Return on Investment. It’s what we are in business for and ultimately, what we expect out of our investments at the end of the day.  So why not expect the same out of our online investments, such as our websites and online marketing efforts? The Return on the Online Investment is often ignored in the rush to achieve online web presence and to start establishing a basis for being found online.  What represents your business online?  Your website does and it does a fine job of it.  Is it sending the right message though?  If you send 10,000 people there will it result in sales?  If it is not selling your product or bringing in more customers now, it probably wouldn’t do so with a crazy increase in traffic.  Unless you know where you are at, with your website, you can’t hope to get where you are going (except by luck maybe).  Knowing the return you currently get on your website is the stepping stone to planning what you would like to have as the return on your website and how to get there.  I hate to say it but if your business website is yielding no return (either in clients or sales) than something must be done because you have wasted money or time and your potential biggest asset is not doing the job it should be. It is time to get back to the nitty gritty of what your online purpose is.  This is the new focus of Big Cloud Media as a web-design and development / marketing company.  Get back to the roots of why businesses are online in the first place and re-engineer the experience and the presence to maximize and reach that reason.  Through a unique combination of website analytics analysis and the analysis of both online and offline marketing, we can establish what works and what doesn’t, where the problems are and where the excellence lies, and ultimately, where the money has been spent and where it needs to be spent, in order to get the greatest ROI. A business’s online presence is an investment.  Plain and simple.  It can also be the most awesome marketing / sales tool, ever, if done correctly.  Think of it as an extension of your business to the masses that have never heard of you or met you.  You can communicate through it to your customers and potential clients.  You can customize the user experience to maximize the comfort and ease of use for your customers.  It can be used at all hours at any time of day and the space is yours to do with what you please.  You build it, nurture it, keep it in good shape and it will, in one way or another, continually return the money put into it.  It is the face of your company online, the first sales person an online visitor meets, and a great marketing and communications tool that never sleeps, never eats and costs little to maintain.  Therefore, your website should be at the forefront of your marketing program, not the backend.  Especially considering you can send people there at any time of day, with relatively inexpensive marketing and have it work its magic over and over again. I guess my point is this, businesses need to adopt the idea that their website is an investment.  Only then will the website and online presence really start working for the business.  Once this idea takes hold, it can be adopted into themarketing plan to keep the website at the forefront of marketing efforts and therefore, keep the always-working, never-stopping, creative-as-you-want-to-make-it marketing engine, that is the website, in the shape that it should be in, to really compete with your competition online and start getting a Return on the investment already made online. If you have any questions about how to turn things around and start doing more with your website or online marketing activities, or you haven’t taken that vital step yet to get your business online, please contact us today and we will be happy to talk to you more about your situation and what can be done about it.  Realizing the issue exists is the first and most often, hardest problem.  Do something about it and start on the road to a more successful online presence.

Notice something a little different? Well I hope so cuz we recently finished the revamp of our old website. It is not the final version because we are always looking to improve our work, but it will do for now. Through this new website we can do much more with the functionality and that was a key segment in the redesign.

For those of you who just loved the old one, you can still find it if you go to www.bigcloudmedia.com/oldsite.

Stay tuned for our post discussing the importance of analytics on your website.  They are super important so don’t miss it.

One last thing…if you have any questions regarding websites, marketing, web-marketing or anything under the sun, leave us a comment with your question in it and we will get you an answer out as soon as possible.

Thank you and God bless.

Koji Flowers (Big Cloud Media)