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6 Simple Questions
 Websites built with the end in mind have a good chance of meeting your marketing objectives. In this article we explore six questions and see how asking them up front, then acting on the answers, can benefit a company:
1) What is the purpose of the site? Leads, downloads, sales, PR, etc...?
2) How will we know if the right people are visiting our website?
3) Will our website be an experience, or just a big advertisement?
4) How can we continuously improve it for our visitors?
5) How can we make it valuable enough to create return visits?
6) How will we know what people are doing on our site?
These imply that a website is in fact a system for continuously gauging the effectiveness of your message and how well you actually understand your target audience. It doesn't necessarily require a huge budget to answer these questions, but it does requires a willingness to act on the answers.
Let's see how a large company, with multiple product lines and services might answer these. If you are a small company, you will quickly see how this applies to you as well.
Our theoretical company sells windows, offers window repair service, specializes
in commercial window installation, offers residential installation, works with
contractors to design custom windows, and holds classes to educate the public
about different window technologies. To make it more interesting, they are in
competition with another company, about 25 miles away, that does the exact same
thing. Now that we've got the (very) basic setup, lets see how they might answer
the six key questions.
1) What is the purpose of the site?
They asked about 20 of their most trusted clients what they would like to see
in their website. The answer they got is that their clients want to be educated
first, then given the opportunity to speak with someone who can answer more questions.
Placing an order online never came up. From this management understood that
giving visitors an educational experience they value would most likely result
in phone calls coming in, and leads being generated. However, it became clear
in doing competitive research that this would require doing a lot of writing.
Their competition was already doing this, they just had not noticed it before
because they had not thought to monitor their competition's website closely and
learn it inside and out. But after having done this type of research now, they believed
they could build a website that would outperform their competition. They sought
and received permission to re-print helpful articles found on the websites of
their manufacturers.
2) How will we know if the right people are visiting the site?
The assumption was that if phone calls start coming, then the right people are visiting the site. The reality turned out to be a bit more subtle. By implementing visitor intelligence gathering, they were able to tell that a majority of their visitors were heading straight from their home page to their "Frequently Asked Questions" pages, and ignoring altogether the helpful articles. They then left the site. Why? Because, as it turns out, there was a menu item called "FAQs" and another one called "News". The company had put the articles under the "News" page. By changing the menu from "News" to "Advice" the traffic began flowing to the correct page. The phone started ringing, but not to the level hoped for.
3) Will our website be an experience, or just a big advertisement?
Their home page was very schizophrenic. Virtually every service to every possible
target audience was crammed in there. Worse, they did their dead level best to
try and make everything fit near the top of the page, so people wouldn't have
to scroll down the screen to see what they wanted. What they forgot is that what
people wanted was helpful information (in internet marketing these sorts of visitors
are known as "informational searchers"), not to be sold to. It was
still important to place their product and service descriptions on their home
page, but they tamed it down to focus just on the broader message of why they
were the best. This allowed their menu system to help segment their audience
and decrease the stress on the home page. Oh, their menus read: Commercial, Residential,
Contracting, FAQs, Advice, About Us, Contact Us. With the additional room recovered
on the home page they could now place the start of a couple of helpful articles.
Visitors could read the rest of the article by clicking on a "more" link that
took them to the full article on the Advice page. Now
visitors were getting the experience they wanted. They even made it so that visitors
could download or print the articles. This allowed the visitors to e-mail them
on to others. The company had unwittingly started an effective viral marketing
campaign, the phones started ringing more.
4) How can we continuously improve it for our visitors?
A pattern began to emerge. By reviewing the traffic patterns on the site and
their call logs, management noticed that commercial callers were most likely
to seek information about how specific windows complied with specific building
codes. Residential visitors and callers wanted to know how they could tell what
kind of window they had in their homes. By placing this type of information in
a downloadable format within their FAQs, then advertising on the home page that
this information was readily available, visitation patterns shifted accordingly,
and a week after this the calls that started coming were briefly about questions,
but more directly to place orders. They had started to decrease their sales cycle.
5) How can we make it valuable enough to create return visits?
Given that it takes far more effort to get a new customer than to keep an existing
one, and that it can take multiple marketing contacts before making a sale, their
website was built with return visitors in mind. This concept, known as "Site
Stickiness" was fulfilled through its educational aspect. Their site statistics
showed that visitors were indeed returning, up to 1/4 of their traffic was repeat
visitation, and these tended to occur mostly on the weekend. When management
checked with accounting, they found that residential orders had increased since
the website's inception. Now they were beginning to understand where new business
might be coming from. They modified their home page to appeal just a bit more
to residential clients. This included starting a newsletter focused on how to
keep windows clean, improving overall home energy efficiency, and offering online
coupons through local retailers for blinds and other things that the company
did not necessarily specialize in or sell.
6) How will we know what people are doing on our site?
By implementing visitor intelligence gathering, and by committing to review and understand what that information meant (the learning curve wasn't too bad, but it did take a few hours to really understand what they were looking at), management was able to start forming an opinion about their visitors and test it by making changes to the site.
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H o m e ⁄ In-Site: 6 Simple Questions
