Question

Topic: Strategy

How To Separate Three Services On One Website

Posted by Anonymous on 3/24/2010 at 10:33 AM ET 250 Points
The set up: The company I work for has traditionally serviced two business-to-business segments: One as a product producer and wholesaler of complimentary items for local and regional clients, with occasional national distribution; The other as a distribution/fulfillment services provider for several national clients. We've recently begun the process of revamping our web presence, and in so doing have chosen to set up our own internet based direct-to-consumer retail system (shopping cart). We would sell our own product, and complimentay items that are produced by others.

The Problem: Our website budget only allows for one website, and our maraketing budget is quite small. The developer is already developing the site to have three distinctive channels (one for our fulfillment service, one for our wholesale business, and one for our retail shopping cart business). The problem we keep coming back to is how to most effectively channel the appropriate customers to their appropriate destination without confusing or frustrating them. Since we already have a web presence (not a good one) that our current business-to-business customers know about, but knowing that the retail application has more profit potential for the website, do we retain use of our current URL for our current customer base, or do we take that for our new retail initiative? Or do we start a new retail brand from scratch with A new URL? I should mention that we do occasionally have retail sales at our facility and have a mailing list of about 1000 people that might be confused by a new brand. Our current website gets about 2000 unique visitors a month, but it is so bad, few stray deeper into the site than the page they landed on.
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by michael on 3/24/2010 at 10:44 AM Accepted
    It depends on whether your wholesale customers also know that you do retail. In some markets that's taboo.

    If it's not a problem then I'd suggest grabbing a few new domain names from godaddy.com and setting them to a different landing page on your current site.

    retailcustomers.com goes to one page and wholesalecustomers.com goes to another. Most people don't take the time to dig around and realize it's just a mirror site. Domains are $10/year. Less if you buy them for 10 years.

    Michael
  • Posted on 3/24/2010 at 10:47 AM Accepted
    So, you're selling the same products, just to a mix of companies and consumers?

    You're going to have to create a clear path for each one to follow.

    Have big buttons in different colors on your home page.

    Lead each type of customer into different parts of your site.

    For example:

    Wholesalers click here (blue)
    Distributors click here (yellow)
    Consumers click here (green)

    Then send them to pages customized for each group's needs, with appropriate color coding.

    You may be able to use similar copy, and tweak it. Hard to say without knowing what it is you're selling.

    Then you can use the appropriate links in your marketing. "For special offers on wholesale widget purchases, go to ourwholesalewidgets/sale"


    Jodi
  • Posted on 3/24/2010 at 11:08 AM Author
    Thanks for the fast replies! I should say that we're doing much of what has already been suggested. In answer to jkaplan, we will be mirroring some of the product we handle fulfillment for. Our managers and owners aren't worried about taking business from our clients if they know our name and our products. While we feel we can be extremely profitable with the retail side, they don't anticipate that we'll be large enough to compete with them.

    We've also focus tested the three destinations from one landing page idea and found it created some problems for the focus group, so we do want to channel each customer segement to their own landing page.

    Our hang up is whether to take the 95 years of company history we have with our current clients, or to take that identity and apply it to a new retail strategy? Will it clutter search results if we have XYZretail.com XYZfulillment.com and XYZwholesale.com? Or do we go with completely different branding for each leaving the existing domain with it's most familiar customers -- So wholesale would retain XYZ.com, fulfillment would be XYZfulfillment, and retail might be ACMEretail.com. Does that make sense?
  • Posted on 3/24/2010 at 11:28 AM Accepted
    The answer to your question is that you need different brand names for each segment. Their needs are different, the target audience profiles are different, and your main positioning benefit is different for each one. In effect you need three different domain names and three different websites (even if they're hosted in the same place and share some common files).

    The current company name (and all the warm, fuzzy heritage that goes with it) can be one of your names. Maybe you can append something to that name for another domain. But the new direct-to-consumer site probably needs a new name to set it apart from the others and avoid any possible confusion.

    The limited budget thing is a problem for a few reasons, the most important of which is that you won't be able to afford to create awareness and generate traffic to the new site very well. And if nobody can find it, you won't sell enough to generate the revenue to pay for any of this. How were you thinking people might find the new site/business?
  • Posted on 3/24/2010 at 11:37 AM Author
    Thank you, Mgoodman.

    We're going to use our current sales staff and email pushes to generate awareness among our current customer base for their areas of interest.

    For the retail strategy, we do have about 1000 email addresses we've collected from the few retail customers that we have. But primarily we're going to focus on targeted paid search results, social media, press releases etc. Our budget allows for doing this in house. We just don't have the budget for hiring an outside marketing firm to do it.
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