getting there

A Little Strategy Goes a Long WayThe Critical Pillars of Web Strategy

Critical to the success of any website is a solid, strategic foundation. This should come as no surprise to many of you, yet many organizations continue to build and maintain their website without one. This lack of strategy creates situations where managers cannot demonstrate the ROI/success of the site, mitigate turf wars (i.e. every department wants to be on the homepage) or maximize opportunities and quickly identify potential barriers to success.

For many of you, the idea of defining a strategy seems too involved and time consuming, especially when the pressure for action is now. So, all too often this critical step is passed over, and 6 months later, organizations find themselves debating the merits of initiatives that may or may not be needed.

Without discounting the tremendous value usability testing and other user-focused research provides, Movéo has identified four simple, yet critical, pillars necessary to establish a strategic foundation for success online.

Pillar 1: Purpose

Understanding and defining your site's purpose is the first step towards developing a solid strategic foundation. The purpose statement is a focused vision that defines how the site supports your business objectives. A well-crafted purpose statement guides the development team, shaping both content and functional requirements and provides key stakeholders with clear direction.

Pillar 2: Audience

Once you know why you have a site, the next step is to identify and profile your target audiences. Understanding your site's users help drive content and functional requirements, guides messaging, voice and keywords--yes keywords. Critical to the success of any SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaign is the identification and marketing of targeted keywords, and the smartest way to determine the right keywords is to understand your target audience. Profiling target audiences can be done in many ways, from top-line categorization (titles, roles, etc.) to detailed character development (name, age, job, personal interests, dislikes, etc.). Either way, the goal is to establish a clear understanding of your target audiences, including how they will use your site and what they will get out of it.

Pillar 3: Objectives

Once you have a clear understanding of who will be using your site, you now need to identify what you want the audience to do on your site. Objectives are the actions you want your users to take. Often referred to as "conversions," some examples of objectives include completing a sale, downloading a file and registering for opt-in email. In all cases your objectives should support the needs of your target audience and the goals of your organization.

Pillar 4: Metrics

Having defined what it is you want your audience to do on your site, you need to create a plan for measuring if in fact they do it. The goal is to not only define what to measure, but how to measure it. The objectives identified earlier in the process not only define actions, but they also identify pages, files, database interactions and other web components that need to be measured. (Note: Once you have identified the components and pages you are going to track, you will need to identify a process for using web analytics to monitor activity and optimize your site going forward.) Once you have determined what actions and web components you will measure along with how you will measure them, you are ready to go.

By defining these four critical pillars you will have a strong, strategic "get there" foundation from which to build, manage and guide the development of your site.

Good luck and good design.

If you'd like to learn more about Movéo Integrated Branding, please call 630.570.4800 or contact us here.

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