How Does the 80/20 Rule Figure Into Your Web Strategy?

Few people in business haven’t heard of Pareto’s Law or the 80/20 Rule, whereby 80% of the results come from a mere 20% of the causes. While the exact percentages may not always be 80 and 20, the differences between them is what’s important. 90 and 10, for example, would demonstrate the same observation, namely that a portion of causes or actions produce the majority of the outcomes.

It’s really quite amazing to think that when you apply this rule to your business and start to break things down, you can quite accurately predict the outcome for just about anything you do. It also becomes a highly valuable guide for where and how to direct your energy and resources, something from which every small business owner can benefit.

If your business has an online presence and you’re working to refine the web strategy that will bring more traffic to your site and customers to your door, the 80/20 Rule can help focus your attention on the aspects of your strategy that will deliver results in the way of new clients and sales.

Your Online Strategy & the 80/20 Rule

Now, I don’t mean to say that all the time and effort you’ve put in hasn’t been worth it, but 20% of your existing online strategy, whether it includes SEO or any form of web marketing, is generating 80% of the business you receive from the web. It can be a bit frustrating to think that such a small piece of the pie is what’s giving you the biggest result, but instead of getting angry, look at it this way:

The key to a successful web strategy is to determine what that effective 20% consists of, focus more of your attention on those tasks and  less on the whopping 80% that isn’t really pulling its weight.

The Social Media Example

Like I said, what’s so beneficial about the 80/20 Rule is that you can apply it to every facet of your online strategy. Take social media, for instance; Interacting with followers through various social media channels is crucial to success online, but if you’re doing too much of what’s not working and too little of what actually generates leads and sales, what’s the point?

Well, how do you interact with prospective customers through social media? By sharing content. Using the 80/20 Rule, think about the content you share. You and I know you’re not sharing content because you’ve got loads of extra time to interact socially online, but that’s why people (your prospects) are on sites like Facebook and Twitter–to be social. While you may be interacting just to popularise your brand and to demonstrate that you are an authority in your industry, if 80% of the content you share on a social network is a total sales pitch, you’re going to do little more than tick people off. Instead, make your content a healthy 80% informative and only 20% sales pitch and see where that takes you.

Determining Which Facet of Your Web Strategy Deserves the Most Attention

So, knowing that 20% of the pages on your site bring you 80% of your leads and sales or that 20% of the web marketing you do is responsible for 80% of your results, you need to determine which specific pages and tactics are worthy of more of your time and energy. Tracking and analysing results is the best way to execute and constantly refine a web strategy that’s capable of taking your business to the next level online. There are many sophisticated tools available that you can use to monitor your traffic, rankings, conversions and much more. Heat maps, for instance, will show you where it is that site visitors are actually clicking, and which pages or sections of content they skip over all together.

If you’d like to know how the 80/20 Rule can be used to guide your web marketing efforts, including content creation, social media signalling and more, For more information on branding, or any other internet marketing query, please call 1300 885 557 or email us here.