The way to build an online strategy is to forget about your online strategy for a second.
Carmen DeLeo, the general manager of CDM Electronics Inc., made that his first step when he and his team were trying to formulate the best way to build a presence on the Internet for the $20 million logistics and software company, headquartered in Turnersville, N.J.
“We put ourselves in the position of engineers and technical buyers — our main customers,” DeLeo says. “They’re the ones who are going to fit the profile for us. We thought about the things they would come to us for — specification of part numbers, drawings and so forth. So we started to decide what our customers needed, and let’s try to get as much information on the site as we can, and we can make it a 24/7 part of our customer service.”
Once you have identified what your customers need, you have to develop your site to meet those needs. DeLeo and his team partnered with outside firms, including business IT support company ThomasNet, to start the development process.
“They educated us on things like (search engine optimization) and other terms we weren’t familiar with. In addition to that, we spent a lot of time online, just playing around and experimenting,” DeLeo says. “We spent a lot of time just reading and stumbling upon different websites, seeing what some other companies were doing. We looked outside our industry, because there weren’t a whole lot of people in our industry doing this yet.”
Above all else, DeLeo says the quality of your site content should rule your decisions about how you market your business online. It’s great to have an eye-catching sight with attractive graphics and sound, but if the substance isn’t there to back up the style, you’ll never be able to leverage your site to help grow your business.
“If you supply the site with as much content as possible, it is only going to help serve your customers,” DeLeo says. “We’re still very early in this era. The computers that are doing the rankings of your website’s value to customers are still very rudimentary. At sites like Google, it is obvious humans don’t review the results. But they still do a remarkable job of returning what is relevant. Even having an ugly site with content is still better than a website without an adequate amount of content. If all you have is an address and a little bit about the company, it’s not going to do you much good.”
Regardless of whether you use internal resources to build your online presence or acquire outside help, you need to partner with people who will engage you in a dialogue. You need to bring different perspectives to the table to get the right look and the right content onto your site.
“You need development people who understand the real goal,” DeLeo says. “Sometimes, we don’t ask for what we want all the time, or there might be a better solution out there. That type of communication has to be the key, so when you’re selecting vendors for this service, you want people who you know you can communicate with. Experience is the number one thing with regard to that.”
How to reach: CDM Electronics Inc., (856) 740-1200 or www.cdmtech.com
