May 2021 -- Modern Web Presence, Q&A with Jason Costa, Director of Product at Reddit
Insights, Noteworthy Bits, and Q&A with Industry Leaders
[Editor’s note] Welcome to the second Eads Bridge Holdings monthly newsletter. This month we’re talking about modern web presence. We’re delighted to share a chat with a tenured Product leader and friend, Jason Costa to dive further into this topic.
What is web presence?
The concept of “web presence” has evolved from a static website to a new engagement model that consists of social media, chatbots, content marketing, marketing automation, text messages, SEO, organic, paid -- a seemingly endless list of options and tools. As if business owners didn’t have enough to do, wading through the shitbox of jargon and “how-to” guides is a significant drain on time and therefore money. Just searching the phrase “digital marketing tools” is likely to trigger a migraine. This shouldn’t be so hard! Let’s take a step back to understand how we got here and some key considerations for each step along the way.
In the early 1990s everyone received 1000s of “free hours” of America Online time. As part of that outreach businesses were told they needed a “website” and a “keyword.” In those days a website was essentially a Yellow Page listing (see here kids)
except instead of being regional, it was international. In addition to keywords, a simple domain name and hidden HTML tags on your page were the trifecta to be found in this new directory. As technology and content developed further, website owners added flashy graphics to make their website stand out. Through the early 2000s this was enough to qualify as a “digital presence.”
With the increased penetration of broadband and mobile phones in the early and mid 2000’s, internet usage exploded, applications advanced, and trust in the ecosystem increased. With the advent of social media consumers became more comfortable with sharing their real identity online and increasingly leaned on the internet for socialization and commerce. With the introduction of the iPhone and Android, billions of people had access to internet connected supercomputers in their pocket. Every business suddenly needed a “bricks and clicks” strategy to interact with their customers. Yet, as the technology advanced, the implications for small businesses were risky and unclear.
This technology explosion enabled entirely new engagement models for every business. As the amount of personalized data on the web has grown, the rapid pace of innovation has evolved to include real time recommendations and support. When a new visitor comes to a site, they are actually carrying a lot of useful, contextual information along with them. This data can create significant insights for a business, but how can an SMB without the resources and data science teams of large enterprises use this to their advantage? If a visitor has landed on your web site, it wasn’t by accident. How do you ensure your web presence is relevant for users and valuable to you as the business owner?
Evaluating your website
Today your website needs to be more than just a “store front” or a phone book listing. Your web presence is a strategic asset that serves as a marketing channel, cash register, customer service center, and even a recruiting tool.
Your web presence should help inform and advance your strategy. As you evaluate your website’s actual look and feel:
Understand your audience and how your web presence can best serve them
Make sure content is clear and concise
Place key information or calls to action “above the fold”
Visitors should not have to scroll to understand what the specific page is about
Your page should render on all platforms
People use tablets, mobile phones etc, your site should be available and usable on all of them
The Basics
Start with the basics. Leverage a design template on Wix or Squarespace for a fast, cheap, and well designed website that looks great on screens of all shapes and sizes.
Turn on Google Analytics, a FREE tool, to help you understand:
Who is coming to my website?
How are they getting here?
How many people, how often are they visiting?
What are they doing?
Social Media
Having a basic page provides a means for your audience to find you based on their preferred channel
You likely don’t need them all so try to identify where your customers are and start on that platform
Level Up
Unlike your physical store, you can leverage more advanced tools to elevate your strategy to new heights. Your web presence can serve as an always-on extension of you and your team that your audience can interact with at their convenience.
We propose taking a step back and thinking of the new engagement modes in two, broad categories. Front of the House and Back of the House.
Front of the House means building a way to actively communicate and engage your customers.
Chat bot (i.e. Intercom)
A simple tool you can add to your website to ask visitors if they have any questions or need any help. You can connect the website visitor directly to sales staff or you can have the bot ask and answer some qualifying questions or frequently asked questions in order to route the request more appropriately.
Email marketing (i.e. Mailchimp)
Another simple tool to capture interest and help drive new customer growth. Collecting email addresses and sharing scheduled updates about company news, new products, sales etc. is an easy way to identify and profile your customers.
Personalization / recommendations (i.e. Optimizely)
Once you start to have an idea of who your customers are and what they are coming for on your website, you can begin looking into tailoring the website experience for them. Tools that help you do this require some more setup and customization, but have proven to improve customer engagement
Back of the House refers to data gathering, customer segmentation that you use for advertising, marketing, or research purposes later.
CRM (i.e. Salesforce)
A customer relationship manager tool (CRM) is a bit of misnomer because while you can use it to track your existing customers, the real power comes from tracking prospects and building out a holistic view of your potential as well as existing customers
CMS (i.e. Contentful)
A content management system (CMS) is a flexible tool you can use to manage anything you publish online from social media platforms to your own website. The right tools will give you insights to help you develop content that is popular with your audience.
Help Desk (i.e. Zendesk)
The act of customer service is certainly “front of the house,” but many new tools enable your business to take this a step further. Sorting, categorizing, and reporting on support requests can unlock key, new insights. Understanding the nature and type of customer questions and feedback can help you decide to pursue new business opportunities or inform changes to your marketing strategy.
All the tools we mentioned were designed to be self-serve. In addition, we estimate that the entire toolkit costs less than $20k/year, and you can get started with the basics for significantly less than that! Your ability to produce incremental revenue and increase customer satisfaction will make this system pay for itself many times over.
Despite all that, building a modern web presence is simple, but not easy. If you’ve decided that your digital presence is worth investing in, don’t outsource the skill. Building expertise in house for how to properly use and manage these tools will pay dividends in the long term.
Noteworthy Bits
Restaurants Fought for Covid Survival, With Some Tech Helpers via NYT
“Being “online” in the pandemic, many chefs learned, meant much more than having an Instagram account.”
“[With online tools] you’re amassing a valuable treasure chest of data that lets you sell the products [your customers] want today and that they want tomorrow”
Zapier’s State of Business Automation in 2021 via Zapier
“The future of automation is about how technology can support humans, especially in the small and medium-sized business community. Software automation has grown at scale, enabling workers to be more efficient and giving them time back to do things only people can do.”
Q&A with Jason Costa, Director of Product Management at Reddit
[Editor’s Note: This month we are excited to have our friend Jason Costa talk about the power of digital presence. Over the last 15 years Jason has been building products and teams at Silicon Valley’s leading internet companies. Jason is currently working on Content & Communities as the Director of Product at Reddit. With a moniker of “the front page of the internet”, Reddit is one of the most frequently visited websites in the world with over 50m people visiting the site every day!
Previously, Jason was one of the first members of the monetization team at Pinterest (and one of the first 100 employees). Jason also worked on the platform team at Twitter, managing an ecosystem of more than a million apps, and at Google where he helped launch the Google Checkout API and the OpenSocial schema. This is a shortened version of the full Q&A available on our blog]
What's something you misunderstood or underestimated in the evolution of the web?
Just how important search still is. We’ve talked so much about social over the years - everything from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram. While these are no doubt important customer awareness & support channels, I personally think Google is still the king when it comes to driving traffic and acquiring an audience.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an art and a science that’s more than fifteen years old now, but no doubt is still the most important element of a business to understand. If a business can generate strong SEO for their website, there’s just so much upside to be had. Some days I think many people simply don’t realize how critical this continues to be for a company’s web presence to be successful.
Business owners have limited time and resources — where should they be investing most in terms of their web presence?
The tooling that has arrived in just the last five years is fantastic. So many business owners are in the business of new customer acquisition because they are exposed to high churn & slower purchase frequency - so they constantly have to grow the top of the funnel to drive sales.
The tools that the web offers can help here on both fronts: it more easily enables customer acquisition, typically at a lower cost than the analog methodology (think tv, radio, print), but it also can establish longer lived relationships with customers that would otherwise churn out. You can stay in touch through email, through social channels like Twitter - in some sense ensuring a level of sustained awareness and potentially loyalty from your customer base. When done right, that sustained connection can lead to increased purchase frequency.
Be sure to read the rest of our Q&A with Jason on our blog.