5 Lessons to Learn from a World-Class Small Business Website

5 Lessons to Learn from a World-Class Small Business Website
By Newt Barrett On December 5, 2008

Kevin Mannion’s Sky Road Consulting helps publishing companies survive intensely difficult times by inventing new ways of serving their customers and of generating revenues.

His website does a superb job of conveying what he does, why it’s important, why you can trust them, and how he can help. You may not be in Kevin’s business but you can certainly learn fundamental content marketing lessons from his website.

Kevin and I were colleagues at CMP Media in the 1990s when even a small print publication had revenues exceeding $10 million and profits of 30 to 40%. That was a very good time to be in the business. Today, both buyer and advertiser behavior has changed so dramatically that it is a very bad time to be in the publishing business. This is where Kevin rides to their rescue with his services–and perhaps, by content marketing example, to your rescue as well.

5 Content Marketing Lessons You Can Learn from Kevin’s Site

Enable your Web visitors to understand precisely how you can help them within a few seconds of their arrival on your site. Kevin begins with a clear statement of what his company does: “Sky Road Consulting helps online and print publishers develop successful business strategies, build powerful brands and grow profitable sales with complex accounts.”

Demonstrate your understanding of the unique challenges that face your target customers. Kevin lays out what he described says “3 Keys to Online and Print Publishing Success” he uses clear headlines that introduce a descriptive paragraph which in turn links to his detailed ‘full perspective.’ For example, number three is “Audience Knowledge: the Publisher’s Greatest Marketing Asset.” Of course, this is a fundamental content marketing tenet that you must apply to your own marketing and which, ironically, publishers often fail to exploit.

Provide relevant and valuable content that engenders trust among your visitors. For each of his 3 Keys to Success he provides a detailed exploration of the issue paired with a solution. Although you will likely be inclined to hire Kevin based on the trust that he engenders, you learn enough from his targeted content to begin work on developing solutions on your own.

Make sure your information structure and user interface are simple and logical. The organization of Kevin’s site couldn’t be more simple with its focus on those 3 Keys that are accessible and visible right on the homepage. He also makes it easy to take the next step by clicking on a “read full perspective” button. Then visitors are invited to take the next step to view the solution and then to contact the company. Although, it may seem intuitively obvious that this kind of simple and logical structure is essential, too few sites are able to accomplish it.

Highlight right up front who you are and what it is that you do. Also on the homepage are simple boxes–one about Kevin and one about the specific services that his company provides. In each case you are encouraged to click so that you can learn more about either Kevin or about his services. Your visitors want to learn about you without having to work hard. When you make this process easy, you make it a heck of a lot more likely that they will want to do business with you.

Kevin’s website engenders trust that will lead to new clients.

You can bet that it took Kevin and his team a long time to develop simple targeted messaging and a clean, intuitive design. As we all know, it’s usually very hard to make things easy. Whatever time it took, the payoff for Kevin and for his visitors is obvious. Because his website does such an outstanding job of communicating his fundamental value proposition and his understanding of the issues that face his customers, online prospects can comfortably trust that he can help them solve even the most difficult of challenges.

You can and should do exactly the same thing. Although Kevin may have made a substantial investment in building his website, you do not have to make a huge investment in dollars to achieve comparable impact. You will, however, have to invest serious time and thought in the messages you want to convey the ways in which they should be conveyed.

Check out Kevin’s website to get the full visual impact of what he does so well. Of course if you’re a publisher, you may want to give him a call to see how he may be able to help.