Your website is your best business investment – Bob Bloom
Buyers no longer care who they buy from. And customer loyalty is dead. So true. So confronting! Bob Bloom’s book The New Experts reminds us that marketing has changed forever and takes us on the journey of understanding how today’s buyers make their decisions. The solution? Get a good website. And turn off your Seller Mind and turn on your Buyer Mind. It’s simple but surprisingly difficult.
The 4 Decisive Moments you must address are:
1. Now-or Never Moment (your first fleeting contact, usually via the web) 2. Make-or Break Moment (does your customer buy, or not?) 3. Keep-or Lose Moment (does your customer buy again and again?) 4. Multiplier Moment (does you customer endorse and refer you?)
My favourite bits
As marketing manager of a web strategy firm, I was most enamoured with the Now-or Never Moment: These 3 quotes by Bob Bloom really resonated with me:
“There is no better business investment than a well designed, well functioning, customer centric website – it can make your business 1st choice at the first point of contact.” (page 77)
“Most home pages do not clearly define the single most important benefit the seller is offering, so the buyers finger instantly clicks the seller into oblivion.” (page 74)
“You and your entire organisation must learn how to win today’s Internet-informed buyer, who routinely gets smart online before buying from from a supplier or a store offline.” (page 82)
From these statements, it’s obvious that a well designed, business focused website is the first step of any sustainable marketing initiative. If you miss the first chance, you won’t get any others.
Bob, thank you for making this point so firmly in your book! Like in his previous book Inside Advantage, it feels like Bob is consulting directly to you as the reader and sharing his four decades of experience in an independent, unbiased way. A must read for marketers, advertisers, entrepreneurs and sales professionals! An abridged version of this review was first published on Amazon.
Check out Bob Bloom’s websites
The New Experts Inside Advantage You can also read my blog post called What’s Your Inside Advantage Asks Robert Bloom.