Creating, Measuring and Maintaining Website Value (Page 3 of 3)

Branding and Brand Recognition

1. A "brand" is a benefit chain. A Johnson & Johnson CEO described a brand as; "the value of capitalized trust between company and customer".
2. The Premium Price that strong brands command is believed to be greater than 7%. Perceptions drive price according to a benchmark study by the Strategic Planning Institute's PIMS (Profit Impact of Marketing Strategy). A product perceived as being superior commands as much as a 9% higher price than one perceived to be just average.
3. A well-known consultancy has studied 100 of the world's most valuable brands and concluded that a brand typically accounts for about 37% of market capitalization. Firms with recognized, brands are rewarded with P/E ratios that exceed their competitors by as much as15%.
4. Successful Brands start in the Executive Suite– Branding is not not just a marketing endeavor, it a financial issue.
5. Branding does not increase the cost of sales while promoting up to 40% more effective sales!
6. The value that branding provides is tangible, it is a real number you can put on a balance sheet. – A rule requiring that brands be counted on a company's balance sheet is currently being reviewed by the Financial Accounting Standards Board. The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) stands behind the idea, which is already practiced in the UK, Australia and New Zealand.
7. Communications plays a greater than 50% role in building a brand.

A well designed and promoted website is a branding agent working 24 hours a day 7 days a week, globally. Some of the statistical figures above were taken from the Chadwick Communications Site. We recommend taking their online Branding IQ Test.

Summing the ROI

There are too many variables involved to estimate a hypothetical branding component of ROI without specific mensuration, so we will discount it all together in this example. With that in mind let's add just the minimal contributions generated by "Information Provision" and "Qualified Sales Leads Generation" provided by the Great Widgets Website.

$26,000 in "Qualified Sales Leads" and $39,000 in "Information Provision" equals a minimum value of $65,000/year at an original cost of $10,000.

This example is based on a real-life scenario of a company with about 10 employees.

ROI Calculations for Website Marketing Campaigns

There are many ways to effectively market and promote a website in the Search Engines without engaging "black hat" SEO practices. We recommend and offer legitimate link building campaigns, press releases and discounted advertising packages for certain industries through "mainstream" partners. Without active Site promotion value "flatlines".

Below we have included a couple references on calculating promotional project ROI:

http://www.topsitelistings.com/news/calculating_roi.php

http://www.viz.co.nz/budgets-ROI.htm

Website Maintenance

The Search Engines highly value fresh, updated material. It is extremely important for continued SE crawling and Site Ranking to update your website frequently. Here is a GOOGLE quote from their Webmaster Guidelines Page at: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html :

"Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site."

It is also extremely important to make sure your hosting company provides good statistical reporting on portraying site performance and visitor statistics. Skilled review and assessment can reveal almost "real time" promotional impact.

Marketing and Promoting your Website

Search Engine Listings

Search Engines have "spiders" that crawl existing sites and pick up links from other sites which they in turn also crawl. Directories and Indexes typically do not have spiders automating their listings. For the most part these days, new Sites do not require listings in the Search Engines as long as they get incoming links from other Sites at launch. We immediately link our client's Sites on our Portfolio Page to draw search engine attention.

Promotion doesn't stop with launch. Manual submission in the form of a linking campaign with targeted high ranking relevant directories and indices is all important! The Search Engines determine a website's value based on 100+ Site aspects. One of the most heavily weighted is what are called IBLs (in-bound links). Incoming links from other Sites to your site, especially from "important" established sites grant credibility and importance for your site. The more the better! This is a time consuming process that needs to be executed with precision. Anchor text that accompanies your link when manually submitted to these directories and indices should contain primary targeted key phrases so that your site can be found in subsequent SERPs appropriately, resulting in targeted traffic.

A linking campaign should be run for any Site who's principles are serious about generating value in an on-line presence.

There are many methods for generating targeted traffic to a well designed website. For example; Timely Press Releases for newsworthy milestones in a company's history can be very valuable.

More on Website Planning and Preparation

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