KEY CONSIDERATIONS FOR PLANNING AN ONLINE STRATEGY

• What primary role should my web site play relative to my business strategies and goals? Answer this question first and prioritize if there are multiple roles. This is based on the nature of the business and the products and services sold, the life stage of the customer base, the markets served, and the resources available. For example, roles could be to deliver more customers in current market, access new customers/markets, or generate new customers more efficiently or a combination of those. These are primarily revenue generation roles. Alternatively, primary focus could be to serve current customers more efficiently or add more value in order to improve margins, retention and share of customer's wallet.
  
  
• Know where you are starting. Review current web site traffic to determine if there is a match to your intended target based on your priorities. If you've got a good base of web visitors, build on that with more of the same and improve content and interaction choices based on your measurements of results. If you do not have the right traffic today, the project will be more involved in order to find and attract the visitors you need to accomplish your goals followed by the improvement and added value to them once they arrive at your site.
  
  
• What personnel, functions, departments and resources need to be involved or contribute to this prioritized role? Breaking down silos early and often prevents major disconnect between marketing, sales, web teams, IT and product groups. There needs to be cross-functional teams built early on to create and perpetuate success. Ownership needs to be determined based on who is the owner of the relationship overall with the targeted group (i.e. not just the web). This is normally a strategic marketing segment or product team - preferably a marketing team focused by customer segment.
  
  
• What results should be identified as benchmarks for measuring success of the web presence? Focus initially on what benchmarks can be set rather than setting goals. Goals are set after benchmarks are established based on how much you want to improve upon the current reality. This is where many marketers go wrong early in the process. They have no benchmarks or they don't have them set at meaningful and actionable points in the buying process. If you set a goal of generating 1000 leads but you don't know what it would take to generate those leads and this is not close to your current web site lead generation level - this is not an actionable or meaningful goal. If however, you know that you are currently generating 50 qualified leads monthly at a cost of $5.00 per lead this is your benchmark (current state). Your goal might then be to increase your leads by 10% and lower cost per lead by 20%. When you begin setting goals, start with high level results and break them down into sublevel results. In this example, a lead would need to be broken down into several preliminary stages in order to set web site visitor/action benchmarks.
  
  
• What resources can I assemble or gain access to in order to successfully build and launch programs and what milestones will I set in order to judge impact and results so as to increase/decrease resources based on results? Assess whether you have the resources in-house to fully analyze and optimize your online results. This involves everything from whether you have in-house resources to make design changes to your site, marketing staff to analyze data, appropriate web tools to measure and track your campaigns etc… Trying to do all of this in-house can be problematic if you do not have the right tools and properly trained staff. Set milestones by month or quarter to assess progress and increase or decrease resources - both people and budgets accordingly.
  
  
• How can target audience feedback enhance my online initiatives? Involve your target audience early and often. Most successful web sites involve focus groups and surveys for initial design and emphasis. They then utilize ongoing intercept survey mechanisms to continue to hear directly from web site visitors how their experience was. The 3 critical questions to ask your audience are, "why did you visit the site," "did you accomplish your goals," and "did you like the experience."
  
  
• How should I set out to align my web site for search engine users? Study the search habits of your intended target audience to better gauge the "information missions" they will be on. Building pages associated with what the market is looking for is much better than building out a large site and then trying to match this to the search engines.
  
  

These are just some of the key considerations for planning your online strategy. There is a lot more information to consider along the way. Next month we'll look at tips for designing web sites to create value for both you and your customers.