It's hard.

It's really hard to hear what you don't want to hear about your business. 

The busy-ness monkey goes on using the same old lines, trying to recycle the same marketing messages season after season.  What might be required here is a fresh look from fresh eyes. 

This week I had the opportunity to sit down with the owner of a small family owned confections company. A colleague of mine has just finished rebuilding his entire website - integrating a shopping cart, adding new photography, creating some new combinations for special sales on the web, optimizing for Google. The architecture is sound, the site navigates well, all the switches work, the site is getting visibility in the search engines. The owner of the company brought me in because I had approached my colleague with some feedback about the imagery that was being incorporated into the new site. I thought it needed a bit more flash in order to engage consumers. 

What I learned - with no more than an hours research - is that the owner of this company had a much larger issue on his hands than simply the look of the photography on the web site. Turn the page to get the big picture.  

The owner was concerned because his sales are flat, and even starting to slip. His new web site, which is a vast improvement over his old one, has been selling LESS. So when I sat down with him, he wanted to know WHY he was losing business and HOW he could be doing better on line. He had some pretty good ideas in his mind, and we talked about those - but he was missing the BIG ONE.

The BIG ONE is that while he has been going along selling a high quality product through the same channels for the past 20 years - NEWER, YOUNGER companies have been springing up all around him in just the last 5 years. And these new companies have something that he has not worked on since his business began: they have STYLE. So while he has been relying on the quality of his product (and it is a GREAT product), others have come along with their own high quality products and they have captured the imagination of consumers with a really fine sense of the GOURMET, BOUTIQUE style that is necessary to sell consumable product on the internet. 

Even if your Google Page Rank (GPR) puts you on the first page of results - if your presentation and your VALUE offer don't pass a VERY FAST (think 30 seconds!!!!) sniff test, YOU WILL LOSE THE SALE.  

Designing your business has to be about MORE than the quality of your product. It has to look right and it has to capture the imagination of the consumer. It has to inspire the kind of FEELING that will drive an impulse sale - and drive YOUR BOTTOM LINE.

I can help your business by giving you STRAIGHT TALK about your image, about your methods, about your marketing that could make or break your future success.  It's a new marketplace - you need new thinking. Call me to set up a business marketing review. 413 303 9193.