Don’t See Big Picture Another common shortcoming of small business web sites is that many fail to realize a fundamental marketing concept: most consumers who make a decision to buy something make decision to do so after 6 - 8 contacts with some form of marketing for a particular product or service. Failing to realize and act upon this marketing fact will hinder your ability to grow your business.

The purpose of marketing is to establish your business in marketplace so that consumers think of you when they are ready to act to fill a need or desire. By regularly getting your marketing message in front of your market you can help them associate what you do with what they need. You can also attract more clients by demonstrating your expertise to clients in your marketing material.

Poor design Do visitors to your web site do what you want them to do? If they are not it may be design of your web site that is preventing your visitors from taking action you want them to take. The design of each of your web pages is instrumental in guiding actions of your visitors.

So what constitutes good design? Good design stems from skillful integration of graphical and textual layout, color, shape and choice and flow of content. If your site does not have content your visitors seek you will strike out each time someone visits your page. If your web pages don’t put what you want your visitors to see immediately in front of them you will miss opportunities to sell. If your choice of fonts and colors make your pages difficult to read your visitors will likely move along to another web site they can understand more easily.

To identify if your web pages suffer from poor design ask yourself following questions: Does my text stand out over my background color? Does design of my site focus my visitor’s attention where I want it? Does my content give my users what they want?

If you answered ‘No’ to any of questions above you can improve your ability to get your users to do what you want by taking steps to correct anything that may be wrong.

Failure to Focus on Client Needs When people visit your web site you want them to read through content of your site. By doing so your visitors develop a sense of how your product or service can help them. If your copy doesn’t focus on your clients’ needs and desires they will be off to another site in a blink.

If your visitors are quickly leaving your web site it may be because your copy does not focus on their needs. Here are some common mistakes to avoid: Don’t focus on process or method you use to do your job Don’t focus on your existing clients Don’t focus on your experience Don’t focus on quality of your product

By making any of above mistakes you detract attention from reasons that are going to help your clients make decision to buy from you. You may be very proud of your accomplishments, and you should be, but focusing on them does not address your clients' needs and will do little to help you sell more effectively.

A + B temp PressureC + D

Chemistry has established that ‘A’ and ‘B’ can react with each other in many different ways, but only that reaction that yields ‘C’ and ‘D’ is what is called a ‘fruitful’ reaction. If that be case, then what about yield? Obviously low if reaction is not directed properly. How do we direct a reaction to give high yields? This is where chemist with all his acquired knowledge of organic chemistry, physical chemistry and inorganic chemistry, come to teach us marketing.

The chemist does something intrinsic to reactants that favor predominantly reaction he is interested in. He simply makes reactants more attractive towards each other way they need to be attracted (to give C and D). Technically speaking chemist equips reactants with some ‘functional groups’ so that reactants not only get attracted, but in most fruitful manner. This increases yield of reaction.

Lets now look parallel at a market, which is our reaction chamber. We have two reactants ‘consumers’ and ‘products’. As marketers we expect a sale and that too of high volumes. We also (like chemist) manipulate product and do something intrinsic to it. This we call as “Brand”ing. So ‘Branding’ is nothing but adding suitable ‘functional groups’ to increase ‘attraction’.

On what basis do we ‘Brand’ our product? The chemist says he adds functional groups to a reactant based on behavior of other reactant. Chemistry, again, has well established behavior of elements basing on position they occupy in a periodic table. This periodic table is likened to segmentation marketers do in market place (viz. demographic, psychographics). Basing on this segmentation, marketers try and predict behavior of that particular segment of consumers. And all marketing efforts revolve around this understanding of segmentation. Same is case with chemical reaction – without a thorough knowledge of segment reactants belong to, designing a reaction is very difficult.