How to Develop a Website Strategy to Meet Your Goals?
The world of websites is changing with every passing day. Remember the time when people had an attention span of twelve seconds when visiting a site? Those days are long gone. Now, it has reduced to eight seconds!
To grasp the mindshare of your website visitors, you first need to begin by setting clear goals. And then you must develop a website strategy to support these goals. Here is how you can do so.
The first step to developing a website strategy is to build comprehensive and clear goals. After all, how can you align your website strategy to your goals unless you have clear goals, to begin with?
How can you develop your goals? You must begin by considering what you want from your website. What are the metrics that will judge your performance? For instance, for some sites, generating leads is all that matters. For others, they are at a stage where they wish to build a brand image by establishing credibility.
Think of what objectives you want to achieve. Do you wish to generate a given amount of traffic? Are you looking for a high conversion rate? Do you care about building loyalty to your website through your content?
Be clear about your goals and relay them to the web development company. This will ensure that the two of you are on the same page. It will help you to create a strategy that helps in achieving your goals and performance benchmark.
Once you have a clear understanding of what you wish to gain from your website strategy, it is time to develop your content strategy. Determine the type and content you will put into each topic that you cover on your site.
Useful and healthy content aligns to your objective in a positive way. For instance, if you aim to build credibility, the ideal substance for your website would be blog posts. These should be about your industry that will establish you as an expert in your sector.
The same can be achieved with white papers and guides. On the other hand, if you wish to generate leads, the right content would have more of a promotional tone with a relevant call to action.
Merely brainstorming potential ideas for ad copies, blog posts and web copies isn’t what website strategy building is all about. Before you begin writing it all, you must also clearly identify your audience.
Who is the ideal user of your service? What are their demographics, social needs, and profiles? How do you plan on changing their lives with your product or service? Each of these questions governs how your content will be created.
At the end of the day, you must grasp the attention of your customers and retain them in the long run. Therefore, you must know them inside out. This will allow you to give them exactly what they want. The perfect user experience depends on who your audience is. Know them to develop a sound website strategy.
Point of difference matters a lot, regardless of which sector you are operating in. What is the point of difference? This element refers to a feature, attribute or benefit that only your product or brand delivers. Every company needs one to stand out from competitors and to have a distinct position in the mind of the audience.
You can also view your point of difference as being your value proposition. You don’t just need one. You also need to communicate it as well. Your website can be an excellent platform to relay your value. Make it a part of your site strategy.
Highlight your accomplishments in your site. Decide how to do so via the plan you create. For instance, you can choose to reflect it as part of your service page or on the homepage. This decision will depend on your objectives and the size of your marketplace like ebay.
You need to set measurable goals in your website strategy. Any plan is incomplete without measures of performance. Why? Well, how else would you know whether the said plan has been successful in meeting your desired goal unless you have metrics regarding its health?
Brainstorm ideas of all possible indicators of success. This can vary from website to website. For starters, if you are interested in generating leads, a good measure of success can be the number of contact forms that are completed. If you merely care about building brand awareness, impressions on the website and the traffic it receives will be prime factors for you to track.
Decide how frequently you will monitor performance via your designated health metrics. You must also consider reassessing the importance of each after a significant period. Maybe after six months, site visitors might not be a good indicator of success since you have achieved the desired brand awareness. So, you must alter your performance metrics, goals and strategy according to the changing environment.
Make changes to your strategy on the basis of the environment. Assess the improvements that you have to make and the goals that you now have to achieve and then repeat the same process.
Meet your unique goals by developing the right website strategy for your business. Remember, online presence is very crucial for your business. Don’t take it lightly at all. Nowadays, websites help in gaining more mindshare than anything else in the marketing mix. Create a marketing strategy and then develop a robust site. It will surely take your business to new heights of success.
Audrey Throne is a mother of a 3-year old and a professional blogger by choice. Throne is passionate about lifestyle, business, automotive, technology and management and blogs frequently on these topics.
Find her on Twitter: @audrey_throne.