One of our clients is Auspen – they make refillable whiteboard markers.
Auspen is a pretty simple website – there is information about their marker pens, and a PayPal based shopping cart to take orders online. They have a blog that talks about environmentally friendly products (and Julia has recently started writing some material for their blog).
The brief we had when we helped Auspen update from their old site was to get the site to convert (their old site hadn’t been driving any orders). The new site does that, from organic search traffic as well as paid search traffic.
But there was a secondary result that is really worth highlighting. Auspen get enquiries not just from prospective buyers, but also from prospective distributors. One of these enquiries turned into a real distributor relationship, which is in place now for the USA.
So when considering the benefits of getting a better online presence, it helps to think beyond just finding new leads and customers. A strong online presence contributes to the strength of your brand and can lead to bigger and better outcomes than just getting new customers.