The Death The Corporate Website and the Rise of the Online Marketing Strategy

March 26th, 2010  |  2 Comments

I remember a client that we worked with briefly that spend over $400,000/year on direct mail.  They wanted no part of online marketing despite our repeated efforts to put together a basic online marketing game plan.  I finally got up enough nerve at one point and told them that it makes no sense whatsoever to spend that kind of money without being able to effectively track the campaign…they laughed some more as they mentally made a note to tell their assistant to avoid any future calls.

Years later, now older, wiser…better looking, many now come to me and ask for my team to provide the very services that I explained ad-nauseam for 10+ years on my soap box.

Make no mistake.  I bask in this warm glory.

The evolution of communication, websites, applications and online marketing is staggering, and the pace of this evolution has been unbelievably fast—the understanding of these changes on the other hand has not. Many businesses in the mid- to late 90’s paid mind-boggling amounts of money to have their websites built to good salesmen at web companies mass producing websites.  Those days, like the idea of a brochure-ware website, are finally being laid to rest.

Despite being able to say things today like, “I told you so,” events like these are nothing more than ego-boosters, small victories that simply become personal mementos of countless hours of work. And while everything that I thought would happen (hoped for) has come true – there is something that is nagging me – something that begs my attention.

• What is the future of the corporate website?
• Will it die?
• Will it morph into something else now that businesses are finally on board?

Let me first state that this is not a new topic. Others have written about this and I’m starting to climb aboard this thought process. A website, for many businesses, is still quite critical right now and will continue to be for some time. In fact, most good online marketing strategies still benefit from having the website site at the center of all their marketing efforts.  The landscape that supports this idea however is shifting as I write this.

For the time being, websites will remain incredibly important for businesses, campaigns and selling products and services. What I question is how long this will last.  Here are some factors that may start digging the hole for corporate websites as we know them:

• Facebook (slowly but surely, FB is becoming a juggernaut – and me thinks they will try to replace the Corporate website for small biz)
• Social media (new sites will creep up & some current ones will grow bigger)
• Mobile devices make it easier to get  info while away from the desktop
• Lack of consumer trust in anything ‘corporate’
• Consumer’s increasing reliance on alternate channels (ie. social media)
• Less of a need to sell products from the ‘corporate’ site and more of a need to sell easily via different channels via their social business accounts
• Google Local Business
• Automated or Super-simple website building (ala WordPress or Business Catalyst)
• Did I say Mobile phones or computers?
• Less centralized marketing efforts & the decentralizing nature of the web
• Future entity (FB, Google, other) that reduce reliance on traditional sources of information
• Virtual environments – some  kind of virtual world will catch on in a game-changing way, or has it already?
• Smaller processing and ability to project a screen anywhere, e-paper..etc

One of the bigger forces that stands out to me is the decentralization that is taking place with the Internet.  For the last seven years, the core of a businesses’ online marketing program consisted of the following three pieces:

• a website
• the customer database
• an email marketing program.

This still remains the de-facto plan for many businesses. Yet, this plan is not only waning in the shadow of newer forms of communication, it is quickly becoming an antiquated model of thinking. Why though? Because it still is one-way communication. Businesses that aren’t able to create ‘conversations’ via the Internet will be at a major disadvantage.

Spewing forth mindless marketing and sales babble is just not enough any more.

In the end, a change is taking place and the old model of placing a ton of useless data on a website is coming to an end. The factors that surround this topic is enormous and this blog post is already too long, but an online marketing strategy has become much more important that designing a website. The traditional corporate website is dying – or perhaps in some kind of cocoon that will materialize as something else in just a few short years.

Don’t blink.

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