So you’re ready to redesign your website.  Or maybe you’ve launched a new business and are designing a new site from the ground up.  Congratulations, while this is going to take some effort and involvement on your part — whether you work with an internal team or bring in a firm or specialist as a partner — it’s going to be exciting, interesting, and probably a chance for you to learn a lot.

Before you do anything though, it’s critical to have a plan.  I know those of you who regularly read Marketing Trenches aren’t at all shocked – it’s rare that we do anything without mentioning a plan.  In this case, what you really need to think about before you do anything with the website is everything that you are going to do after the website.  What do I mean by that?

Let’s face it, the days of “If you build it, they will come” are long gone.  Except with some very rare exceptions, you can’t just launch a website, lay back, and wait for prospects, customers and dollars to roll in.  So, before you even start on your new website, make sure you have planned – and budgeted – for the marketing of that website.  Make sure you have thought about marketing as an ongoing piece of the puzzle as well, not just a burst at launch for a month or two and then nothing.  Don’t think that a launch email and submitting to search engines is all you need, you need to make sure you address all your online and offline marketing channels, including a plan for search, email, and social media among others.

Too often I’ve seen it happens where clients spend a huge chunk of their budget on the website itself and have little if anything budgeted to market it.  Make sure you don’t fall into that trap, even if it means reserving some website pieces for a second phase.  Because without a commitment to a marketing plan, it probably won’t matter what content or features your website has if nobody knows about you.

Think of your ongoing marketing as the fuel for your website, powering you forward.

After all, what good is that new car if you don’t have any gas to take it out of your driveway?

About the Author: Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  If you liked this post, follow Will on Twitter for more commentary like this.

Seth Godin blogged Friday on Things to Ask Before You Redo Your Website, and like most of his posts it was enlightening and made you think.  Seth provides just under 25 bullet points on the difficult and most important questions you have to ask before you redo your website.  While it’s a great post, I do have a small difference of opinion on one part.

The questions are right on track, with the focus on the strategy of the website vs. the technology.  Too many folks go wrong right out of the gates by making their first website conversation about the technology requirements or having the website look JUST LIKE a website they like, vs. the strategy and business objectives.  Once those are in place, the other items can fall out of that next.

So I think the approach and the questions are right on, and taking the time to do this is the right first step.  However, there is one place where I differ slightly with Seth.  Many companies will be able to ask and answer these questions themselves.  In my experience though, many more need additional outside assistance to help them step through this process.  In many organizations there is still a deer in the headlights look as we start talking about the web.  In the best ones they realize this and bring the right folks onto their team to help to navigate this.  A client recently described themselves to me as “They don’t know what they don’t know” when it comes to the web, and I think that is often an accurate assessment.  While these questions should serve as the starting point for redoing your website, I think it’s just as critical to make sure you can provide the right answers – or get somebody on the team that can help you get there.

If you tried to plan a new home from the ground up without an architect, I’m sure there are things you would miss.  Making sure you have the right plan in place out of the gates is the only real way to succeed in your website project.  Understanding what is important and what doesn’t need to be a focus right up front is critical.

After all, as Seth closes, everything is not an option.

About the Author: Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  If you liked this post, follow Will on Twitter for more commentary like this.

So you got yourself involved with a startup company.  It may have happened by circumstance or by choice.  You’re either a founder or one of the first employees.  You either envision your concept as a potential single to be flipped in 3-4 years, or a grand slam that will allow you to socialize with the likes of Brin, Bezos and Cuban.

Awesome.  We all love a good startup story.

Unless you’ve got an inherently viral concept on your hands (and by the way, keep in mind that there have only been about 5 inherently viral products introduced over the past 5-7 years), you’re going to need to put a significant emphasis on marketing.  I wrote an earlier post about the necessity of bringing marketing expertise to your internal/external team, but this post isn’t designed to belabor that point.

You’re going to need to do certain things during your first 90 days to survive and show some traction from a marketing standpoint.  Why 90 days?  It’s simple.  Business plans are great for fundraising and for attracting senior-level employees, but executing on a 5-10 year grand vision usually happens in pieces.  I happen to believe that this execution is best broken down into 90-day pieces.

One caveat before we get into the list.  All of the items below are tactics.  Tactics that do not flow from a broader strategy usually fail at some point.  Build a sound marketing strategy – identify goals, build your messaging, pinpoint target audiences – before you start getting tactical.

Here are the 10 marketing items every startup should consider executing within the first 90 days of operation:

1.  Build a clean, easy to navigate website.

I know.  Quite an “outside the box” statement.  All I can say is that people still miss on this first step, and miss in an embarrassing way.  Remember this – depending on which web genius you listen to, you have between 3-10 seconds just to convince a visitor to move further on your site.

And if you’re a startup that doesn’t think you need a web site at all, I wish you luck.  No need to read further.

2.  Create a blog, post quality content, and learn how to market it.

You’re still reading this post because you find the content interesting and the site doesn’t look half bad.  You’re here because you found the content via a search engine, another website, or perhaps a social media property like Twitter or LinkedIn.

If your website is your brochure (and hopefully it doesn’t look like one), then your blog is your platform to express your ideas and distribute some of your marketing content.

3.  Spend the time to do the basic SEO work, or have someone do it for you.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), generally speaking, rarely will impact your business in the short-term.  That being said, if anyone tells you that SEO is dead and you shouldn’t worry about it, toss them out the window like the guy in the Bud Light commercial.  Even the most basic SEO work, if done appropriately, will pay significant dividends eventually.

4.  Do some public relations, or at a bare minimum issue a press release surrounding your launch.

Not every startup can afford to spend thousands of dollars a month on retaining a public relations agency, but that’s not an excuse to ignore public relations.  You can get a high quality press release written, distributed and pitched for as little as $1,500 – $2,000, even less if you do some of it yourself.

Is there a good reason NOT to announce your business?  Afraid of a poor first impression on the media and consumers of your product?  If so, you may be facing a product problem or a problem with other elements in your marketing mix.

5.  Get involved in social media.

Notice that I didn’t say to rush out, join all 10,000 social media properties and start posting.  As always, with social media, my advice is to join, listen, learn, then post.  Most startups join and post.  They don’t even acknowledge the listen and learn part.  Startups are typically in a rush to show some traction, and unfortunately some investors judge traction based on Twitter followers, Facebook friends, and LinkedIn connections.  That’s just silly, almost as silly as the valuations those investors placed on the revenue-less companies of dot-com boom times.

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In Tuesday’s 5 Marketing Misconceptions That Need to Change post, Will covered some of the misguided statements we hear from clients.  If I only had a nickel for every time we hear those types of statements….

In the spirit of fairness, I am determined to defend the marketers who make these types of statements.  Here’s what Will left out – often times these misguided comments originate from an agency, consultant or service provider that the company has put its trust in.  So let’s look for some warning signs. 

If you hear your agency, consultant or service provider make any of these five statements, consider running.

1.) Hi, I’m Mike from XXX National Directory/Search/Ad Network Company, and I am a Marketing Consultant with the company.  I am here to help you build your marketing plan.

RUN! FAST! Nothing against these folks (really), but selling Yellow Pages or even a “boxed” pay-per-click solution does not make you a marketing consultant.  It makes you someone that is trying to sell Yellow Pages or a “boxed” pay-per-click solution.  There’s nothing wrong with selling.  God knows we all do it in some form or fashion, but please don’t try to mislead people by calling yourself a marketing consultant.

Clarification: If you are in fact interesting in purchasing what essentially amounts to an advertising package, by all means engage with these folks.  Just don’t expect to get any marketing strategy advice out of them.

2.) If you choose us for your SEO project, we can guarantee multiple top 10 rankings on your targeted keywords.

I thought these people had gone away, but it appears they’re back in full force.  And I can’t blame clients for listening.  When someone tells you they can guarantee results, it’s hard to ignore.

That being said, let’s all say this together:  SEO is not a quick fix, set it and forget it solution for driving traffic .  The best SEO strategies I’ve seen involve a long-term commitment to the creation of relevant content, building that content in multiple formats, and finding multiple distribution channels for that content.

I am guessing there are companies that make an SEO guarantee and do follow through on it.  I am also guessing that those guarantees are made on keywords like “patent attorneys that also handle divorce cases in reston virginia”.

3.) You really can’t afford to wait on addressing social media.  We should build out your presence on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter right away.

Stop.  Please.  We all realize that social media is important, even though it’s getting a bit crowded.  Like anything else though, you shouldn’t build anything if it doesn’t fit into a more strategic plan. 

Some of these groups will bait you with the promise of thousands of Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or LinkedIn connections overnight.  Great.  Go ahead and recruit thousands of followers, all of whom could care less about your message.  They’re following you because they’re trolling for followers as well.  And the followers/friends/connections you do want?  You’ll turn them off quick with the hundreds of meaningless updates you’ll have to post to accumulate all the meaningless followers.

Build a social media strategy.  Make sure it ties back to your overall marketing strategy.  Then join, listen, learn, and eventually execute.  It’s that simple.

And one more thing, and I know this will be painful for some “social media gurus” to hear.  Social media is NOT a necessity, nor is it necessarily effective, for every business and business category.

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These are infamous words, generally spoken by infamous people.  Or at least people that are about to become infamous.

There are literally hundreds of ways organizations arrive at the decision that they need to build a new website.  Sometimes the decision is simply dictated from the CEO.  Sometimes the decision is driven by a change in ownership or control.  Sometimes the decision is driven by the poor performance and usability of the current website.  For the point I am trying to make here, the driving factor of the decision doesn’t matter.

What does matter is the mistake that at least 20% of small and medium businesses make: I call it the “All I need is a web designer” mistake.

Really? No, I mean really?

Listen.  Perhaps you just want a brochure site.  Static.  You don’t care about driving “new” traffic.  You don’t care about using the site as a lead generator or customer acquisition tool.  You don’t care about using the site to become a thought leader in your industry.  That’s cool – go find a designer – there are thousands of great ones out there, some of whom we work with on a regular basis.

But if you’re interested in making your website a complete, living, breathing, fluid marketing vehicle, then please don’t say things like the following:

“We don’t need any help with our messaging.  We’ve got that down pat. “

Really? No, I mean really? Strangely enough, the companies that usually say that are the ones that DO have their messaging down pat.  Down pat in the CEO’s head.  And only his head.  And the messaging is in his/her head equates to 10 pages of messaging if you could extract it.

“Don’t worry about the copy.  We have all kinds of brochures, and if the information isn’t there we can always use all the copy on the current site.”

Really? No, I mean really? Brochures aren’t websites.  And if you don’t have any formal messaging plan, then that copy that resides on your site probably doesn’t make any sense.

“Not sure that SEO matters to us.  All of our customers come through referrals, and that seems to work out pretty well.”

Really? No, I mean really? That’s probably one of the reasons why your business isn’t growing.  You’re maintaining a business, not growing it.  If you’re good with that, then forget the SEO.  It will probably drive all kinds of new leads into the business, and you’ll have to figure out how to deal with these new leads instead of always handling “warm” leads.  Who would want to deal with that problem, after all?

This brings us back to my favorite:

“All I need is a web designer.”

Yup.  And when I build my next house, I’ll just get someone to paint the outside real nice.  Plumbing doesn’t matter.  Working appliances don’t matter.  Electricity? Who needs it.  Just make it look nice on the outside and we’re good to go.