WISE Series Part I – Business outcomes and website – What is a WIN for me?

The role of the website and online presence has evolved…

The key question that you always want to start with is…

 
WHAT IS A WIN FOR ME?

What is your business goal?

Launching a new product?
Capturing market share in a specific segment?
Setting a revenue target for a certain business unit?
Cutting down customer support costs by 25%?
Getting more from the advertising campaigns?

Identify these key metrics. This is the foundation to design of all marketing campaigns. It also plays a central role in using web analytics as an intelligence tool.

THE ROLE OF YOUR WEBSITE

Once you have clarity on business outcomes, the next step is to understand where and how your website can help you in achieving those outcomes.

A few examples of what your website can do –

1. Sell the product(s) online.
2. Answer questions, facilitate discussion forums and cut down support costs.
3. Capture leads for the sales funnel.
4. Supports sales cycle. For example, prospects can download product catalogs, see case studies, request samples, review/download specs …etc. Each of these is a “mini-conversion” along the way to the final conversation (they became customers).
5. Empower sales team – it is a lot easier for sales team to point prospects to the relevant links on the website than providing the same information over email and/or phone calls over and over.
6. Build a database of prospects by getting them to sign up for a newsletter.
7. Engage customers and others before and after the trade show.
8. Promote and support sharing of your content on social media portals and RSS feeds. This can pull targeted prospects to you, and/or improve customer support and lower the cost.
9. Credibility that helps in closing deals in the sales process.

Each of these adds economic value to your business. Quantify that.

What is the potential value of a lead? How many leads do you need on average to convert one customer? What is the lifetime value of a customer?

If a prospect subscribes to your RSS feed, you have a very effective real time channel to distribute information. With quality content, this becomes a nice customer relationship development channel that helps the sales force in converting leads and quantifying the gains.

How many fewer phone calls did you receive since you launched a technical support portal? Did it help in cutting down support costs?

If you did email marketing before a tradeshow, how many leads did it produce? Did it provide value to your business?

Design information architecture of your website to help this asset realize its full value.

WHY DO THIS?

When you think of your website and the whole marketing program in terms of desired outcomes, it helps you in a number of ways.

1. You know what to measure. And as Peter Drucker says, “What gets measured gets managed.”
2. You know what your marketing is contributing to the business bottom-line.
3. It forces you to think in terms of different market segments. Organize and plan for each segment. This is a key to capturing market share and sustaining revenue targets.
4. It guides your focus to customer behavior, and not aggregates. The website gets 10,000 visits a month – so what? What does it mean to the business bottom-line, if anything?

What is your experience with the website design? I would love to hear your ideas on it as well.

WISE Web Intelligence Series – Measure and Achieve Business Outcomes

1. WISE Part One – Role of Website
2. WISE Part Two – Implement System to Measure and Test
3. WISE Part Three – Segment the Data
4. WISE Part Four – End Customer Behavior