True Confessions: Being Inconsistent

It’s the beginning of a new month and a new quarter, so I’m working on reports. For our own website, I was surprised to see that we had only half as many leads in March as we had in February. We really hadn’t noticed — we were so busy in March with projects for our new and existing customers that we didn’t have time to pay attention to that.

Looking for the cause of the drop, I found that our web traffic was also lower in March — by a little more than 8%. What happened? Digging into analytics, I found some big differences in our website in March:

• Blog posts weren’t as consistent as usual — sometimes they were posted in the evening, and there were a few days that didn’t get a post at all, since clients’ websites always take precedence over our own. You know what they say about the cobbler’s children.
• Our social media was down, too. We sent 54% as many messages in March as in February, or a little more than half as many.
• While we did get a newsletter out in March, we didn’t give people anything special to click through to — and had about 20% of the clicks we normally get.

Fewer leads? No reason to be surprised.

Here’s the takeaway for you and your company website:

• You need to be consistent. I had 17 good fresh blog posts instead of 20, and posted them at random times instead of consistently, and I saw a change in my business in just one month. If you are your own blogger, are you writing regularly? If you handle your own social media, are you posting good things on a regular basis? Does your newsletter go out regularly, and does it provide value for your readers every time?
• You can’t wait and see. We didn’t notice a slow down. It depends on your business and your industry, of course, but the common rule of thumb is that you will see the results of what you do right now in 90 days. Do you want to be happy at the end of second quarter? If so, you need to take action now.

I’m sharing this true confession with you because it is so easy to overlook this. We take care of our clients, of course, but I know that a lot of you reading this are taking the DIY route. And I know that, just like me, you can get so busy providing goods and services for your customers, clients, and patients that you don’t even realize that you’re slipping up on your own online presence.

If it no longer makes sense for you to try to keep your own website consistent, call us at 479.966.9761. The cobbler’s children, as the old saying goes, go barefoot, but we keep our clients consistent no matter how busy they get.