mass for its campaign within an extremely short period of time, a feat that is crucial to internet marketing.

Internet marketers have been taking both sides of the campaign.  Some think that Skittles’ courageous adoption of the web 2.0 properties paid off big-time, while others scoffed at giving too much freedom to consumers, a freedom which was eventually abused.

Personally, I feel that the outcome from the Skittles campaign was positive.  Prior to the campaign, there was little mention of the brand or even candy in general on the Internet.  Then suddenly, literally everyone was talking about  it.  Skittles could have spent half a million dollars on new tvcs yet not come close to this level of buzz around its brands.  Indeed, there were some nasty comments left on its website, but I am sure a majority of visitors to the site realized that this was the work of immature pranksters, something bound to happen in today’s social web environment.  These visitors would normally not have even thought of dropping by the site.

The lesson we take away from this campaign:  we see the potential of using web 2.0 as a marketing channel but at the same time realize that it is a raw and untamed force.  Study social media marketing and master it, because if you don’t, someone else will.

Most business owners that we meet are not aware of Per-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, those who do often have a stigma that PPC is expensive and generally quite useless.

Pay Per Click?

Perform any search on Google and sometimes you see “sponsored listings” on the top and right side, which are the PPC advertisements.  Like its namesake, an advertiser pays Google whenever someone clicks on the ad and gets directed to the advertiser’s website.

For most of our campaigns, we’ve included PPC in our Internet marketing toolset.  It’s not something that you would want to depend on for a steady stream of new visitors (we have organic search or SEO for that) but its still a good source of traffic and fast too, especially if you have a new website.

How it Works

Most PPC campaigns start with the advertiser deciding on a daily budget (you could start for as little as $1 a day if you wanted to).  Rest assured that you will not be charged for anything more than the daily budget you’ve set.  The next thing would be to decide the keywords that you want to advertise for (”pet supplies”, “accounting services”) and place a bid for them.  Your bid price is the amount you will pay each time a user clicks on your ad, up to your daily budget.

An Example:

Suppose your budget is $10 and you bid for “pet supplies” at $1.  Each time a user searches for “pet supplies” on your ad network (Google, Yahoo, etc) your ad will be shown.  It doesn’t matter how many times your ad is shown (the more the merrier of course) since you don’t get charged for it.  If the user is interested in your ad and wants to find out more, he clicks your website.  Then, you will be charged $1 for this referral.  After 10 users have clicked through your ad to your website, your advertising budget for the day will be spent and then your ads will stop showing until the next day.  Oh, and don’t worry about someone clicking your ad for the heck of it.

Since your competitors may be bidding for the same keywords, your bid price will determine the position of your advertisement.  Unlike natural search (non-paid results), our experience is that you don’t need to be in the top 3 positions for best click-through results.  What matters most is a well phrased, good value proposition.

Web Analytics & PPC

Web analytics, or the lack of it, is the single most-common for PPC campaign failure.  There has to be some form of tracking in place to see how ads perform.  Things to track would include the change in traffic before and after the campaign, conversion rates and sales volume.  With analytics, you should be able to tell if your ad spending is bringing you a positive return.  If the ads are performing badly, analytics will also tell you if something is wrong with the ad copy, or if you have to optimise your landing page for more conversions.

Once you have established a correlation between your ad spending and returns, you will be able to adjust your daily budget and forecast the effect it would have on your conversions.

Most of the time, when you hear about PPC campaigns not performing,  it’s due to the lack of tracking and analytics.  A PPC campaign properly deployed can be a very cheap source of targeted leads to your website!

In the recent years, the Internet started to decentralize and redefine news.  We obtain our dose of information daily from various sources.  So many, in fact that it is no longer possible (at least very difficult) for traditional media to control or decide what gets shown to the public, at what frequency.  The new rule of the day is: if you’re not going to report it, someone else will.  Anyone with a camera on their mobile phones or access to a blog had become an aggregator of news.   Information overflow?  No longer a concern with the rise of social networks.  Think about the last time you learnt of some breaking news over Facebook before hearing about it on the news.  And its happening more frequently isn’t it?

Since new media is about mass participation and not huge marketing budgets, this means that as long as small businesses are savvy enough, there may effectively be no barriers to entry.

Is your organisation an active participant in new media?

Automation? Convenience? Image?

How about exposure?

For many of our clients in B2B industries, the search volume for their services and products have taken quite a hit.  If you have access to and compare the search volume for your services you would probably find that it’s been significantly lower compared to the same period last year.  Businesses aren’t necessarily in really difficult times but most prudent ones will think twice and make smarter decisions about purchases.  That means that they will spend more time looking at alternative suppliers and doing some research.  Probably on the Internet.

Zip back to objectives.  I met a business owner today who believed that corporate websites should all be about ecommerce.  I’ve met several others who do not have an online presence because “our customers prefer to touch and feel our products” or “our customers are regulars who do not really access the internet”.

To me at least, a website is most powerful when used as a marketing tool.  It should be used primarily to capture the part of the market that you have yet had access to.  Use a website to gain exposure and build brand recall.  It doesn’t matter if nobody fills in your contact form for an order today, tomorrow or next year.  When he finally needs a service and your brand comes to mind, you will have won the battle for market share.

Just look at social bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon or feed aggregators.  Notice how “news” is being defined and voted upon by members?  Information has began to be rated and then shared in social networks.  There’s too much content online, so our natural response will be to give a rating to a piece of information to decide if it is share-worthy.  Similarly, we will be more dependent on our network to filter our news for us.  Take a look now at Google and think about how it works. PPC and SEO.  Now you start to see we will start to change our patterns of infomation search?

Let’s suppose you set up a retail store.  Probably one of the first things you consider is location.  You try to find a location with the highest amount of traffic that fits within your budget.  Once you’ve gotten your location, you’ll do some design and renovation work, and start packing your store with merchandise.  Now that your store is ready, you might put an advertisement out in the papers or magazines, or send out flyers around your area.  You understand that its about:

1. Getting in the way of traffic
2. Providing the traffic with the product/service that they are looking for
3. Marketing to attract more traffic

If you get this 3 principles right, chances are your retail store will do fine.

Now think about setting up a website for your business.  A website is an extension of your business, it’s an online marketing tool and a “2D” version of your store.  Since it is a variation of your physical store, we should apply the same 3 principles to your website.

1. Getting in the way of traffic

The majority of traffic to your website will come from search engines so the first thing you want to do is to get indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN, the 3 big ones.  Then you have to think about the other places where you could “set up shop” on the Internet.  Sites like online business directories and classifieds can be a good referral source.  To narrow down your target audience, go for the ones that are specific to your industry or geographic location.  The Internet is a huge marketplace, you’ll need to actively search for sites where you can promote your business.  Make it a weekly practice to post information of your business on a new website (make sure it’s relevant though).  It’s free most of the time so no excuses!

2. Providing the traffic with the product/service that they are looking for

Think about the visitors who will be accessing your site soon.  They will be coming to your site with the intention of gaining more knowledge about a particular topic.  If you have a site about golf clubs, and foresee that the majority of visitors will be golf club fanatics, tell them all they need to know and more about golf clubs.  Your goal here is to turn everyone who is interested in your products into a repeat visitor.  Just like in the 3D world, someone who stumbles upon your shop for the first time may not be ready to buy anything, but you want him to remember your shop when he is.

Make sure your website is professionally designed.  It helps provide a better image of your business and improves the browsing experience of visitors. Sometimes, the content and structures of websites are so ambiguous that visitors do not know what they are offering.  The worst thing that happens is when visitors are led to your store and see that it has nothing to offer.

3. Marketing to attract more traffic

You’ve listed your site on search engines and directories, and optimized the content on your site.  You’re ready to handle any leads and enquiries generated from your site, but your site is not running at full capacity.  Here’s where the marketing really starts.  You have an arsenal of marketing tools to choose from:

• Email Marketing
• Search Engine Marketing
• Social Media Networking
• Participation in Forums
• Link Building Campaigns
• Article Marketing
• etc.

Internet marketing covers many methods and you would probably think of  some ways that are unique to your industry.   You could even mix online and offline marketing to achieve better results.  Just remember that your objective is to make your online presence as visible as possible over multiple channels and in the process engage potential visitors.

To sum it up: It takes the same (if not more) effort and time to market your website as you would a retail store.  It’s tough to start but once you gain momentum you’ll start to see potentially exponential results.

If you are an SME however, you may have just gained entry to the “level playing field”.

In a short span of 6 months, corporations have been run into the ground.  Some of them rely too heavily on a failing sector, others fail because of poor governance.  The reason that they’ve been able to get by in the previous may have been their financial clout.  Sometimes in a bullish market, rewards may not be the direct result of perfomance.

Forward 6 months, and now the massive corporations are falling under their weight with the lack of strong foundations.  The cutbacks in jobs and manpower will lead to outsourcing.  There will be a search for alternative suppliers who show the potential of being the most cost-effective.  Most corporations will recover eventually but now is a good time to squeeze thorugh the gaps and expose yourself.

With this increase in search for B2B services, there is going to be more traffic on the Internet.  Is your company well positioned in the way of this surge of traffic?

Singapore is unranked with 2,700,000 users but if we’re looking at penetration rates, Singapore is 5th after Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Malaysia.

Penetration rates:

• Japan – 73.8%
• South Korea – 70.7%
• Hong Kong – 69.5%
• Malaysia – 59%
• Singapore – 58.6%

Penetration rates are calculated using the number of internet users in a country divided by the population of that country.  That means that 1 in every 2 persons in Singapore is an Internet user.  Pretty encouraging stats if you are marketing to a local audience, no?

A few years ago, it was difficult to justify building a website and using it as an effective marketing tool for your business.  Internet usage wasn’t as widely adopted as it is now, and the web had not established itself as a channel for sourcing products and services.   Then as web development services got cheaper over time, many business owners decided that spending money to develop a website didn’t even require justification.  It was just an affordable, one-off, sunk cost.  Things got worse when more others decided to develop a website for their company simply because “every company has one nowadays”.

This year, with the looming recession (are we there yet?), many businesses will review the cost of maintaining their assets; including websites, and start asking for some accountability.  The lucky ones will stumble upon the fact that a website today can become an extremely powerful weapon.

Search engines (Google in particular) has dramatically changed the purchasing pattern of the under-30s.  Do you still keep a copy of the yellow-pages and thumb through it when you want to look for a service or product?  The younger crowd prefers to let their fingers do the walking on their computers and mobile devices.  With search engines constantly improving to deliver faster and more relevant results, this phenomenon is definitely here to stay. Unconvinced about this demographic and its purchasing power?  Think about why the recent election went in Obama’s favor and what percentage of the voters fall into this category.  Today, these are just kids and young adults new to workforce, but very soon, they will become the major decision makers, and guess how are they going to get their information from and where do they network?

What this means is that while the rest of your competitors are still focusing on the brick and mortar (i like to call it 3D) aspects of their business, you should start to place more emphasis on your web assets.  Use online marketing channels and tools like social networks and PPC advertising to get your brand out to as many people as possible.  These methods are relatively cheap and perfoming such activities can actually help to fully utilize any spare resources especially in manpower.  A year of regular presence-building activities will set you far ahead of your competitor when they decide to market themselves online.