The goal of our Web Strategies for Business offering is to help business leadership to evaluate and modify their website strategies around business ROI.  This focus looks at how a website can be coordinated with other customer supply chain interaction including customer services, and their overall go to market strategies and internal marketing and sales efforts.  This offering does not focus on brand or product marketing or on consumer based selling --- but instead on the website as a tool to streamline the business you do with your clients and customers in a business to business relationship. 

 

Much like banks, schools, health providers, and car repair shops provide you as a home consumer with online services that you have now come to depend on and expect, you can provide dependable and valuable service to those who buy from you.

 

The offering also outlines and helps you implement some basic best practices related to selecting technology for supporting a website or intranet strategy. 

 

These best practices include:

• Start with your ERP or CRM systems and determine integration and business requirements

• Customization should be a differentiator, not a core approach

• Make sure that products and modules are not available for your existing packages before you build

• Be flexible in your implementation of requirements to reduce cost (80/20 rule)

• Eliminate technical, external, or expensive bottlenecks with an easy to use CMS

• Stage more content more often because non-technical users can update the site

• Utilize new collaborative and community functionality to form a customer community

• Don’t get stuck behind based on a vendor lock-in strategy

• Select a product that is flexible, nimble, and transportable

• Make sure there are adequate resources available that know the product

• Reduce long term IT cost and IT maintenance with an integrated system

• Increase overall value to customer with real-time account information and order processing

• Reduce risk of moving data manually, rekeying data, or delayed processing

• Reduce customer service cost with automation of front end to backend process

Meritide can drive your business leaders and business units through a strategy and assessment process (see resources to the left) that will help you identify the proper business focus and technology platform to maximize your internet investments.   

 

This strategy assessment process is intended for business leadership and owners to use improve the business value to their customers and clients and increase revenue and decrease the cost of doing business with them.  A website can be much more than an online brochure or online shopping cart and can be used as a critical application in the Customer Demand Chain.  A well done website can increase customer intimacy and create a larger return on all coordinated sales, marketing, and customer service efforts.

 

We can help you maximize and measure your efforts as well through the proper use of

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Website visitor and traffic monitoring

• Lead generation from website tracking

• Easier Content management and online catalog management

• Collaboration and Community portal sites for your customers to interact with your business and each other