In today's digital marketing landscape, you can use efficient web operations to build a better marketing engine and more opportunity for your business.
Okay, let's be honest. Marketers hate math. But you need to do a little math to ensure your website redesign gets the infrastructure it needs.
Now, I know some of you direct marketing database geeks are out there right now delighting over the decimal point of your latest survey. But, for the most part, we hate math. As a general rule, we'd much rather work on the creative aspects of our new campaign and wring our hands over whether the headline looks more "organic" in Arial or Helvetica font.
And, I have a big secret to share: Everybody else in your organization hates math, too. Well, except for the guy in the corner who freaks out if you mess with his red Swingline stapler. But that's right, you heard it here first: Everyone hates math, and specifically, marketing math. If you don't believe me, try this experiment:
Walk around your office and try to put together a committee to look at your web analytics reports to determine whether the open rate, clickthrough rate or conversion metrics are trending, and which trend is most significant. Then, walk around with new website designs in your hand and ask for opinions. The old cliché is right; everyone has two jobs: their own and marketing. That is, unless you want them to do math.
Why is it so easy for us to get stakeholder and executive buy-in to do a website redesign, but so difficult to get buy-in to acquire the tools necessary for us to manage the website we're about to redesign?
The website has a huge emotional pull for everyone in the organization, but in today's world, we have to be a bit savvier about how we structure our new web operations. From adding new Web 2.0 capabilities like social networking, blogging and RSS feeds to other management components like content management, email campaign management and web analytics, we need to build the business case for why these technologies make sense. In short, we need to do the math.
So, ride the coattails of presenting your website redesign project, or even after you've launched, and consider a few tips that can help make your case. You'll certainly have to do some math initially, but I promise you, if you do it now you'll not only be more successful, but six months from now you'll have significant ammunition to change that flaming, spinning logo the CFO loves.
Building the business case for your web operations
Adding technology to your website operations can feel a bit like installing new electrical and plumbing in your house. When it's all done, you've spent a lot of money and you can't see any of it. But the fact that you're saving money on electricity, the shower works and you don't have a flood in the basement is a definite ROI. And your house is so much more valuable for having done the internal improvements.
So, there are two tactics for building the business case to purchase web operations technology. The first, of course, is the tried and true "efficiencies" that are created. This is the "saving money on electricity" argument. Let's just use a simple example. If it currently takes you 10 staff hours at $50/hour to get a press release live on your website, then it's costing you $500 to post each press release. Using a content management system to empower the business users to do the same task in three hours (approvals included) is a 30 percent savings. At 15 press releases per year (and we're only talking about press releases), that's a meaningful savings in just press release production.
However, the lesser of the two arguments explored in building a business case is how much more valuable your new website is by having added management technologies. And this, frankly, is where it starts to get interesting. I think you'll get no argument from anyone that the web is an enormously efficient way for us to expand our business, regardless of what our "success conversion" is. Whether it's a new customer, a qualified lead, a satisfied site visitor or a banner ad impression, we all realize that the web is important. If it isn't, why are we spending so much time trying to figure out how to re-design our sites?
So, if it is that important, then it follows that we should continually find ways to optimize it. Inherently, this optimization means that we will drive more success conversions.
Let's look at three examples.