It’s time to redesign our website. Our company has changed significantly over the last couple of years and our web presence should reflect that.

I gave our team the following objectives, stepped back and let them loose. You can be the judge of how well these have been achieved. A taste of our new marketing is featured in the February 2011 issue of CT&L and we needed to coordinate our new web with that release date. The directives were as follows and can act as a helpful guideline for anyone in the process of updating their site.

Message first - It’s great to be clever but it’s critical to communicate…if you can combine the two it becomes memorable and creates impact

Front door message-  Lead with your strength which in our case is 22 years of experience marketing  the transportation industry. It’s important not to cast too wide a net and weight your product offerings so that people get a real sense of who you are and what you do…in short order

Side door message - Leave the door open to other opportunities which for us is the fact that our process works for any industry. You need to back that side door message up with hard facts to make it believable.

Easy to navigate - With the help of Google Analytics you can track how customers are reacting to your site through a number of metrics. Most come to your site to get contact info and get an overall impression if this is a company they want to deal with. Ease of navigation is a key element.

Warm and personal – Our clients are becoming directly involved with a higher proportion of our staff. It’s a function of running lean and streamlining communications. In general terms, we believe it is important that your web has a personality that reflects your company. A few real shots mixed in with a stock library can help accomplish this. Yes people leave but the web can be updated very easily. It’s a more dynamic and flexible media that you can measure a return on.

Assess the brand – Take a look at your brand elements. Do they need a tweak. Is your tag line unique and does it help establish a persona for the company. In B2B you can change elements of your brand without so much as a ripple in the stream. Be open to subtle change. It can breathe new life into your marketing.

Incorporate social media – We continue to experiment in this area. Our blog efforts have shown the most return. You need a champion to lead this charge. Anything that brings fresh content to your site helps promote your company and raise your ranking on search engines

Engage SEO (search engine optimization) – There is an expense to this and it varies on the size of the site and how deep you want to go with. We plan on taking it all the way. Why? It works and you can clearly measure the results (With Google Analytics) and fine tune it for even greater benefit in the future

Meet the Deadline - It’s important to set a date and work towards it with diligence. You get a certain flow that takes the project to a higher level. When too much time goes by where the project is parked on a shelf, it’s increasingly hard to get it off the bottom of the pile and successfully launched.

Lee’s quote for the day

“Change is good and engaging proper SEO powers your site like fuel powers your vehicle. Doing one without the other doesn’t make much sense or get you any further down the road”

There are notable advantages and disadvantages related directly to the size of your organization. As a small company, it would be helpful at times to think like a bigger firm and have more processes and procedures in place. The opposite is always true; with larger companies favouring process over the kind of entrepreneurial decision making that made their companies a success in the first place.

It’s basically a spin on the economic theory of marginal utility. What are you willing to give up of “A” to get more of “B”? There is always a trade off. I think it would be an interesting exercise for employees, managers and owners alike to put on a different thinking hat the next time a decision has to be made.

I had occasion to do this in a small way a couple of weeks ago. We had to decide whether to replace or replenish an $8,000 colour laser printer. The consumables on the 4 year old printer were getting expensive and there were 3 costly imaging units to replace. We also had a number of supplies for the existing printer we couldn’t return. The decision, see if we could sell the existing printer and supplies first on eBay. The result, there wasn’t much demand or value for either. The end game, we discovered there were plenty of supplies for our existing printer on eBay, at a fraction of what we had been paying…making our existing printer viable to operate again.

I had put on the hat I wore when I started the company. A time when every dollar counted. I believe it was the right decision and sends a message within our company that if we can save money (with the very important condition of not compromising quality or wasting valuable time)… it’s the right way to go.

My job has allowed me to chat extensively with transport carriers of all descriptions and sizes. I’ve heard lots of stories like this (on a much bigger scale) where hundreds of thousands of dollars have been saved by putting on a thinking hat that was more common “back in the day”.  The recession has forced the survivors to get our “mojo workin”…  and it’s good for business big and small.

Lee’s quote for the day

“A recession is a great teacher if you choose to listen closely and take your seat at the front of the class.”

This summer, Tim Horton’s introduced a new procedure where the person taking your order got a little more personal, “Hello my name is Debbie” were the words you heard as you drove up to the area where you initiated your first cup of java for the day. I waited for the new procedure to fall off but after several months the location I frequent has kept up the pace of being as warm and comforting as the products they serve.

Shift to small town New Brunswick. I had to visit recently on a family matter and stopped by the busy little Tim’s that has graced the community of less than 1000 for about 10 years now. Even the old boys that used to hang out at the barber shop and local gas station have migrated up the hill to their new spot and are quite comfortable calling Tim’s home.

For the most part, East Coasters have a reputation for being pretty friendly but when I took a spin through to get my morning coffee I didn’t hear the “Hello my name is…” greeting. Inquisitive person that I am, I mentioned my story to the lady serving me at the window. Her response was something like “Yes, we got some CD down from Ontario but I can’t see us doing that.” She proceeded to get my order and left me with these final and sincere words,”You have a good day now honey pie!”Friendly enough wouldn’t you say?

For all of us that have tried to initiate new processes and procedures is there a lesson to be learned? I think so. We tend to create all encompassing policies because we are either afraid to or are not able to single out individuals causing us grief in some way. Do most hourly employees punch time cards because at some point everyone was fudging their hours or because a few were? Are trucking companies religious about measuring on time performance because they were always late or because they messed up less than 5% of the time? Has anyone created a long list of rules and regulations for everyone because a small percentage of people are doing the equivalent of “peeing in the pool”…and does that sign on the wall actually stop those individuals from doing so in the future?”

I remember a blackout happening in Fredericton, NB where I went to university. At first it was “yahoo” with speeding cars everywhere but within a few hours there was self managed order without a street light or policeman in sight. In “Good to Great”, the author promotes self managed order as the key to business sustainability. It’s a leap of faith that requires a huge amount of trust. For the time being it seems the rotten apple continues to set the environment for the basket.

Lee’s quote for the day

“For the most part, the only thing tougher than initiating change is being on the receiving end of it.”