The 5 Minute Web Strategy
It’s been said that an expert is someone who has made all of the mistakes that can be made in a vary narrow field.
Last night I had the honor of being one of the chronic mistake-makers chosen to moderate a series of discussions on web strategy at the Troy Chamber Tech Exchange.
The event structure allowed attendees to select three subjects that they were interested in, and then participate 20 minute discussions on the topics with a group of eight people and an expert. When the 20 minute session was up, they would switch tables, and participate in the next discussion. It was a new format, but judging by the feedback that I heard, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it implemented again in the future.
I can’t speak for the attendees, but I can say that I learned a lot about doling out quick snippets of web strategy.
From past experience, I know that it’s quite simple for me to look at a website, hear a few seconds of background information about a business, and rattle off five to ten things that a company could change on their site that will produce fairly drastic results.
I also know that I can spend weeks diving deep into a business’ sales, marketing, and operations processes, and surface with a web strategy that they can implement that will produce an increase in online business (meet Deep Discovery).
What I learned last night is that the 5 minute web strategy does not exist, in a broad sense. Sadly, even with everything in my bag of tricks, I cannot listen to the question, “I’m the marketing director for a IT company and I’m redoing our corporate website. How do I make sure that the new site increases sales?” and provide anything but an ultra-generic answer (concise copy, clean design, and strong calls to action!!).
I can, however, provide tough answers to tough questions, and prescribe things that you’ll never end up doing. The unfortunate answer to the question, “I don’t want to spend money on SEO, how can I outrank my competitors?” is still, “blog like crazy, create new website content every day, write industry articles, participate in online discussions, and spread your content far and wide to attract inbound links to your site.”
I could have spared them and just said, “it’s unpossible.”
Don’t get me wrong, we had some incredibly compelling conversations about web strategy, but there’s a lesson to be learned from all of this. The lesson was taught by the people who got a LOT of value out of last night’s session. These people came to the event after putting some thought into exactly what they were looking for.
A number of attendees came to the discussion and opened with questions like, “my homepage contains x, y, and z, and my goal is to drive phone calls or emails about these specific products by enticing my visitors with online incentives. What should I pay attention to?”
Now we can have a great discussion about things to do, things to avoid, and things to test.
Were these people BETTER attendees than the ones with broad questions? Absolutely not! But I truly believe that they left the session with a number of website improvements that they can implement quickly, and I’m excited to watch their websites as they put them in place.
Learn from this experience. The next time you have the opportunity to attend an expert discussion, take a few minutes during your drive to the event to formulate what you’re looking to get out of it. Ask some hard, specific questions to the expert, and you’ll most likely take home a few tips that you can quickly put in place that will yield good results.
After all, we’ve already made all of the mistakes. Why should you have to?
Many thanks to Deb at the Troy Chamber of Commerce for the invitation to moderate!
Once I get that swapped out for a more professional picture, I’ll start working on launching the group.
