IMSC Services – Consulting
Services
Case
Studies - Catering
company launches new website and increases sales
significantly
The scenario:
A new company opens up in the
catering business serving client locally and across the Greater Toronto
Area. The owner called us wanting to build a website to attract more
business. Owner was admittedly less than knowledgeable in the Internet
but had significant experience in the food business. He believed that by
having a website that they would be able to attract more business. He
was however, unaware of how the potential traffic found your website and knew very
little about search engines or any of the costs related to creating a
workable and productive marketing plan.
Common Problems:
Most websites are owned by
companies that don't know or care much about how a website can be a
great marketing tool. They figure that most companies and their
competitors have a website so I should too. Now you know what they say a
customer is a customer so you design the website and the site sits
stagnant for the year that they buy hosting for. This is because the
customer has little or no focus on what they are trying to accomplish.
They don't want to spend money on marketing their website and in a years
time they might as well just cancel the whole thing, due mainly to the
fact that they did not receive much on their investment. There are many
tangible steps that a good marketing plans consists of that in these
cases never get done. To list a few, not
collecting any analytics, not engaging their customers about the
site and what they think of it. They did not promote the site in the
brick and mortar world and never bothered to promote online either. In
short they dropped the ball big time.
So what did we do?
Well to begin with, you need to
educate your customer. Now for the customer this is going to sound like
a sales pitch, but in reality its a reality check for the customer. Now
in this case before we designed anything, we sat down with the customer
and right up front educated them on the realities of the web. The
customer has to understand where the traffic will come from, what are
the available sources for traffic and most importantly the need for a
thorough marketing strategy. We talked to the customer about how many
sites are stagnant do not offer customer much in the way of incentive to
use the site. A site is only as good as the content and when the content
is old and back dates, then the customer won't feel that your website
has anything of value to them and they won't won't use it.
Steps to building
their solution:
Building a successful website
is not rocket science but it does require that you look at the site from
the perspective of the customer. We built the site from the perspective
of catering clients that want to order their orders; so they need to
find the menu online, it has to be up to date with the latest item. They
want to order online and not have to constantly re-input the same old
information again and again. Features like being able to access their
order history and bring up their last order and make modifications was
essential. Now for our client, they needed to have a system in place
that would deliver their order pronto; so we setup an email client to
constantly scan the directory for new emails every 60 seconds. that was
the minute an order was placed online, the staff member that monitored
orders would receive it. As far as the office was concern, when orders
were sent online or otherwise, we helped them process and track order by
redesign some of their business process leveraging their existing ACT
database. The database was customized to better track order and several
workflow report were designed to track order statistically so to better
understand the impact that the website was having on their business.
We also setup a
marketing and maintenance program for submitting their site to
applicable search engines and other online services that catered
specifically to the catering business. We monitored and analyzed their
online traffic to see how successful their site was at turning readers
into customers. In order to see which marketing was best working we
monitored where site traffic was coming from. One thing that we did that
proved very successful indeed, was to do a comparative study of 100
catering sites and see how our design concept stood up in terms of the
industry online. That in itself allowed us to help our client stand out
of the crowd by having useful features that were not common to other
sites in the same industry.
To Conclude
Our client after the initial
learning curve was over, learned to manage this strategy on their own
and experience growth in their overall business. By staying on top of
the strategy and by making changes when need, they also learned the
value of a commitment to service excellence. Being able to react quickly
to customer request and by having customers interact with them using the
internet in real time, their customer satisfaction increased. Happy
customer are loyal customers.
We would be happy to
discuss how our sales strategists can develop an online strategy to help
your business better compete within your industry. Call us today at
416-550-2487
Contact
a sales specialist for more information on any of our
services. You can call us during our normal business
hours of 8:30 am - 3:30 pm, Monday through Friday at
416-550-2487. Alternatively use our online services to
request a quote or to send enquiries, by
clicking here.
