Does anyone remember the early days of Web site design? A time when it was cool just to design a 'website', any website, like a cowboy riding into the Wild West with nothing but your wits to guide you.
The speed at which companies built sites was reminiscent of a gunfight; the Web arrived, someone shouted "draw!" and everyone rushed to build a site more quickly than the other guy.
Well, those gun-slinging days may be over, and that cowboy posse may have moved on; but the Internet frontier remains just as wild and there is still plenty of unknown territory to stake out. Building a website is a major undertaking, a task demanding the combined efforts of many in an organization.
Now an integral element of marketing strategy, websites must meet complex interrelated needs, perform well in the search engines, and must do so while providing exceptional user experiences.
Even in the year 2006, another major shift is taking place in business and it is being driven by Internet technology. Though somewhat quieter than the initial information revolution, the shift to the Web 2.0 Internet, where customers can interact directly with an organization, is happening.
Customers are developing higher expectations of the Internet, and the services organizations can provide via the Web. Increasingly, customers expect to be able to visit a website and conduct business, purchase goods, and obtain customized information.
However, a great number of Web sites currently do not meet visitor expectations. Many people can recall frustrating experiences registering for an event or making a purchase online. Given the high level of resources required to develop these services, it is no longer feasible just to build a website; rather, organizations need to develop comprehensive Internet strategies tightly integrated with overall marketing, branding and organizational strategies.
Developing an effective Internet strategy demands much more than just building a website. Internet strategy takes time, expert knowledge of an organization's needs, its niche marketplace, its target consumers (audience), and the range of technology available. Having the right expertise is key; and without it, an organization risks wasting its investment in time and money. An Internet strategy must achieve three correlated goals:
First, and highest on any organization's priority list, a website must meet visitor expectations. Consumers not only expect up to date information, increasingly they expect to be able to interact with the organization, to exchange information, and to conduct business transactions online.
They expect the website to be easy to find, easy to recognize, and above all, easy to use; if not, the competition is just next door (a single mouse-click away). If an organization does not strive to provide the best user experience possible, they risk losing visitors and consequently losing business.
In a shift to an information services driven economy, there needs to be a renewed focus on 'the user experience'. An organization will soon be only as good as the online experience its website delivers.
Second, Internet strategy must be an integral part of an organization's overall marketing plan.
It must drive the organization's brand, and must be effectively marketed across all channels, from brochures and trade show booths, to search engines and e-mail messages. Media convergence is becoming a necessity: offline communications must mirror those online and vice versa. Inconsistency only undermines a brand.
Third, the technology involved must be well chosen, must meet consumer expectations, and must be robust.
The progress of server technology, software development, and the ever-increasing widespread adoption of high-speed Internet access and high-end personal computers are dramatically changing the Internet and how it is used.
Organizations must make informed choices regarding the technology they employ; it is imperative they choose the right tool for the job.
Technology, when chosen carefully and applied with business needs in mind, can introduce new efficiencies and increase profitability.
Obviously, developing a plan to achieve all of these goals is a challenging task, and most organizations do not possess the internal expertise to do so. Professional Internet services firms - firms with a sound knowledge of creative, business and marketing needs, and an ability to address those needs with technology - begin with the premise the web is a tool.
An organization's Internet strategy must make the best use of that tool to meet the needs of their customers.
Organizations should regard their Internet development partners as they do lawyers and accountants - standard service partners every successful organization must engage. A successful Internet strategy must address a wide range of elements.
Professional Internet Services firms ensure these issues are addressed by breaking them down into seven fundamental segments; the building blocks of business-driven Internet strategies
First and foremost, a website must clearly communicate an organization's brand; it must work in concert with all of organizations' communications tools (regardless of medium) to deliver one clear, consistent image. A well-defined identity helps customers identify an organization effortlessly and instills confidence in the marketing messages being delivered, not to mention the organization as a whole.
Exceptional user experiences set organizations above their competition. To create websites that are easily navigable, and present straightforward tasks, takes careful forethought, and accurate knowledge about visitors' abilities and goals, as well as the level of technology via which they are accessing the Internet.
There are two key ways to increase the usability of a site: First, create positive redundancy. Provide several different navigation features to appear on every page in the same location, for instance, a left-hand navigation menu, a search function, and a site map. Employ conventional web design cues, particularly those used by other organizations in the same industry.
Second, provide positive feedback. Each time a customer interacts with the site, give them a positive message explaining the result of their action, and what their next steps should be. Providing customers exceptional experiences works positively in two ways. It enables visitors to achieve their goals, thus reinforcing their overall positive perception of an organization. It also gives an organization the opportunity to retain and reengage site visitors.
If a website is easy to use, visitors are more likely to use it regularly. Simple but effective: regular, happy visitors are generally more open to targeted marketing strategies, helping an organization to drive particular products or services, as necessary.
Online visibility is a third critical component of a successful Internet strategy. A staggering 85 per cent of Internet traffic comes from the top three engines: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Achieving top rankings in search engines requires professional expertise. Search-engine algorithms are constantly updated, and search-engine spiders are engineered to find website structures that fit certain criteria. While this can create difficulties for the uninformed, knowledgeable and diligent search-engine marketers can reap great rewards.
Business-to-business (B2B) organizations know the value of a new customer is typically very high. And once an affiliation has been forged, the lifetime value of that single business relationship can be in the hundreds, thousands, or even millions, of dollars. That makes search-engine placement a particularly critical part of many B2B marketing strategies. Regardless of where B2B prospects are in the buying cycle, chances are that searching is part of their due-diligence information collection routine.
A well-crafted search marketing plan, including both paid placements and organic (non-paid) search strategies, is an organizations' best approach to ensure potential customers seeking this type of information find the site.
While it is sometimes difficult to assess, measuring the success of organic search engine results versus paid placements provides valuable information when allocating future marketing funds.
When developing a solid search engine strategy, it is critical to develop a good follow-through process. The landing page that visitors view first on your web site must be exceptional. First impressions count, and an excellent first impression reinforced by an immediate "call to action" is the best strategy an organization has to engage and retain potential customers. A landing page therefore needs to have engaging content that asks the visitor to go one more step and collect some information from this visitor in exchange for more information.
This is the "call to action". A "call to action" can be measured against your search engine marketing spend for ROI. This process must be refined and measured and should be an integral part of your marketing strategy to funnel sales leads to your sales team.
Straightforward in theory, the constant delivery of timely and relevant web content can be difficult to put into practice. Customers expect a website to be absolutely up to date and accurate, but the process of developing and publishing content, particularly when whole departments are responsible for different sections of a site, can be difficult to manage. A web content management system can be utilized to ease this process.
Systems on the market today such as Hot Banana have all the latest features and most importantly, it was designed to make the updating process as simple as possible. Systems should provide for workflow management, content scheduling, versioning controls, navigation and web page management, and search-engine friendly features. An increasing importance should be placed on how well the system has been integrated with web analytic tracking software.
Just as Web content management and Web site marketing strategies must be on-going processes, so must statistical reporting on Web site traffic and activities. Accurate statistics provide valuable information an organization can use to evaluate - and to evolve - search engine and other marketing strategies, such as email, directory listings and even measuring the succes of trade shows.
It is important to invest in an accurate reporting tool, as most freeware applications do not provide the quality of information necessary to make informed Internet strategy decisions. Web analytics should be tailored to capture the unique design of your website, call-to-action landing pages; search-engine paid marketing referrals and email marketing strategies.
Simply stated, 100 per cent reliable Web hosting is imperative. Customers demand the sites and services they use be available, and reliable, not to mention secure. Today, server technology can easily provide round-the-clock reliability.
User interaction design - creating positive human experiences - is becoming more and more integral to professional Internet strategy development. For most businesses, a straightforward brochure site is insufficient. The era of the Web 2.0 Internet is here; customers expect to interact with organizations, conduct business, and achieve their goals online, any time.
Those organizations that push the Internet to deliver superior business value, that push the level of services and that move forward in search for new opportunities, will succeed. The building blocks discussed above are all fundamental to successful business development. So while nearly any cowboy can rope together a 'website', in the era of the Web 2.0 Internet, an organization should consult a professional Internet services firm as they would their accountant. Without expert knowledge, success is not possible.
