One of the first things we notice about most small business websites is that they appear to lack focus, clarity, and direction. Many of them try to appeal to everybody rather than to a targeted market, others appear to have been thrown together with little thought at all and amount to nothing more than an online business card. These are all symptoms of poor planning.
For a website to succeed, for it to really contribute to your business' success, you must devote some time to planning and developing an effective strategy.
At a minimum, your plan should cover what your site's purpose is, who its intended audience is, and what action you want your visitors to take during or after their visit.
Purpose and Goals
Defining the business goals of your website is crucial, and you should do it as a first step whether you're launching a site for the first time or making changes to your existing site. Doing so establishes what purpose your website will serve and what it is expected to achieve.
Without clearly defined goals your website will be just like the majority of your competitors' websites. It will lack purpose and direction, and will probably fail to achieve anything at all.
A method that some people find useful when establishing goals for their website is to imagine their website as an employee and write a job description for it. You expect results from your employees, you hold them to certain performance standards, and you hired them to perform certain specific tasks. Should your website be any different?
Most services industry websites will have goals that relate to marketing or customer support. Retail websites will have goals relating more directly to sales. A classic car restoration company might focus its website on marketing and after-sale support by setting the following specific goals:
- 150 visitors per month
- 50 visitors per month viewing the "Our Services" section
- 10 new subscriptions per month to our ezine "Vroom"
- Top 3 listing on Google and Yahoo for terms such as "classic cars" and "car restoration"
- 1 hour response time to any questions posted to our online discussion forum
- Real-time updating of customers' work in progress
The website may fall short of some of these goals, at least initially, but by establishing them the company will ensure that its site has a clearly defined purpose and that the site's performance can be measured and tracked.
Audience
The next part of planning is to work out who your audience is. It sounds simple, but most companies don't take the time to clearly define who their site is trying to talk to. This isn't usually very difficult and can typically be derived from the goals. If your site's sole purpose is customer support then your target audience will consist of existing customers. If its purpose is marketing then your site should target people with an interest in your products or services.
It's important to get specific when defining your audience. No matter what you're selling your site won't interest everyone so you shouldn't waste time and money trying to cater to everyone. The classic car restoration company mentioned above probably isn't interested in people who don't own classic cars. It may even get more specific and only target wealthy collectors who don't have the time to work on their own cars.
The more specifically you can define your audience, the more specifically you can target them. And if your website is targeting an audience well, its chances of getting a response from that audience skyrocket.
Visitor Response
Now that you've defined who your audience is you should establish what you want them to do. Almost every website I see fails to give visitors a compelling reason to respond to the material. Without a "call to action," you are in essence saying to your audience, "Here is what I do. Make up your own mind as to whether or not you want to get in touch with me."
Don't leave them to decide for themselves! If you do, even those visitors that might have responded to you will probably find that they need to be doing other things. They might try to call you tomorrow, or next week, but they'll probably forget.
Compel them to respond to you immediately by creating a most wanted response that is of obvious benefit to them. It could be calling for more information, signing up for an event, subscribing to an ezine, or making a purchase. Whatever it is it has to be something that is beneficial to the user, and as risk-free as possible. If it isn't inherently valuable to them (and many of the examples I gave might not be perceived that way by your audience) then you have to add value to it. If it isn't risk-free, then you need to make it risk-free. Failure to do so will result in people ignoring your call to action.
Let's consider our classic car restoration firm. They could say "Call us today to discuss how we can help you." Fair enough. They've thought about their most wanted response and decided that they want to have visitors call them. But it's not very compelling, is it? On the other hand, they could offer a free seminar on car care and then say "At our free seminar you'll learn A, B, and C about caring for your cars. To reserve your place, call us today." Isn't that a little bit more persuasive?
Obviously your most wanted response needs to benefit you in some way, but if you fail to make it of benefit to your audience too, then you'll get very few people responding. Be creative with your most wanted response, just always bear in mind that somehow you have to persuade people to respond in that way.
The Extra Mile
If you've planned out all of the above, you're off to a good start, but clearly this is still a fairly basic plan. If you've got the time, you should also:
- Consider how you will measure the success of the site
- Establish success and failure standards for the website
- Consider any software or hardware requirements
- Define any usability and accessibility requirements
This list is by no means exhaustive, but it is a good place to start.
It's an old cliché that "if you fail to plan you plan to fail," but like most clichés, there is a huge element of truth to it. If you want your website to deliver results, if you want it to actually grow your business, then you need to plan very carefully what it will do and how it will do it.
Posted on
Tuesday, January 15, 2008 5:48 PM