Back in 2000 I addressed a seminar of PR consultants who were discussing the “threat” from the internet. Many of them were worried that if print magazines started to die off, relationships with editors would become less important, and many companies would just start to write their own press and PR material which would find a much easier route to publication on the web. Meanwhile, online advertising looked set to boom, and advertising agencies were going to have a great time.

I argued that this wasn’t the case: the web would require much more writing to be done, and PR consultants were in an ideal position to capitalise on this. Conversely, online business-to-business advertising would lend itself to a DIY approach, and it was the advertising agencies which would start to lose their customers, with no more hugely profitable bits of film having to be made for magazine adverts (this has been such a lucrative income stream for ad agencies over the years that many continued to make film for clients long after magazines started to ask for digital files instead).

I was right in my assessment, although it took longer than I expected. Nowadays companies get nearly all of their new business through the web, and most are realising they need as much content to be written as possible to help generate this. Many industrial companies have switched a lot (sometimes all) of their advertising to online “pay per click” campaigns which they manage in-house. There’s a whole world of new technical writing and advertising management services to be offered.

So… boom time for PR consultancies, and a radical change taking place in industrial business-to-business advertising agencies? Not at all. Both have stuck their heads in the sand when it comes to the internet, and (in my opinion) thoroughly badly advised their clients as to the extent the market has changed, in order to continue going through the same old motions they’ve been going through for the past 20 or 30 years. Most traditional ad agencies have never really invested in learning about what most of them quaintly call “new media”, in part because they didn’t understand it, didn’t like change, and couldn’t see as much profit in it. Instead, they’ve allowed a number of specialist “e-marketing” or “digital” agencies to come into the market who - despite their horrible names - realise that online advertising is a lot more than being able to do the artwork for a banner ad. Can your ad agency manage an AdWords campaign for you? Why on earth not? It’s the only advertising which works for lead generation now, and we all know it.

But it’s the PR consultancies - which had an even bigger opportunity - that have disappointed me the most. When I speak to companies about why they’ve been slow to invest in expanding the content on their websites, they often say “well, we leave the writing to our PR company, and their contract is just to do press releases really”. Yes, but haven’t they offered to do more? “Strangely, no.”

When you look at the news distribution lists offered by many PR consultancies, “online” is covered by sending to the Pro-Talk sites, and - er - that’s about it really. “We send to the magazines, and so that should cover their websites”. What about working on all the bloggers and other sites that take a bit of effort? A bit out of their comfort (and profitability) zone, it would appear. And let’s not get into how few PR consultancies have made the effort to learn how to manage their clients’ websites, a fantastic opportunity for them which many clients would love to have been able to have commissioned them to do.

Naturally, there are exceptions, and I’m happy to namecheck outfits such as Copylines and 4CM as PR/marketing consultancies who are making the effort to move forward and get their clients onboard with them. But quite frankly, if your PR consultancy or advertising agency is doing nothing very different from what your PR consultancy or advertising agency was doing for you back in December 1998, then it’s time to start asking some hard questions.

This is the final observation I’d like to make from seeing so many UK industrial companies’ online marketing operations this summer: my surprise at how much companies are spending on pay-per-click advertising - and my concern at how much they may be wasting.
By pay-per-click advertising, effectively I mean Google AdWords, which dominates the market. If you’d asked me to have made an educated guess at how much this was being used in UK industrial marketing, I’d have probably said maybe a quarter of companies might have tried it, but maybe only one or two percent would be spending serious money on it regularly. I would have been underestimating the situation significantly.
From the small sample of companies I’ve been speaking to, I’d say that most companies have at least tried it, perhaps a quarter are spending on it regularly, and for as many as 10%, it’s quickly become single biggest advertising expenditure. I have met more than one company where the scenario is that once upon a time the advertising budget was several thousand pounds a month, but in recent years that has fallen to no more than several hundred …until they got into Google AdWords. Now their advertising expenditure has risen back up to two or three thousand pounds a month again, nearly all of it going on AdWords. If you have a competitor who you know is spending money on marketing and whose profile seems to be rising amongst customers, but which has been conspicuously absent from the trade press, exhibitions etc., this may be what they’re doing.
Now, I’m not going to criticise substantial investment in Google AdWords, although I know how easy it is to get carried away with this advertising outlet. Indeed, it’s an almost unbeatable way of getting people to your website, so it fits in well with my suggested marketing priority list for 2009, which is:
1. Make sure your website is as good as it can be;
2. Drive traffic towards it;
3. (A distant third) Everything else.
However, it can be very easy to overspend on Google AdWords without realising it. Remember the old adage “I know that only half of my advertising works, but the trouble is, I don’t know which half?” The problem with Google AdWords is that the effectiveness of your investment per pound spent peaks at a certain point, and the more you spend, the more likely it is you’ve passed that peak in the curve.
The key to efficient Google AdWords spending is not drive just anyone to your website. You need to be driving the right people to actionable pages where you can measure if they’re valuable to you, and calculate a value for that visitor. Learning how to do this will save you thousands of pounds in the long term, which is why we look at this inside the first few months of our Insider Programme.
So the fourth thing I learned this summer is that far more UK industrial companies are investing heavily in Google AdWords than I expected. I’m really encouraged by the initiative they’re showing, and it seems their increasing expenditure shows they’re pleased with the results. But I’d caution them to make their campaigns more specific and measurable.

What else did I learn this summer, while talking to loads of UK industrial companies about their websites? I learned that many companies do not have website traffic analytics data, and even fewer are actually using it to calculate return on investment from online campaigns, or their website as a whole.
At many companies, I asked what analytics data they had on their website visitors, and they pointed to some horribly crude log analysis program provided for free by their website host - something like AWStats or Webalizer. A chart of “hits” (whatever they mean) and very little more. As long as that chart was going up, they felt that was enough.
Well, secretly, they didn’t feel that was enough. Most marketing managers are quite aware that this data doesn’t really mean much, but they aren’t sure what else they should be using, what it could offer them, and how they would get it working on their website. So web data analysis has been discreetly pushed under the nearest available carpet, along with many other aspects of online marketing which seem like hard work.
The strange thing is, installing proper traffic analysis applications on your website can be very easy. It can also be free (how about that?), and for anyone who likes to see if their marketing investment is working, it can be fascinating, as well as very profitable. Putting something like Google Analytics on your website is so important that we cover it in week 1 (yes, week 1) of our Insider Programme. We explain how to set up “goals” and start measuring what your web traffic is worth soon afterwards, but anyone can do this with one of the many books available on the subject.
There are many excuses for not analysing who your website visitors are, what they’re worth to you, and if your investment in getting them there is paying for itself. But in the end, they’re all excuses. So the third thing I learned this summer is how many people don’t realise how straightforward and affordable it is to analyse website traffic. I hope we can start to change that, because as people start to spend more money on online marketing, it’s crucial that they don’t start to waste more too.

As I mentioned yesterday, while travelling around the UK this summer introducing our Insider Programme, I’ve started to see the challenges involved in online marketing in UK industry, and have discovered some common problems and mistakes, which I thought I’d bring to you all this week. Today: the Splash Page lives!
Now, you’re probably thinking: “The Splash Page? Does Chris mean those movies people used to make you watch before being able to access their websites? The ones which made half the visitors hurriedly scroll around for the “skip this” link, and the other half go straight to the “back” button?”
Well, sort of.
The Splash Page which involved spinning logos was long ago discredited as an own goal, and I think almost everyone knows this. In addition, most people understand that the home page of a website is the most important page on it, and the one where you absolutely must have plenty of text describing your company’s capability, using all the critical key search terms. There’s a reason why newspapers and magazines have the headlines and contents up front, and there are even stronger reasons to do this on a website.
No, the Splash Page which I’m referring to here is just as much of a barrier as the spinning logos from 1999. It’s the home page which just says: “what country are you in?”
Not only is this unnecessary, it’s an utter chore which massively handicaps a website’s effectiveness for two reasons: firstly, it throws away the opportunity to fill the most important page on the website with the most important terms for the search engines, and secondly, it will send a significant proportion of visitors right back to where they came from. Other sites are only a click away, and they don’t put a bouncer on the door, like the bridgekeeper at the Gorge of Eternal Peril in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: (”Who approaches the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, ‘ere the other side he see”).
From a user point of view, the worst thing about these “what country are you in?” questions, is that for half of the world (including the UK), you have to scroll way, way down the list to find your country. You need a good mouse and a steady hand, and if you’re using an iPhone or something you may as well give up now. US companies often put the USA at the top, and then everyone else underneath, which just says to me “you want to make it easier for yourselves but don’t care about the rest of us” and makes me even more irritated. As a UK resident, I like to select “United States Minor Outlying Islands” for a laugh, because that’s probably how most Americans see us.
Of course, it’s totally unnecessary. If you must know where I am, then detect it automatically and stop making your customers do the work for you. If your IT department doesn’t know how to do that, get a new IT department.
And that’s the second thing I learned this summer. Many companies still know so little about how to build an effective, customer-centred website that they still have Splash Pages. Amazing.

This week, rather than refer you to other people’s articles, I thought I’d write about some of my own recent experiences. In the course of launching our Insider Programme this summer, I’ve visited many industrial companies around the UK, and spoken to many more at the series of seminars we held. In doing so, I’ve started to get an idea of the state of online marketing in UK industry, and it’s been most revealing - in some cases, pleasantly surprising, in others, quite shocking. While my small sample of a few dozen companies isn’t a definitive snapshot, I think you might like to know what I found, if only as a rough gauge of how your company compares.
Each day this week I’ll discuss surprises which I then came across frequently (and subsequently ceased to be surprising). Today: the continued existence of regional variations being shoehorned into a one-size-fits-all website.
By this, I don’t mean the websites of companies who only have one sales office and whose product offerings are the same the world over - they obviously don’t need to have different websites for different countries anyway. I’m referring to the websites of multinationals which hoard all the content creation at head office but try to suggest what you’re seeing is some sort of “local” site, despite it being patently clear that the local office (such as the one in the UK) has had no input at all. This totally insults the intelligence of the website visitor.
If I’m looking at doing business with (say) an American multinational, I don’t have a problem with being referred to the US site for product data etc. But I want to be referred there by a proper UK site with all the news and “regional” information which is clearly maintained in the UK. Otherwise, it’s implied (often accurately) that the UK operations of the company are very much second-rate, and the support I’ll get as a customer will be equally poor.
One major giveaway is being asked, when I arrive at a website, which country I’m in. Oh dear. That might have been necessary in 1998, but in 2008 it’s unforgivably bad customer relations. Then there’s the glance at the website address, which instead of being www.redwidgetcompany.co.uk, is probably something like www.redwidgetcompany.de/a-bit-of/complicated-code/grossbritannien - that doesn’t exactly make me feel close to the manufacturer. There is no excuse for not having a .co.uk website address other than “we can’t be bothered with making our system do that”.
Worst of all are the bad (or missing) translations - and that can be from “US English” as well as more obviously “foreign” languages. It’s comical how many “UK” websites from US companies have the telephone numbers written in US format with hyphens, or lapse into US spellings. Telephone +44 (1462) 489-060? What’s that?
It’s even more astonishing how many “UK” websites from German companies have menu items on them like “Kontakt”. Did nobody in the UK get to proof-read the website?
The answer, from my travels this summer, is almost certainly no. In company after company, I hear the same refrain: “Our website is maintained by the German (or American, or whatever) head office, and presented as a done deal.” To which I ask: “But can’t you tell them to change things which are obviously wrong, and damaging to your image in this country?”, only to be met with a resigned shake of the head, and an explanation that it takes so long, and embarrasses people at corporate HQ, that they stopped asking long ago.
One of my favourites is “Welcome to the Red Widget Company EMEA”. What the flip does “EMEA” mean outside of sales and marketing departments? I suspect the reaction of many customers is that this company sadly doesn’t operate in the UK (which is a shame, because they seem to have some pretty good products available to customers living in EMEA, wherever that is).
If you’re a UK marketing manager in non-UK-based multinational, you’re probably thinking: “What does he know about the problems I’ve got? Challenging cultural imperialism from head office is not going to make my job any easier”, and of course you’re right. But please make a renewed effort in 2009 to get some degree of local control online. Customers get their first - and often only - impression of your company from your website, and if that impression is that they’re going to have to deal with people in Japan rather than the UK (however untrue that is), they’ll turn to somwhere apparently closer to home.
So the first thing I learned this summer was that far too many multinationals don’t let their worldwide subsidiaries have anything like the autonomy with online marketing that they do with other elements of the marketing mix. It’s absurd: the parent company wouldn’t fly over from Frankfurt to do WidgetEx’08 at the NEC for them, and they wouldn’t do a local mailshot to UK customers from the HQ in Arkansas. What’s different about the website then? Could it be that the uncomfortable truth is that the UK marketing department has never actually argued sufficiently that it needs to do its own thing, because running an independent UK website is a little outside its comfort zone?

Last week we completed a series of four seminars for marketing managers from UK engineering, scientific and construction sector suppliers. If you were one of the 60 or 70 people who attended, we hope you enjoyed your day with us and found it useful. Certainly the feedback (100% positive!) leads us to believe we got it right. We hope you found the introduction of our Insider Programme on a face-to-face basis to be revealing, and we know that many of you got quite a few ideas from my presentation on measuring all aspects of your marketing via your website. Our guest speaker Paul Bragg’s session on his own experiences of small-to-medium-sized business-to-business marketing was clearly inspirational to one or two of you, as one of the most frequently heard comments from delegates over lunch was how they’d started off thinking “we could never do that” and ended up wondering “why can’t we do that?” Finally, our afternoon “workshop sessions” looking at delegates’ websites was illuminating - I think many people who were initially hesitant to put their sites forward ended up surprised at how much they were getting right!

We may be able to hold further seminars in the next few weeks, and we’ll contact you if we have one which we think you might be able to get to. But if you’re interested in the Insider Programme, I’ll be spending some time out “on the road” around the UK between now and Christmas, and I’d be more than happy to drop by, wherever you are, to discuss what we’re up to: just email me.

If it’s passed you by, the Insider Programme is an affordable way of getting my colleagues and I to analyse your online marketing and show you everything you need to know in 2009. This goes way beyond any quick website analysis - instead, we go through each topic, one week at a time, in a steady, manageable way, giving you the information you need to get your online marketing working properly. Whether you work on your website yourself, or whether you instruct a team or external agency, the Insider Programme will give you everything you need to know - and you can do it all in just the odd hour here or there, or you can use it as the basis for instructing a team working full-time. It’s up to you. But you can master this yourself - in fact, we believe it’s essential to do so.

It’s a big day for us, because today Business Marketing Online unveils its flagship product, the Insider Programme. This is a combined educational and consultancy service for industrial and technical companies in the UK, where we’ll show you how to increase your website traffic as well as convert a higher proportion of visitors into name-and-address sales leads.

I won’t describe it in depth here, I’ll just direct you to our Insider Programme information page and our Insider Programme explanatory video which do a pretty good job of explaining it all. Please take a look!