Define business goals:

Defining business goals for a website is the first very important step in making your website an effective business tool.  Many people know they need a website; they hear it from their friends, family, and coworkers but rarely know why they really need one.  Defining business goals before embarking on the web development process is very important because these goals act as a context for decision making. Business goals like ‘selling more x-widget’, ‘gaining more brand visibility’, and ‘receiving more sales calls’ can easily be deduced into actions users can accomplish on your site.  If these goals have been defined and your web developer is aware of them, they will be used as a context throughout the entire development process and will greatly increase your website’s effectiveness.

Action Items:

• Define one (1) business goal for your website.
• Deduce this business goal into one or more actions users can accomplish on your site.
• Write a call-to-action that can be placed on your site to motivate users to accomplish your business goal.

Measure everything

Why measure everything?  Because your website is a crucial part of your sales funnel and, unlike many advertising mediums can be iteratively improved to better forward your business goals.  There are hundreds (thousands perhaps) of analytic software suites that exist to make you more aware of how your website is performing.  Many of these tools are free and only require an investment of time on your part.   I always like to use the analogy of your website as a digital salesperson.  Differences being that you can program your website to convey any message you like consistently to every visitor that reaches your site.  If you had a salesperson that was out selling 24 hours a day, 7 days a week creating conversations with your customers, wouldn’t you want to measure their performance?  Website analytics are just what you need to start leveraging your website for its potential as a powerful business tool.

Action Items

• Install analytics tracking software on your site (try www.google.com/analytics/ -- it’s our favorite!)
• Setup automatic reports to be sent to your inbox every week (just to be sure you stay informed).

Iteratively improve

A very important thing to know about the web is that there is no magic formula that works for every industry.  Each business has very different goals, target audiences and norms that affect your visitors’ every move.  The only way to know what formula works for your business is to try many approaches, measure everything, and deduce which approach works best.  In an age where nearly every website is built with some type of content management system (software that makes it easy for end-users to make changes to their website) there’s just no excuse to leave your website as-is for eternity.  A practical example of trying several approaches is to create multiple versions of your website’s home page, test each one for a month (depending on traffic volume) and determine which results in more inquiries.  Seem time consuming? Maybe a little painful?  Well, at this point, it’s a good time to think of the pain you’ll experience when you realize your website is delivering ZERO sales for your company.  This same approach and logic can be applied to nearly every element of your site.  It’s what we like to call the “scientific process” of improving your website’s effectiveness.  Using science as base for decision making rather than intuition will ensure you never make a move in the wrong direction and are constantly improve your website’s ability to forward business goals.

Action Items:

• Work with your marketing team and developer to create three (3) permutations of your home page (this could be as simple as coming up with several unique call-to-actions to test)
• Determine a reasonable length of time to run each version.
• Measure the net effect each of these versions have on your business goals and use this data as a guide for determining which version is most successful.
• Repeat on other areas of your site!