B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine

Is Your Website the Core of Your Marketing? …or Still a Bit Player?

November 16th, 2007 Posted by: Bill Gadless

Back in the late 90s, companies were putting up websites largely as a defensive measure …for no more compelling reason than “everyone else is”, so no one wanted to risk being left out.  Most marketing folks believed that this new tool would be important “someday”, but few were sure exactly how.  So sites remained rather skeletal and image-oriented, expectations stayed low, and the bulk of marketing budgets continued to flow into the traditional vehicles (print ads, direct snail-mail, events, etc.).  The typical B2B was ecstatic if their site simply acted as a decent billboard… where a prospect might (for example) get the word to “Meet us at Gaviscon ’99”.

The Web Matures
In the early 2000s, some things went down that changed the landscape dramatically.  The WWW passed a billion indexable pages.  Search engines matured to become the de facto means of doing research, including B2Bs looking for products and services to support their businesses (and this was even before Google’s landmark IPO).  A technical specialty – search engine optimization, or SEO – arose to help companies make their websites more easily found by the search engines.  And Google introduced Adwords, effectively creating a technology – now universally known as Pay Per Click – that would totally reshape the world of advertising:  for the first time, advertisers could pay only for a nominally-interested lead, rather than for a given number of TV or print insertions that might or might not produce anything of value.

Marketers also began to notice that their website content was relatively quick and easy to modify, as well as quick and easy for their prospects to access.  Smaller companies saw it as a great equalizer:  a $1 million company could look as impressive as a Fortune 100.  And because Web marketing is totally electronic, the return on an investment in it was also measurable to an extent and level of accuracy that could only be dreamt of in the traditional, offline world.

The Tipping Point
Studies show that this year or next, online (Web) marketing budgets will surpass those for offline marketing for the first time …and the shift actually appears to be accelerating.  (See our earlier posts, “B2B Online Marketing Budgets Set to Grow…” and “B2B Online Spending On the Rise” for summaries of relevant research.)   What this means is that B2B marketing as a whole is increasingly being built around the core Web marketing effort:  conference speaking slots are used in part to set up later webinars and white-paper downloads;  mail and print advertising are used to drive traffic to the website;  email becomes the primary means of nurturing prospects.  Already undeniably every company’s first face to the public, the website and associated vehicles are fast becoming the nucleus around which all other marketing activity revolves.

Is Your Company Stuck in the 90s??
Clearly, there’s no longer any way to attribute such a fundamental sea change to some sort of passing fad.  Rather, it’s happening because hard-headed marketing execs – and their even colder-eyed CFOs – are seeing better ROI on marketing dollars allocated to online vs. offline vehicles.  And those who‘ve figured out good ways to integrate the two have found that they can drive returns even higher.

If your web marketing isn’t yet central to your company’s total marketing effort, you should at least be working on a plan to get there.  If you’re uncertain of how to proceed …well, you’re not alone, and it will probably be worth your while to seek professional help.  This is definitely no time to be on the wrong side of history.

Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy, Internet Marketing