In the era of social media, is it still necessary to run a good official website?

In the era of mobile Internet, everyone is moving to social media, but the official website of a company does not have the attributes of social media. In this article, the author analyzes how to allocate resources and the core factors of resource allocation when budget resources and human resources are limited. Let's take a look.

In the era of mobile Internet, everyone is turning to social media. Whether it is user attention or corporate marketing direction, marketing departments are all investing more energy in social media in the hope of achieving unexpected marketing results quickly and at low cost.

Social Media

Social media is also called earned media. That is to say, as long as you open an account, you can gain natural attention from users and free traffic by publishing posts, short videos and other content. That is why it is called earned media. Is this really the case?

In this case, the value of a company's official website is easily underestimated or even ignored because it does not have the attributes of social media and cannot be quickly shared and forwarded like social media to achieve a secondary diffusion effect.

In the case of limited budget resources and human resources, how to correctly measure the value of the two and how to allocate resources? The premise is that resources are limited. The wealthy party A can ignore this problem, but in today's market environment, I believe that resource shortage is a practical problem faced by most companies. Therefore, how to correctly allocate resources is a major problem for the marketing departments of most companies. Strategy determines resource allocation, resource allocation determines marketing output, and marketing output in turn determines the formulation of next year's strategy. This is a cycle.

Some large B2B brands actually don’t have that many followers and activity on social media. For example, GE has only tens of thousands of followers on TikTok, but its official website has millions or even tens of millions of traffic a year, which is quite impressive.

So the key question is, how to allocate resources? What are the core factors of resource allocation? Here are some methods for reference:

1. Review the performance of the official website and social media over the past year

The core quantitative indicators include:

• Visits refers to the number of visits to the official website and the number of visits to the social media microsite
• Engagement refers to indicators such as video playback, likes, shares, reposts, and comments
• Leads are the number of funds retained by the platform
• Number of qualified leads in MQL Market
• Number of SQL sales qualified leads
• Opportunity is the number of business opportunities that have been visited and are very likely to become actual customers.
• Win wins, the number and amount of customers who have signed contracts

2. Comparing the ROI of the official website and social media

All the above indicators are quantifiable, ROI=return/investment

The Return indicator here specifically refers to the marketing performance in the above dimensions, and Investment is the amount you spend on this platform in a year.

The cost is divided into three parts. One part is the media cost, which is the cost of the brand buying media to attract traffic to the channel. Another part is the operating cost, such as the cost of updating the official website content, improving technical performance, and establishing data dashboards, which is the operating cost paid to maintain the normal operation of the website and convey the brand image. For social media, there will also be operating costs, such as content production and distribution costs, and the design and execution of H5 interactive small activities.

The last part is the labor cost. How many man-days are devoted to the official website each year? How many man-days are devoted to social media each year? What is the cost of one person per day? The two parts are multiplied together to get the labor cost for one year. The sum of the three parts almost covers all the cost investments.

The mathematical formula of ROI=return/investment can be used to calculate the traffic investment return ratio and retention investment return ratio of each channel. For example, the traffic ROI of the official website dimension = annual traffic of the official website/annual investment. Assuming that the annual traffic of the official website is 1 million and the annual investment is also 1 million, then the return on investment is 1.

Another example is WeChat micro-site traffic ROI = WeChat micro-site annual traffic / annual investment. Assuming the WeChat micro-site traffic is 500,000 and the annual investment is 1 million, then ROI = 0.5. You will find that in terms of traffic cost performance, the official website's return on investment is higher than that of social media WeChat. The same method can be used to calculate the return on investment of other dimensional indicators.

3. Calculate the above indicators to determine the overall investment distribution and strength, and position different platforms

The first step is to determine the overall investment allocation through the ROI calculated in the second point above, using the previous year’s performance as a benchmark. Assuming that the two major channels of investment returns remain the same next year, how should the investment budget and manpower be adjusted?

The second step is to position the channel based on the above mathematical formula. For example, if the return on investment of traffic on the official website is high in social media, then the positioning of the official website is to expose the brand image and obtain traffic.

If the return on investment of the interaction rate of social media is higher than that of the official website, then the positioning of social media is a user interaction experience platform and a lead incubation platform.

Interactive experience platform is easy to understand, so why lead incubation? Lead incubation is a key link in marketing conversion. Different from B2C, in B2B business model, it is almost impossible to complete customer conversion by just one contact with the brand. It requires multiple contacts and long-term understanding, thus a longer-term user conversion path. At this time, it is crucial to subtly influence the user's mind through repeated interactions on social media in the long-term B2B business.

4. Determine investment direction based on the positioning of different platforms

Let’s take the official website as an example. If the official website is positioned to acquire traffic or generate user leads, then more resources should be invested in the key links that affect traffic acquisition and user leads. There are several ways to do this:

• Use all free media to drive traffic to your website, such as social media, offline exhibitions, media news, sales pitch decks, product manuals, etc.
• Increase user call to action . For example, SAAS software companies provide free software services and repeatedly emphasize this information in a prominent position on the official website to lower the threshold for retaining capital and increase the number of entry points for retaining capital.
• Optimize user experience and improve technical performance . Repeatedly optimize the information retention form to maximize the possibility of users leaving information while also obtaining more user information.

5. Review and adjust the performance of each channel platform on a monthly basis

The allocation of investment and execution of projects depend on team members closely tracking the marketing performance of each channel and continuously adjusting the performance obtained to find the point with the best input-output ratio.

As early as the emergence of social media such as WeChat, there has been a discussion about whether official websites are still necessary. Due to its social attributes, social media instinctively makes marketers feel that official websites are not so important. Social media can obtain more free traffic, and due to its easy spreadability, the effect will be better and the efficiency will be higher.

In fact, under the B2B business model, the more leading the brand is in the industry, the more important the official website is. Its importance and return on investment may be several times higher than that of social media. With limited resources, the question of how marketers make choices is not a difficult decision in the digital age.

The above are methods to help marketers allocate resource budgets. Specific decisions vary according to the brand’s positioning in the market, the size of the company, and the industry it is in. They need to be treated realistically and applied flexibly.

Author: Zhu Jingyu

Source: WeChat official account "Jade Digital Marketing (ID: Jade_Digital)"