WEBSITE PROFIT IS IN THE LAYERS

You’ve seen the ads: "Whole business websites for $499" or even "build your own website for free." Cheap, cookie-cutter sites tend to have several negatives:

• chief among them is a copycat, generic look: how do you stand out from the crowd of established competitors with a generic design? and
• poor implementations of the money-making & money-saving benefits of what a great website can deliver.

A high-performing business website is going to be built with a number of crucial layers. Here’s SOME of them:

• Sales: a layer of often many pages dedicated to motivating leads & prospects to buy now… or subscribe… or take whatever action you most desire of them. The sales layer is extraordinarily crucial to your success and should be maximized. VERY often, companies fail to put enough into creating a strong sales layer, only to be disappointed in how little revenue & profit that follows. Worse, sometimes they don't even know how much more money they could be making if they took this piece of their site much more seriously. Hint...

if you cranked out the sales creative in a few hours or a day or two, you've almost certainly left (probably lots of) money on the table. Maximizing anything (especially sales) is rarely realized on rushed and/or minimal effort. Whatever you sell should be pitched like it's the most important thing in the world, even if you sell something as simple as nails, paper clips, water, rocks or dirt.

• Leads: a layer of often many marketing tactics aiming to turn nameless website visitors into fresh, relevant contacts in your lead database. Every single visitor is a potential customer. The most likely reason they found your website is because they are looking for something you sell or cover. If you can't sell them today, the next best thing is motivating them to identify themselves so that you can have dozens or hundreds of opportunities to sell them in the future. Reject optimizing your lead layer (or put too little into it) and you are ignoring/rejecting potentially huge numbers of tomorrow's buyers. Hook more leads, nurture them and then harvest the easiest revenue you can make.

• Service: a customer self-help layer aims at reducing the demands on you and your customer service team. If a segment of customers can help themselves, they don’t burn time & money with you or someone on your team. What is freeing up your valuable time worth? If you can cut customer service team demands by 30%-60%, that means that same team can serve far more customers without adding to staff & office space expense. Do you have a great service layer woven into your site? Or do you want to pay for more and more human service agents to cover the same customer wants over and over? Hint: one option costs you nothing after you have it in place and likely saves you a lot of money as you scale up. Choose wisely.
• First-Time Visitor: a layer of content especially designed for a prospect who is exposed to your proposition for the very first time. Do you want to treat such prospects exactly like everyone else or do you want to give them special attention to make a better first impression? Hint: think of the best business introduction/transaction you've ever experienced. Did they treat you like a commodity or as if you were their most important prospect? If it was the best, you felt special. Do you make your first-time visitors feel special now... or no different than anyone else?





• Navigation: how often have you been to a site with poor or confusing navigation? Did they get your money? Intuitive navigation is crucial to attracting, selling and keeping customers. It needs to be the right navigation for your needs now and readily scalable for your future growth.
• Intelligence: websites can be remarkable tools for market research. By taking note of where a lead or customer spends time on your site, you can learn their preferences. Profiling visitors can help you better market your offerings to them. By knowing them, you can be more relevant to them. Relevancy is HUGE in motivating sales transactions. A "dumb" website has none of this free intelligence working for you. A smart one will gather intelligence 24/7, all 365 days of the year for FREE!
• Ecommerce: there are hundreds of options for facilitating transactions. The best one is rarely the cheapest one. Leveraging the right option means you deliver a smooth, effective buying experience for your customers. Some particularly good ones can manage a variety of customer relationship features instead of you having to try to do that manually. The wrong choice can confuse and drive buyers away. We can help you choose the right option for your particular kind of business and situation.





• Security: how often do you buy from completely unknown businesses? Will you risk hundreds or thousands of dollars buying through a questionable website? A well-crafted security layer helps strangers gain confidence to part with their money or personal information. A website that gives little thought to this basically begs would-be customers to buy elsewhere.

Are there more layers than these? Of course, there are many. This list is easy to quickly convey to anyone on a web page. It should have you thinking about your own website already:

• Was there a solid investment in the selling portions or did that get slammed together in hardly any time at all?
• Any room for more or better lead hooks?
• Are we getting service calls & emails basically asking the same things over and over that could be proactively answered on the website?
• Do we make first-time visitors feel special... and do we do enough of that?
• Etc.

There's big-upside-potential audits to be done... to be sure your website is contributing as much as possible to your business.

If those are OBJECTIVE audits, you can maximize the evolution or new website creation.

Layers beyond the basics get particular to the situation. For example, subscription & membership sites need layers for cross-selling, up-selling, nurturing, renewals and the entire membership backend functionality. Interactive sites often need software-like replication. Social sites need social media hooks and channels to help motivate followers to share your site with others or point their followers to your products or services. Personality or politically-driven sites tend to need multimedia layers so the personality can be seen, heard and generally simulate being much closer to their followers or voters. Retail sites need inventory management layers, a variety of promotional tools and so on. One-person businesses will typically need a content management layer, so they can easily add to their website without having to continuously employ a programming team. Etc.

ALL should be well architected, scrutinized, refined and THEN created. No part should be hurried: quality cannot come from rushed creative work. Your website has so many absolutely VITAL jobs to do for your business. It needs to do ALL of them exceptionally well. For many potential buyers, it makes the first impression, often the lasting impression and may represent their ENTIRE perspective of your company...

TARGET AMAZING!

All of those potential transactions- countless opportunities for years and years to come- depend on it.

Obviously, there's MUCH to doing this right. High-producing sites go well beyond pictures and text on pages. We are EXPERT at figuring out the optimal website architecture for our clients, documenting & designing it and overseeing coding to a successful launch. Modern websites tend to be the most prominent "face" of a business- how most customers view the company... perhaps the ONLY view many ever have. Are you maximizing this very important part of your mix?

Don't waste opportunities to make exceptional first- and lasting- impressions. Don't serve up a 2-or-3-star experience when you can be a 5-star company. Don't miss out on all that upside by failing to present your business as less than the very best...

WOULD YOU LIKE CRITICALLY-ACCLAIMED, BEST-IN-CLASS WEBSITE ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN?

BI sites are clever blends of marketing & sales and state-of-the-art programming & design. Each site has received critical-acclaim by users. Our designs have also won "Best of the Web" honors by major national press players such as Forbes, Barrons, IBD, etc. Our most recent from-scratch, site design was deemed "innovation of the year."

Because we utilize a strategic planning approach to website development, our creations have long-term legs... meaning expensive redesigns should not be necessary (no band-aids involved). You end up with a WOW site that makes you and your company look really good while maximizing your Ecommerce and digital marketing opportunities.

Of course, building a great site is only one part of developing a lucrative digital marketing model. The Big Innovations team has substantial experience creating profitable revenue streams and new lead generation vehicles through Internet marketing mediums. There are many ways to do this, ranging from internet advertising and direct response to a wide variety of targeted digital marketing tactics. It is a great advantage having your architects also own diverse expertise in many forms of results-driven marketing.

We can help you with fundamental solutions like improving your search engine rankings (SEO strategies) and utilize low-cost e-mediums to realize your financial objectives. We can also help you promote your site, grow traffic and/or attract the ideal prospects, maximize Ecommerce revenue, develop paid access programs, foster constructive communications between marketers & product development people and the customers & prospects you seek, develop a lucrative subscription model, use your website to qualify leads for your sales team, multimedia marketing, landing pages and so much more!

Blending digital marketing prowess with our latest website designs facilitates an opportunity to segment your customer and prospect bases all the way down to the individual level. This one-to-one marketing capability is the holy grail of 21st-century marketing: Amazon, Ebay and similar already do this well. You could do it better!

We can create the opportunity for you to delight your online users while helping your sales & marketing team deliver even better results than ever before. If your current website is not quite all it should be... or if you just want more results from your Ecommerce investments, contact the Big Innovations team for a FREE CONSULTATION right now. We are standout Grrrrrrrrreat at this! Let us apply Grrrrrrrrreat to your business...