Don’t Have a Website Yet?
Don’t Have a Website Yet?
Thirty years ago, the rudimentary requirements to be an entrepreneur were a nice suit, a stack of business cards, an office, and a copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People. Today, however, just about all of the aforementioned have been rendered obsolete. It was once the status quo, but now that technology has advanced, it’s time to reinvent the wheel and get it rolling again.
The all-inclusive equivalent of the suit, the business cards, the office, and influential rhetoric is a personal or business website—your sharp aesthetic, your more informative business card, your office with a capacity of a million people, and your new way of winning friends and influencing people.
Follow this step-by-step breakdown.
The Business Suit: We now live in a business-casual workforce. Why? Because businesses are now represented more by logos and branding. This is important for your website. You want to be modern, slick, sharp, etc. You need to stay away from the dull, didactic, and clinical. Think about purchasing a book you’ve never heard of. What will you notice first? The cover. Will you feel inclined to purchase a book with a beige cover and nothing but a title written in white, Times New Roman font? No! You want the full-color cover art! Pictures. Classy fonts. Catchy phrases. The same elements will draw more people to your site. Be and look exciting!
The Business Card: The old piece of cardstock with your basic information has been replaced by a domain name. Instead of a card profiling you, simply offer cards with your website listed on it or just promote it by word-of-mouth. The key is a memorable domain name for your business. For example, if you are Girard Family Financial Firm, LLC., you might want to narrow down the domain name to www.GirardFinancial.com or www.GirardFinancialFirm.com. That way, when you are chatting with a potential client and do not have a card, you can offer an easy-to-remember domain for them to visit. Domain unavailable? Then you must get creative. In this case, Girard Family might try www.getFinancial.com or www.insuranceforyou.com.
An Office: Dear lord, the things you can do with a website today. Remember teleconferences? Reporting quarterly results over several phone lines? No more. There are so many tools available to incorporate with your website like conferencing apps, web forums, instant chat, etc. No need to rally your troops into your 12’ x 12’ room anymore. Just set a date and time and have everybody log in to your business website. Plus, you can incorporate all of Google’s office tools into your site: documents, spreadsheets, records, etc. The possibilities are endless.
Winning Friends and Influencing People: Dale Carnegie once said, “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.” One must use their website to trigger the emotional core of its visitors with pleasing text content. Think of your sales pitch in website form. In person, you might say, “…an I am confident that my product will satisfy your needs.” In website form, you can further elaborate on such a statement with more details and pull am emotional reaction from the website user by saying, “By purchasing our product, you will succeed in such areas as_________________. And with these tools, you are going to be one step ahead of your competition. We believe in you and your business and are confident will satisfy your needs. Tip: remember, when creating a business website, it is vital to place the words “you” or “your” more often that “we” and “our.” Make it all about your potential client or buyer. Win them and influence them.
Now, I hope you might be convinced it’s time to get your own website. Like I said, it is the all-in-one tool to conduct business properly these days: your business suit, your business card, your office, and your means of communicating effectively with people. So go ahead and dress business casual, save a tree and cut it out with the cards, save paying a lease, and put that Dale Carnegie book back on a shelf. It’s time to enter the cyber world.
I love your comparison of a website to all the things that used to mean ‘business’ to anyone: suits, conference rooms and business cards. It’s true! I think it’s also true that this is a much more pleasant and effective way to great and stay in contact with potential customers and clients. You’re always there whenever they want to find you.
Your quote from Dale Carnegie sums up a very effective method of marketing. People need to feel like your website is speaking directly to them and addressing their particular needs or issues. Generic marketing speech isn’t going to do that. Be conversational and professional at the same time.
I love how you point out that a website is not only useful for people looking for an adviser or financial firm or the clients of one, but also for internal company business as well, such as sharing reports. Having all that functionality in one place where everyone can come and ‘meet up’ virtually makes business smoother to run these days.
Carnegie had it so right! Play on people’s emotions and you have them hooked a lot stronger than if you appeal to intellect. Of course you don’t want to fluff up your site and offer no substance, or, god forbid, come off as a marketer! You need to make sure that every visitor to the site knows that their particular problem is going to get solved.
A website is definitely important for attracting new clients and customers, and keeping in touch with existing ones – especially to offer more services to them and increase profits. I’m curious about the capabilities you mention that mimic that board meeting concept. I definitely need to look into being able to contact and share information with other advisers and my employees through the web like that. Thanks for the head’s up.