Why Technology Billionaire Mark Cuban is Wrong About Websites and Marketing

My wife and I are big fans of the show Shark Tank. It's one of only a few programs that we are excited to see pop up on our DVR each week. (Walking Dead, Hell on Wheels and Shark Tank make for truly "must-see TV in my house!) Not only do we love to see all the new product ideas that people invent, but as a business owner, I find it educational to see what does or doesn't excite the sharks and why.

In each episode of the show, a few minutes are dedicated to following up on one of the companies that the sharks had previously invested in. A few weeks ago, the network decided to dedicate more time to those updates, giving them their own show, Beyond the Tank.

In the second episode of this new series, we were brought up to date on a company called The Red Dress Boutique. The segment focused primarily on a website upgrade the owners of the Red Dress were eager to perform, much to the chagrin Mark Cuban, their Shark Tank investor. According to Cuban, their money was better invested in marketing than in developing a new website.

Mark is a smart guy. Heck, he probably makes more money in an hour than I will in my entire life. But if that comment is representative of his concept of websites versus web marketing, then he's way off base. By about a billion dollars, give or take a few.

Your Website IS Your Marketing

Ok, so let's get the caveats out of the way. I only know what I saw on the show, and there is no doubt a lot of information was left lying on the cutting room floor, never making it to the airwaves. Mark clearly knows more about this particular situation than I, and he may be absolutely right in this specific case. His comment may not have been intended as a catch-all for other businesses in a similar situations either. For all I know, The Red Dress Boutique could be better off continuing to patch the problems with their current site rather than rebuild it.

With those caveats out of the way, I think it's important that other business owners who watched the show don't walk away thinking that webites and marketing are two different things. They aren't.

It appeared from the show that Cuban tends to look at websites as more of an IT (information technology) function rather than as a form of marketing itself. There is certainly an IT component to websites (server speed, ability to place orders, etc.). All the programming has to work in order for the website to do its job of taking orders. But that just scratches the surface of the true nature and value of a website.

While there is an IT component to website development, the website itself is a marketing platform. It is essential for businesses to understand this, else they will fail to maximize the full potential of one of their best revenue generators. Just as you wouldn't want your sales people to do nothing more than create processes for getting sales (they have to actually use the processes!), your website must function as a traffic/lead generator and sale/deal closer in order to achieve the full value/benefit from it.

There are a lot of avenues for successful online marketing. Social media is the one that currently comes to most people's minds. Properly managed social media campaigns can get a lot of traction in building a customer base and growing your sales. Done right, you can use social media to drive your audience back to your website where the sale is typically made. Social media acts as both a branding and traffic driver, but it's the website that, ultimately, must do the job of selling the product or service.

I'm not so naive to think that Cuban doesn't know this, but then again, maybe he thinks of websites as just another web marketing tool rather than as the foundation of all your web marketing efforts.

Your Website Should Be Your #1 Revenue Generator

In order to get the idea out of your head that your website is more about IT than marketing, you have to understand some basic principles of website marketing. To make your website your #1 sales generator and truly be the foundation of all your online marketing efforts, you have to pay attention to some key details.

Site Architecture and Usability

Your website is first and foremost about creating an exceptional experience for your visitors. You can't stop at just creating a "working" website. May web designers focus on the visuals and basic functions of the website. As long as those two things are "working" then, according to them, the site is doing everything it is supposed to do.

But behind the visuals and the basic functions of the site is the construction and usability. Of course we know that visitors don't care what content management system your site is built on or what the coding looks like behind the scenes. But they do notice when those things become a hindrance to them getting what they need to complete their purchase. Many times, the average visitor won't even know there's a problem. Even still, it has an impact on how they shop.

If the coding of the site isn't top-notch, you're going to run into all sorts of issues down the road. Whether you want to expand the site, add some upgrades or make the site search engine friendly, the CMS and poor coding can be the biggest obstacle. From what aired on TV, this seems to be where The Red Dress Boutique is; they have a great looking website that's being held together with the proverbial duct tape.

My guess is when Red Dress goes to add new functions and features, something on the site breaks. Of course, it's hard to say no to the free programming being offered by Cuban, but sometimes "free" costs more than actually fixing something the right way. Having a website that stays out of your visitors' way in achieving sales is the worst-case level of acceptableness. What you really want is a website that your shoppers feel good about. That means going above and beyond what other websites are doing.

Any function that you've experienced while shopping on a competitor's website is a function your visitors will likely miss if not offered on your own. Once shoppers become accustomed to being able to perform X, the lack of that feature becomes an impediment or frustration. "Why don't you do that?" they ask.

You should always be improving your shopper's on-site experience, looking for ways to give them more of what they want and reducing the current slate of hindrances.

Optimization

The second thing to consider is that the website itself should be a force in bringing in new business. It should not be the only traffic generator, but it can and should be a primary one. This is where optimization comes in.

There are two components for bringing in traffic from the search engines. The first is search engine accessibility. The search engines need to be able to crawl the site and effectively calculate the value of each page for a specific topic or keywords. This goes back to the coding of the site. If the search engines are effectively blocked from properly rendering your pages, then they won't be able to assign the correct value. Without that, you lose the ability to rank as high in the search engines as you otherwise would.

You also have to ensure that the content of your site is valuable to the visitor. Why the visitor and not the search engines? Simple. The search engines are looking at the value of the content from the visitor's perspective. If they determine that your content and messaging is weak, then you lose the ability to draw traffic to your pages as search engines place sites that have more effective and valuable content higher up in the search results.

Messaging

Finally, the messaging matters a great deal as well. Getting rankings alone can only do so much. Searchers are scanning search results to determine which site is most worthy of getting visited based on the information presented to them. At the very least, you are competing against ten other sites for any keyword search you're ranking for. You need to make sure the messaging (title tag and description the search engine displays) is effective at convincing the visitor to click on your page rather than a competitor's. And once visitors click into the site, the messaging there must keep moving them through the conversion process.

Sometimes Starting Over is The Best Way To Proceed

A good majority of websites can be fixed without having to start from the ground up building something completely new. But eventually, as technology changes and visitors' needs change, patching an old site becomes counterintuitive.

If a site can continue to be fixed, by all means, do so. Maybe that's the case with Red Dress. But unless you truly understand that your website is an active part of successful online marketing, you'll spend a good deal of time, energy and money majoring on the minors. It's almost like focusing on your car's tire pressure when the whole engine is about to go belly up.

When watching Shark Tank, I'm usually they guy yelling at the screen telling the entrepreneurs to listen to the sharks! But this is one instance where I think the shark doesn't know best. I'm open to being wrong on this based on my limited knowledge of the situation, but when the shark implies that the website isn't marketing, that's where I have to draw the line.

Want to know more about how to make your website your #1 revenue generator? Check out my LinkedIn post on the 36 Web Marketing Focuses That Need Your Full Buy-In.

By the way, Red Dress Boutique, you are in desperate need of optimization. Give us a call. :)

Stoney deGeyter is the author of The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Periodand the CEO & Founder of Pole Position Marketing, a leading online marketing strategy company that been working with organizations to improve their online presence since 1998. Additionally, Stoney is a well-known speaker at industry conferences nationwide. He is also a prolific blogger, having written for a number of popular industry blogs and Pole Position Marketing's own E-Marketing Performance blog. Want to velocitize your web marketing? Stoney and Pole Position Marketing are the crew you need. Follow him at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.