A lot of times when people are doing a new website, they skip over the strategy – out of fear it’s going to be too expensive, too time consuming, or that consultants are going to come in and portray them incorrectly. The fact of the matter is, defining your strategy upfront is really one of the most important things you can do when you’re first developing a website. Here are three ways to infuse strategy into your website projects:
1. Make sure that your brand is intact
One thing we consistently see are brands that lose shape over time. The brand loses the pillars that originally crafted the iconic name. They forget who they are, what they do, etc. Fine-tuning your brand doesn’t have to take a long time. We’ve found that when we help our clients, the biggest advantage is that we bring an outside perspective. We’re able to end conversations that have been going in circles by laying down a pretty straightforward process. So again, this doesn’t have to be an extensively long process, but it essential to your website.
2. Identify with your audiences
We’ve come to a point in marketing where if you’re not talking to your audiences, you’re so far behind it’s immobilizing your business. We help our clients identify those few audiences that are going to amount in the most business, by really getting to understand them. Sometimes this can take two or three interviews with different clients or prospects to really understand what they’re thinking and engrain ourselves into their views and perceptions. From there, we’re able to build personas and journey maps. We’ll map content to it making your brand highly relevant and empathetic so that your audiences will see that you really care and that you’re well connected to them.
3. Tie your website strategy to your overall business strategy
A lot of businesses fail to tie they overall business strategy and their go-to-market strategies to their website. Is the website delivering on the things that you’re trying to do with your overall business strategy? This is another benefit we bring to the table with website projects because we come in as a third-party and we’re able to go through things rather quickly to help you tie the two together seamlessly and effectively. With our process, we’ll create objectives for the website that are clearly tied to the business goals and we can start to measure those and increase the effectiveness of your website.
