Written by Fernando Maciá
Índice
What defines a high-performance website is that everything on it has been defined in terms of meeting objectives. Through careful planning, the web is integrated into the fabric of the company to help achieve its strategic objectives. Choosing the right people to lead the corporate web creation project is key for the result to be a high performance website.
The development of a new website involves the implementation of a series of steps aimed at achieving a new presence of the company on the Internet that actively contributes to the overall strategic objectives that the company has set. For the web to fulfill this role, it is necessary:
- that they have set their objectives correctly
- means of measuring the achievement of these objectives are provided for.
- that these objectives are aligned with the company’s overall strategy
In this sense, the corporate website must act as one more element within the marketing-mix of the company and the investment of time, money and resources allocated to it can only be justified to the extent that the website plays a significant role in the creation of value for the customer and the production of benefits for the company.
From the Web-Showcase model to the Web-Business-Unit model: the high-performance Web
Despite the obviousness of the above lines, most corporate websites are still acting as a mere showcase, a simple electronic support where to dump the pre-existing printed information of the company without a clear objective and without a visible strategy that denotes the creation of value for the customer or contribution of benefit to the company.
This common situation is often rooted in the web creation process itself. Specifically, in the selection of the people who participate in this process, both by the company itself and by the company contracted to develop the website. In this first installment, we are going to focus on the people responsible for the creation of the website by the company. We will see below how the composition of this team has a direct impact on the approach to the project of creating a website, with a clear reflection in the architecture of the site and with a final direct influence on the performance that can be expected in the long term of the company’s presence on the Internet.
If a single department is in charge of implementing a web project, it will inevitably lead to a portal design that will reflect the partial vision of that department and that will be focused, in one way or another, on those aspects that the people working in it master the most. If, for example, the web design is entrusted to the IT department, it is very likely that the focus will be on the processes, on aspects such as compatibility with the company’s internal management systems, etc. If, on the other hand, it is the sales department that must manage the project, we could expect a website focused mainly on the aspects related to the sale of products or services, but where those related to the company’s corporate information, sponsorship or patronage activities, after-sales service, etc., are not properly represented.
The creation of an interdepartmental team involving at least one representative from each of the company’s departments is therefore essential in this first stage of web planning. As to who should lead this team, it depends on the approach that the general management of the company wants to give to the web, but it seems logical that it should be the Marketing department that, with the contribution of the rest of the team members, should lead the project.
The two fundamental aspects to be defined by this working group will be:
- Definition of target audiences to be addressed by the website
- Definition of the objectives to be met by the website for each target audience.
Definition of target audiences
In the definition of the website’s target audiences, we can clearly see how important it is to have representatives from each department. It is clear that Commercial will immediately refer to customers. And Purchasing will top its list with Suppliers. The General Management may also wish to have a section for informing the Partners or Shareholders. Marketing will want to attract new potential customers, but you may also want to contact importers, exporters, partners or franchisees…
In this way we would arrive at a list of different profiles of potential Web users:
- Customers
- Potential customers
- Prescribers
- Partners
- Partners
- Shareholders
- Representatives
- Opinion leaders
- Importers
- Exporters
- Franchisees
- Distributors
- Installers
- After-sales services
- Pressure groups
- Media and communications
- Society in general
- Etc.
Does this mean that we should undertake a website that from the outset meets or fulfills the expectations of all departments and all possible target audiences? Not at all. What we mean is that it is important to consider, at the very moment of planning, all conceivable target audiences so that a hierarchy of priorities can then be established according to their greatest contribution to value creation. We can divide the entire project into phases to be undertaken progressively in the order of priorities decided.
If we take into account all the possibilities, it is our decision to give priority to some and postpone others in a process where there is no room for improvisation. So, once the list of target audiences has been defined, the next step is to order them from most to least contribution to value creation. The objective here is that, for each target audience that we define and consider sufficiently important, there is a content or functionality on our website that serves to justify their visit and can respond to their expectations. Overlooking this point can be much more costly once the project is already in the programming or publishing phase.
Definition of objectives
The next point to be decided by the interdepartmental working group is: for each target audience listed above, define what objectives the web can accomplish more efficiently or cost-effectively than by other means previously employed, or what NEW OBJECTIVES it can accomplish that were not being pursued previously. These objectives will be tactical and must be aligned with the strategic objectives set for the website. Again, having people from different departments will give us a much broader view. Let’s see:
Objectives for the target audience Clients:
- Increase purchase frequency
- Incentivize cross-buying
- Customer loyalty
- Converting customers into prescribers
- Alternative sales channel
- Etc.
Objectives for the target audience New Customers:
- Increase the rate of new customer acquisition.
- Reduce the cost of acquiring new customers
- Increasing the geographic scope of the clientele: reaching new markets
- Demonstrate the product to new customers
- Increase our brand’s branding
- Etc.
Objectives for target audience Distributors:
- Create a repository of promotional material
- Create a single, centralized source of pricing information and stock availabilities
- Etc.
And so on for each target audience
These are just a few examples. The important thing at this point is to define, for each of the target audiences on our list, the objectives to be met by the website. And, again, prioritize each of these objectives. Some of these objectives may be proposed from the moment the website is launched and others may be undertaken in successive phases.
Definition of resources and deadlines
After defining the different target audiences and the objectives that the website must meet for each target group, the company must also allocate the appropriate personnel, investment and time resources to the project in order to guarantee a minimum chance of success.
The time of websites that were alive only while they were under construction, and that passed away as soon as they were published, has passed into history. Nowadays, a website is like any other business: every day we have to open the shutters, take calls, produce new content, study what our customers want, figure out new ways to respond to changing demand and meet their expectations. It will also be necessary to foresee the necessary resources not only for technical maintenance, hosting, etc. but also for traffic dynamization: natural positioning in search engines, creation of new contents, payment of sponsored links, e-mailing campaigns, banners, etc. as well as the logistics that may arise from online sales, payments, etc.
Web 2.0, with its vocation for greater levels of participation by all users, opens up new opportunities for visibility on the Web, but it also requires a greater effort to focus and channel these efforts in favor of the company in an environment where the voice of any user can have an enormous impact.
Allocating resources also involves describing ways to calculate the Return on Investment (ROI) of the resources invested. It will be time to quantify the objectives set, define the measurement mechanisms to be used to determine their achievement and assign them different compliance deadlines in accordance with the resources invested.
Conclusion
When a company decides the time has come to have a new website, it is very risky to delegate the responsibility of the project to a single department. Whichever one is chosen, it seems reasonable that the resulting website would shine in the aspects closest to the chosen department and would present serious shortcomings in other aspects that it masters less. It is therefore imperative to have an interdepartmental working group that can bring different perspectives from different areas of the organization. Once the strategic objective of the website has been defined, we will define the target audiences we want to reach and what we intend to achieve with each one of them: new customers, loyalty, distributors, cross-selling, support… And all this will have to be allocated resources of personnel, money and time not only in the phase of creating the website, but also once it is published, as happens with any other area of the company.
