You arrive home after a particularly long, hard arduous day. You’re soaked to the skin, numb with cold and still have your toerag of a boss’s shrill words ringing in your ears. To compound the misery, your spouse doesn’t greet you with a hug or any display of affection, but roundly chastises you for not picking up her dry cleaning.
“If only you had a car, none of this would have happened. If you had a car, you wouldn’t be drenched to the skin, you’d be home earlier and you’d have my dry cleaning”, she howls.
“I mean come on!”, you mutter to yourself.
“I’ve had a day like today and this is what I’ve gotta come home to?”
But deep in your heart of hearts, you know she’s right.
It’s time to go and buy a car.
Spending inordinate amounts of your precious time slumming it on buses to and fro work getting pummeled by adverse weather conditions doesn’t really add up. In this particular scenario, it makes a lot of sense to perhaps invest in a car to make the journey a bit more palatable.
A car fulfills a specific purpose. It saves you time, and makes your life easier all round. Heck, it even keeps the missus happy into the bargain.
Win-win stuff all round, I’m sure you would agree.
Yet when business owners decide they want a website, they don’t get one for anything approaching a practical reason.
They usually let emotion hold sway, deciding to get one because they want to portray a “solid brand identity.”
Or possibly they want to tell the world about great they are, how they are the best in town and how “no job is too big or small”.
Perhaps they desire the fanciest website their little hearts can imagine, something that makes them all a flutter with smooth lines not out of place in an Audi advertisement.
They might get one developed because their competitors are getting one, and they don’t want to get “left behind.”
I suppose on the surface these reasons make some sense.
But on closer examination, they’re about as logical as buying a car to complete a picture postcard image of your house, or to complement your all new Louis Copeland fitted wardrobe.
It makes as about as much sense as sending a no-nothing smoking hot supermodel out to sell your product, despite the fact she couldn’t sell a starving man a hamburger.
They simply don’t hold up to any close scrutiny. They all completely abandon all notions of salesmanship, persuasion or understanding the conversation that’s happening inside your customers head.
In short, getting a website created for any of the above reasons does little to solve your prospects problems, or sell your product or service.
Oh sure, you will always get some sales if you get a brand orientated website. Some sales is better than none, I guess.
But will be they enough to get you an appreciable ROI?
So if you are thinking of getting a website developed for any of the aforementioned reasons, I’ve got a money saving tip Eddie Hobbs would be proud of: don’t bother.
Call me traditional but I come from a world where all marketing spend must be justified.
It’s gotta produce a positive ROI.
Otherwise, why are doing it?
Is doing something just because your competitors are doing it necessarily going to make you any moolah? There’s nothing to suggest it won’t, but most of the time following the herd leads straight to the abattoir.
Your website is there to make you money, pure and simple. It’s there to convert as many visitors to sales, not to bore them about how long you’ve been in business or dazzle them with your “brand awareness”.
And it’s especially not there so you can boast about your new website to your biggest rival at the local chamber meetings.
So once again, it’s there to make you money.
If you want a website that cares not for reputation, brand awareness or what your neighbours think of you, but rather puts bums on seats, then you’d better give me a call on 087-7426631.
Do it today, before your Chambers rival twigs that his “brand consultant” has been feeding him swill straight from the trough.