The Teckki Says

This is a multipart series on websites that will discuss what pages common to many websites should contain. This article discusses the Product Presentation.

Most websites sell something, whether they are goods, services or ideas. Far too many websites think the web is full of customers looking to buy from them exclusively. If your products and services aren't well presented, you might as well not have a website, because the effect on your sales will be about the same. You are not the only game in town,

Some website owners think that just getting up a site is all that matters, and just good enough will do. Presentation can become a casualty of many budgets, but I'll offer up proof of just how much it matters. Many of us have seen Walmart's print flyers, television commercials and website. You've probably also been in their stores. In my opinion, the presentation of the print, television and website advertisements are much better than the actual shopping experience in the stores. In the store, profoundly low pricing and immediate need overcomes my low expectations of positive shopping experience. Low pricing is their mantra, and bland product presentation, along with tight aisle space and a Spartan store layout, is emblematic of this. They do not replicate this on their website, because if the experience was the same, many visitors might shop elsewhere. They certainly need the reputation they've built up in the stores to make their website efforts work. However, their site presentation is not too far different from their rival Target Corp's website. They are both clean and non-cluttered, but in my opinion, Target's website reminds me a little more of their stores than Walmart's website remind me of theirs. If on the web, Target, Walmart and most online retailers are roughly competitive on price, what makes them different?

Presentation and Expectation Builds Reputation

This brings me back to your website – Pictures can be worth a thousand words, and a thousand dollars. I look at thousands of pictures a year, many from clients. I can get technical, but your eyes know the difference between poorly taken pictures and professional ones. If you plan to sell a thousand widgets at $10 a piece, is it too much to ask for you to spend $500 for a better picture so that the widgets to look better? Is it too much to ask you to spend $125 for a professional writer to produce a great description for a necklace that you want to sell 10 at $500 a pop? Should your customers have to find better written descriptions of merchandise on your competitor’s website, making them wonder if you are selling the exact same product for $50 less? Wouldn't this be better than the $85 you spent on the cheesy yellow and red flashing banner that says "hurry, only two left?"

Is it too much to ask that the services be explained, perhaps backed up by testimonials of REAL customers, rather than self-serving proclamations stating, "I am cheaper than 'competitor.com?'"

The web is all about visuals. The "Low Price Leader" recognizes this, your customers do, and so should you.

Sometimes you get more than a morning jolt when you stop by the coffee shop, although I drink decaf. I did get more than the high octane shot most of you get, and I want to share it with you. A friend stopped by my table, and we talked, among other things, about marketing.

My questions started on the topic of surviving the current recession, knowing that this friend had been through several. He’s been in business over twenty five years, so he's seen downturns in a number of flavors. The jury appears to be in, and the verdict looks like he will survive this one also.

Many of you have heard these before. However, in a downturn, the panic button gets pushed more often, so it's nice to be reminded. Here are the five tidbits I gathered from our conversation:

(1). Contact your customers. Look particularly at those customers you acquired from the last recession until just before this one. If you've been in business for less than five years, this will be everyone you’ve done business with. Rekindle and/or reinforce those relationships

(2). Find out what works. This is easy because right now, almost nothing seems like it does. All editorializing aside, someone is still buying from you, or contributing to your cause. What works with your marketing right now? What types of mail or samples gets kept, what gets thrown in the garbage? Now is the time to ask.

(3). Redeploy your workforce. You will find out just how good your hires are in this climate. If there is less work, there is more time to do other things, like calling current customers, or making sales calls. This is the time to make your organization more customer–focused by perhaps engaging with customers personally.

(4). Set your limits. Not every business survives a downturn, and yours may be one that doesn't. Know this beforehand, so you are not losing the business, your house and personal possessions, your family and everything else because you think the last quarter in the slot machine is going to hit big. For instance, you may have to adjust customer payment patterns, just know what your limits are there, too.

(5). Cut strategically. No where does the reflexive budget cut ax wield so recklessly in many companies as in downturns. All of those "25% cuts across the board" mandates may sound good at department meetings, but if your heart, brain, legs and arms are the heads of those departments, mandates like this will get you one dead person. I like the way my friend phrased this – first make the personal cut, then make the personnel cut.

One of my favorites is to get out of the office. Isolation only solves one problem I know of, and that is to focus on a problem where you need to cut out interruptions and clutter. Holding your face in your hands, while lamenting a poor economy, is not that kind of problem. Besides, you never know who you will see in a coffee shop. It might be someone who could give you five great marketing ideas!

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is over, and there are always announcements, along with outright speculation, over what will hit and what is hoped. The biggest specualtion right now is for a product that did not even appear at the show, nor did its manufacturer exhibit there. Everyone is waiting for Apple Computer to announce a tablet computing device.

Apple does not comment on speculation regarding product releases, and has been known to announce products that no one knew was coming. A lot of us are waiting for the "Apple Tablet", a device that is rumored to be a larger, non-cellular version of its iPhone product. Since Apple is extremely successful in guarding information about new products, we really don't know. Even if we did, should we rush out to go buy one?

We should remember the launch of the iPhone. It was cool back then, but we quickly forget that iPhones weren't selling for $99 or $199 with a two year phone contract. These 1.0 versions were selling for $499 and $599. They were no where near as capable as their successors today. One thing that seemed to be better back then than today was that no one was complaining about AT&T's data network and the drag it is on Internet browsing

If Apple does produce a tablet product, there is no doubt will it be drop gorgeous cool! But Apple also has a reputation of charging at the higher end for that cool. It won't mainstream at that higher price for some time. It is also rumored that it won’t be part of a wireless carrier's data plan, opting to be a wifi device, meaning there's no AT&T or Verizon to subsidize the cost. This is the biggest single reason that $99 iPhones exist. Certainly, Mac desktops and laptops aren't dropping as fast in price as iPhones did.

The question is how much are you willing to pay for cool that happens to be first generation? Cool wears off after use, and hardware doesn't have upgrade pricing like software. One thing I've learned about the tech industry is that it usually takes about three tries to get something right. Microsoft Windows didn't mainstream until version 3.0, and iPhones are flying off the shelves at 3.0. If Apple announces a tablet, I want one, but I don't get paid to be cool, I get paid to make sure my clients have the widest reach on mainstream Internet platforms, and the tablet won't satisfy this requirement just out of the gate.

Will you buy one if it is released? Will you be the leaders that show us the way, buy one for the eye-candy effect, or really make this device catch fire?

Let me know.

Have you looked at your website on a cellphone, computer screen and gaming console? The Internet is becoming the common pipe delivering information to viewing screens of all sizes, meaning that you have to consider presentations for each format. This has profound implications of how businesses will purchase advertising, and even how advertising is prepared.

The ad world is still diversified where there are many mediums in which you can advertise on. Print advertising, while it continues to evolve to digital, still has requirements in terms of size and color to make ads fit onto its medium. The same is true with billboards, radio, television, websites and direct mail. As someone who produces content, I often have to produce multiple versions for clients who plan on using a number of different mediums.

The Holy Grail of software development is to write once, run everywhere (on all types of computing devices). This failed primarily because Microsoft, king of the PC world, wanted to rule this environment, and indirectly, all of the devices running the Windows operating system. No one owns the Internet, so the rules are dictated by all of us, the users. We dictate in mass by the types of devices we use, and the amount of information we access. Device makers, content producers and medium providers are left to play catch-up.

As more money goes to the Internet for advertising, your advertising providers will have to deal with a greater number of devices, and not all devices are created equally, or simply. Who is in the best positions to handle this? Ad Agencies, who already develop multiple media strategies for their clients. Who is the least? Advertising medium providers, such as print, radio and television, and many web development companies, among others.

What makes this such a problem is that many of us bypass ad agencies in favor of going directly to the medium provider. It’s a matter of economics. You have to have a sizable organization to absorb the expense of having someone else design campaigns for multiple mediums. But most advertising medium providers, such as print, are set up for those who choose to bypass agencies, so they have in-house staff, specifically orientated to THEIR medium. Everyone knows how to use Photoshop, but print people specialize in the print aspects of Photoshop, video people specialize in the video aspects of Photoshop, and so on. As clients began to understand and consider the number of devices their information will show up on, they will depend on firms that can do it all, and it won’t be media companies selling ad space for their own mediums.

For those that think this problem is relatively far off, I only need to offer up the Apple iPhone as an example. Apple has sold approximately 30 million of these phones in 2-1/2 years, and you can assume the majority are still active. It's a given you can browse the web on these phones, and your target market may well have them. However, if you have one of those gorgeously animated sites powered by Adobe's Flash product (most animated sites do since this is the industry standard), you can forget about the iPhone, because they won’t see it. If Flash programming is your website firm's only expertise, they may not be able to make the accommodation for differences in devices.

This could leave you holding a very big bag of air, waiting to pop with the release of each new hot technology.

This is a multipart series on websites that will discuss what pages common to many websites should contain. This article discusses the Price Page(s).

If you are selling something, eventually your potential purchasers will want to know costs. Bury the price, and you bury the sale. If there is anything a purchaser dislikes more than anything, it is the surprise of something that costs more than expected. However, there are few things sellers hate more than exposing their prices too early in the selling process, or divulging price information to a competitor.

Many sellers will agree that if you reveal your price too early, you expose yourself to comparative shopping. After all, you may not have had the chance to explain the benefits and answer questions that justify the price. An upfront price lessens the opportunity to justify your case.

Putting out pricing information also helps your competitors. For competition that has been in the business for a while, they know where to undercut you. For those who may be jumping into the business, all they know is to undercut you. To your prospects, neither makes a difference.

I am one who believes in posting pricing, and I began to include it on my website years ago. Upon doing this, I was surprised to find that my colleagues were also looking, and they were amazed. I am sure that they felt that I would drive away prospects, as well as expose myself to competitors. I don’t know how many competitors used my pricing as benchmarks, but I do know that prospects who called me became no longer available once I sent them to my website to check out services and prices. I was fine with that, because that is part of what I designed my site to do.

I don't feel I've lost much, if anything. This resolved a problem I spent years trying to correct. I used to spend days preparing estimates based off of spectacular sales meetings, building rapport and fostering relationships, along with identifying the customer’s needs and providing solutions to fulfill them. I asked the budget question and what they expected to pay, and the answer was that no one has a budget and no one knows what websites cost - until I gave them a price. Then they were experts. What I found was that the number was important all the long.

The web is a medium where comparison and lower pricing are generally expected. You can be wowed by dazzling sites, and clients expect everything to look great, but buyers expect it to be cheap, or at least cheaper than can be found in the offline world. If "lowest price" is not your targeted market, then let them know that upfront. In a world where the lowest price wins, not displaying one is tantamount to having the highest.

Eliminate price as a deal breaker. Your website should serve as a filter as well as an informational and selling tool. If you direct people to your site, all of the things they want to know should be there – who you are, what you do, what you have done for others, and of course, well, price. Those who know what they might pay, and still choose you, have found something else they like about you. The negotiations change to how you will get it done. You also don't have to make the client regret the price by eventually telling him that the things he thought he was getting were put back on the shelf the minute he agreed to the deal he ultimately got.

I recently got a call from a prospect who was almost sure she would buy from me. It's easy to get excited and feel that you bagged the sale. However, I referred her to my website, where a few days later, I got a call saying that they had found another provider. Price may have played a role, but I know I saved hours of meetings, proposals and modifications, and sales speeches trying to emphasize value, only to lose out because of price.

Missed potential sales cost, but lost sales attempts cost much more!