If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that your web presence is more valuable than ever. Your website, or better stated, your online real estate that you have full control over, is your best chance at impacting your audience. Simply put, you need a website strategy.
Sixty-eight percent of consumers say COVID-19 elevated their expectations of companies’ digital capabilities.
If you are not focusing on a website strategy for meeting the expectations of 68% of consumers, you’re missing a huge opportunity. To get you there, we want to help you get clear on your goals and make sure you are putting your best foot forward in this digital world.
Let’s go over what you might consider in your website strategy for 2021.
What are your goals?
The first and most important thing to consider are your goals. It’s important to think about your business goals at a high level to start and not just your website goals (we’ll get to those, too).
- Has your business been required to shift this past year?
- Were you a brick and mortar that suddenly found themselves doing 100% of business online?
- Are you selling products, services, or both?
It’s important to get really clear about the ‘what’ here so that you have your north star that will help drive decisions as you work through your website strategy.
Some examples could be:
- Drive more sales to a specific sector of your business
- Build a more targeted email list
- Allow previously face-to-face services to become digital
Why are you setting this goal?
Having goals is great, but without a backing ‘why,’ you’ll have a harder time staying the course and hitting those goals. Sometimes the ‘why’ can take some work to get to but you really should take the time to get there.
Let’s say you’re a marketing manager at your company, and your boss comes to you and says, “Our goal for 2021 is to update the website!”
Okay… that’s great and all, but why? “It’s time and something we should have already done before.”
Hmm… but why? “We are not getting enough leads.”
Why not? “We’ve had to move from in person sales to digital sales and we’re not showing up on Google when people search for our services.”
Now we have an idea of what’s going on!
Leads that were coming from face-to-face business meetings because sales people were flying all over are no longer coming in. The website is not optimized for search engines, so it’s not showing up. Our goal is now to update the website, making sure it’s SEO optimized and things are in place to capture leads. Dig in and ask why as many times as you can until there are no more answers.
How do you plan on reaching these goals?
This is where the fun part begins. We’ve done the hard work of creating the goal and stating the why; now let’s figure out how to pull it off, specifically with your website.
- What do you need to reach your goal?
- Will it require updated branding guidelines?
- What third-party services might be helpful?
- Do you need to take payments online?
- Will people be booking to your calendar from the website?
- Is there some business process automation that could be helpful?
- Do we need to create something custom?
It’s important to list out all of the needs of your website strategy up front so that we can plan how all of those things will work together.
What does the outcome of a great website strategy include?
A great website strategy team will work with you to ensure that all of your ducks are in a row before you begin the project. This will allow the team(s) doing the set up, building, and integrations to have a clear vision of what the expectations are.
Here are a few things you would see:
- Project overview and timeline
- Branding guidelines
- User personas
- User paths or journeys
- Design mockups
- Technical and/or functionality details
- Level of effort
- Resource or people Requirements
Some of these may be items that you or your company have already prepared, or they may be things you need help piecing together. Having all of these packaged together will greatly increase the likelihood of a team knowing what success looks like for building or updating your website, and when you’re ready to work with a team to get you there, contact us!