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What Can Gordon Ramsay Teach Us About Website Marketing?

Guest post by: Allan Kent

Article Overview: Are you regularly contacted by experts offering to help drive more traffic to your website through search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising and banner placements? Effective online marketing certainly requires that people to find your site, but the area that often seems to be neglected is ensuring that the user experience is a great one once they are there. This article examines how Gordon Ramsay's approach to running restaurants can help with your website marketing.

What Can Gordon Ramsay Teach Us About Website Marketing?



If good food is essential for a restaurant's success, then great content is the key to a website's!

Now let me say right from the start, I'm certainly no fan of Gordon Ramsay. However now a days it seems it's impossible to avoid seeing him on TV almost every day, and one of his most popular programmes is ‘Kitchen Nightmares', where he helps to turn struggling restaurants around. I believe he's teaching us some valuable lessons here regarding website marketing. Let me explain.

The first thing Ramsay does every time is to experience the restaurant himself as a diner, taking the customer's perspective. Once he's got an idea of the front end problems, he then examines its systems and business approach as that will undoubtedly explain why the diner's experience is so poor. Looking critically at the restaurant from these two perspectives helps him to discover what needs to be done to put matters right.

An important aspect of his approach, no matter how the restaurant is struggling to get diners in the door, is that he purposely does not try and drive traffic before ensuring the changes and improvements he's suggested are in fact taking shape. Only once he's confident that the restaurant can deliver a great dining experience does he go to phase II - drumming up business, which he does by going round the streets with tasters, and inviting local influential people to experience the place.

So, how is Ramsay's approach relevant to websites? In the world of website marketing it seems to me that too much focus is centred on getting people to a website and not enough on ensuring that once there, a visitors experience is a great one. We get called and emailed daily (and I suspect most readers here will have too) from experts who can help with search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising, banner placements etc, but no one ever calls us up and says they can help with the website experience.

Driving people to your site before you have critically evaluated what you offer from their perspective, and then ensuring that you deliver on this is not only ineffective, importantly it is actually counter productive. You run an extremely high risk that it will create an experience that will not only stop them ever returning (even if you do put matters right eventually), but that they will compound the problem by bad mouthing you. Common thought is that people are more likely to share bad experience stories than good ones which is bad enough in itself. Add into the equation the ease in which these negative opinions can be mass broadcast through social media and you can see just how counter productive the wrong approach can be!

So, let's take a leaf out of Ramsay's approach and see how your website's performance should really be improved! Getting back to basics, a website will only perform if its content is valuable, interesting and relevant to the audience it's targeting. The content of the website is like the meal in the restaurant. To a very large degree, in both cases, it IS the experience. Sure, other factors affect it too, such as the setting and look and feel, but ultimately a visitor will come back if the experience is good, and they won't if it's not!

What elements make for successful content? Obviously this will differ for each type of audience, but some of the basics include:

• Fulfilling the needs of the visitor. What do they need from your site? If it's information, be sure to give it to them in a clear, logical and consistent manner. If they want your opinions, give them freely. Make sure the content at all times is focused on delivering what they want to find and not what you want to tell them.
• 
  
  Not falling into the trap of self glorification! If you're going to ‘big yourself up' explain just how/why the visitor benefits from this. Everyone wants the experience to be about them, and not about you. If you do need to mention some of your achievements and accolades, ensure the reader can see how that will benefit them and is not simply thinking - "so what!"
• 
  
  Keeping the content fresh - if the content remains unchanged, why would you expect anyone to come back? The people you do want coming back are your customers as the cost of doing business with existing customers is always less than bringing on new ones. Make sure there's a reason to get them back, and better still telling their contacts the good news about your content.
• 
  
  The way you deliver your content shows your commitment to service delivery. A site riddled with poor grammar and spelling mistakes does not inspire confidence and is such a simple thing to get right.

Seeing yourself from the visitors' perspective - is the experience a good one and if you were a stranger to the company, would the website experience be enough for you to recommend it to others? Get someone with a "fresh pair of eyes" to critically evaluate the experience.

For websites, it's a common quote that "Content is King". I'd suggest that it's only great content that is king. Poor content is like quicksand, not only will it absorb your marketing dollar it will swallow up your potential prospects, never to be seen again, not by you at any rate!!

Only when the ‘experience' is refined, captivating and customer focused, should traffic generation be attempted - a separate exercise, but one that uses the well formulated content as its bedrock.

Related Articles
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  The Hot-Tempered Head Chef: The Early Years of Gordon Ramsay
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  Sampling Success: How Bad Chef Ramsay Makes Good
  Lesson #4: Discipline Yourself So Your Customers Do Not Have To
  Lesson #3: Do Not Let Your Business Become Static
  Management Fundamentals - Gordon Ramsay and Kitchen Nightmares
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  Teaching as a Marketing Tool
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Article Tags: banner placements, content is king, driving traffic, pay per click advertising, search engine optimisation, website experience, website marketing



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