It’s great if you have web designers and marketers that you can count on. The problem is, most of them don’t understand your entire business ecosystem. They can make things look nice and work well, but that’s just the bare minimum you need. You can literally waste thousands of dollars and many, many hours on just one wrong decision.
It takes someone with knowledge of more than just technology or marketing to help you use the web most effectively and outpace the competition. The web should be an integral part of your business, helping create more efficient operations, marketing, and sales, and helping pull all of those functions together.
The most important questions are the ones you don’t even know you need to ask!
This is why you need a Chief Web Officer, or CWO, someone who can work with you, the CEO, to do things like:
- analyze where your business is now and where you want to go,
- recognize opportunities for new online revenue streams and develop strategies for creating them,
- analyze how you could be using the web to improve efficiency in operations, marketing, and sales, and
- analyze your budget to determine where your money is best invested.
In short, a CWO is your trusted advisor on integrating your business into the web in the most profitable way possible.
Most consultants or staff can’t even begin to conceptualize new revenue streams. And when it comes to apps, they rely on what’s the most popular or what they’re used to using. In the world of the web, online marketers have the loudest voice because that’s what they’re good at and they’re going to tout what they like. That doesn’t mean it’s best for you!
Example: a nonprofit client signed a 2-year commitment for a CRM based on word-of-mouth. They wanted to be able to take recurring donations online and the system did that, but they realized too late that donors couldn’t cancel their own recurring donations or even choose a specific period of time to donate over. Donors had to contact the nonprofit and their staff had to cancel the recurring donation.
That could have easily been avoided if they had known the right questions to ask. You see, if you don’t ask the right questions you can’t get the right answers. How much was their donors’ frustration worth? And how much was their staff’s wasted time worth? They’re having to do something that the donor should have been able to handle themselves, and communicate with the donor. All that takes time and is also ripe for damaging relationships.
Most large corporations don’t even have a CWO yet, though. Their web strategy and presence is a hodgepodge of their Marketing and IT departments and nobody understands the big picture. The turf wars are a nightmare!
Being a small business owner, you have the advantage of being able to move swiftly to get ahead of even the big guys. Realistically, you probably don’t need a full time CWO now – and may never need one that’s full-time. What you DO need, though, is someone who can advise you on the big picture and help you make the right decisions. Someone who can help prevent your business from becoming one of the majority that fail.
That’s where I come in, as your outsourced Chief Web Officer. It’s what I’ve been doing since 1996 and what I love to do. You can now work with me as your Chief Web Officer For a Day! It’s the perfect way to get the help you need without the ongoing expense of hiring someone.