Fluid Web Service Puts Powerful Platform at SMB Fingertips

October 17, 2012

For the better part of 15 years businesses have been using websites as part of their marketing strategy.

At first the new medium was widely accepted and virtually every business, with a few exceptions, felt compelled to have one. In the last ten years other mediums have sprung up tied to the Internet, creating more platforms businesses have to consider when reaching out to their audiences.

More mobile than ever whole segments of the population are locked into receiving all or a portion of their information and communications via smart phones that access the Internet. Pads are beginning to see wider and wider use. Eventually it seems reasonable that they too will a common device marketers will not be able to ignore. Add social/content marketing and the Internet search component, with search and email still having a commanding lead over social network marketing in actual sales, and suddenly the website seems to be…displaced.

Popular “Inbound Marketing” companies simply take the same “closed loop automation”  tool set and sell it to you in a managed service. The truth is that their methodology is sound but they are not really giving you anything that an internal strategy with a website robust enough to provide you with the same functionality can’t provide you.

The cost of these services is for many small to mid-size businesses, usually monthly billed as a “managed service”, prohibitively high. And it still requires the client to engage internal sources for the actual content utilized or incur additional costs by engaging outside sources.

fluidwebdiagramThese managed services work, provided you come up with good content, but most small to mid-size businesses would do well to reduce their automation costs so that they can pour more into the content development. In a closed-loop situation, content of varying types is critical and the system is only as good as your content is compelling for your target audience.

But that is only the closed-loop automation part, there is more to the puzzle.

Close-loop is highly dependent on email. It is lists of willing contacts who are already onboard with receiving your messaging that are the end game. How you get them to that point requires outbound messaging, strong search optimization methods (paid search in particular) and, once again, content that has legs beyond the email format. Video is one strong component. The use of and deployment of things like white papers, infographics and blogs also contribute to getting folks to give you their email contact info and “opt-in” to your email marketing to them.

Both organic and paid search will give you that “pump priming” action but again they need compelling content, regularly deployed to your website or utilized paid search as a come-on to get them to landing pages pitching the content availability. If the content is compelling enough they will give you their email to get it. If it isn’t…well they might give it to you anyway but the total number of folks doing so will be greatly diminished. Good content, clever content, compelling content abounds these days and the bar is rising for the quality of content that will get your audience’s attention.

Mobile presents yet another challenge. Do you do this now in a different format than your website and invest more in mechanisms than in the development of solid content? Or do you take advantage of new website frameworks and look at solutions that will give you all the tools and capability needed? So many questions.

BTU’s new “Fluid Web” service is our answer to helping sort out this need businesses are now faced with. With FW we build-in all of these capabilities into one web platform. Not a service that you pay a huge monthly or yearly cost to. It’s your web. Your marketing tool. And at a cost that leaves you with budget left over to build the most important part…the content.

If you would like to see just how a “Fluid Web” will give even the smallest of businesses Fortune 500 level marketing, sales and lead generation power…businesses just like yours…call or email me personally. You won’t be sorry.

1 thought on “Fluid Web Service Puts Powerful Platform at SMB Fingertips”

  1. Another very strong and powerful post. I’ve been reading through some of your previous posts and finally decided to drop a comment on this one. I signed up for your newsletter, so please keep up the informative posts!

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