Getting Started
How do I Develop a Business Strategy for my Website?
Good for you for recognizing your website needs a business strategy. Before building your website decide what you want it to accomplish and what functionality you need.
- Some websites are structured and designed specifically to generate leads, others serve as an online brochure, some enable customer service.
- Sometimes the business goal is to establish a business’s credibility.
- Some websites are designed for public relations/media management, or to present the business owner or specific staff members as Subject Matter Experts (SMEs).
Your goals, whatever they are, should be based on your value proposition, a thorough understanding of your target market, buyer personas, and the prospect/customer’s need for information throughout the sales process.
When setting business goals and thinking about content (the copy on the page, Blogs, videos, etc.), remember you only have seconds to:
- Communicate what your website (business) has to offer
- How it can remedy their problem(s)
- Or answer the questions that brought them there.
Be clear and concise about how your business can address the prospect’s pain points.
- What exactly are they looking for? Is your website providing it?
- Is there a strong Call to Action (CTA) and a way to capture prospect information?
A website can be more than a brochure, it can be a lead generator.
Test, test, test. Test your business assumptions. You won’t know how well you’re meeting your goals unless you have Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and can measure and analyze the results. Measure those things that directly affect your business. How many leads have been generated? Not just how many visitors have landed on your website, but how long did they stay on each page; what pages did they visit? Did one page generate more leads or engagement than others? A good tool to use for measuring and analyzing results is Google Analytics (it’s FREE); your web developer can help you install Google Analytics and an ancillary product from Google called the Search Console.
Determining your website business strategy in five easy steps:
- Decide what you want your website to do: set goals
- Develop a plan and set goals on how the website will support revenue goals
- Clearly and concisely determine how your business addresses the visitor’s pain points, and how this will be reflected in the website design and branding approach
- Test your business assumptions
- Measure, Analyze, and Optimize
From a business perspective, it is important to recognize, that while a website project has a beginning, middle and end when it goes live, a website is never really done.