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The Key to a Profitable Website Strategy

Marketing is what drives customers to a website, not what goes on the website.

There is a longstanding website strategy that uses an ecommerce or lead generation website as a marketing tool to raise awareness of new products and promote brand priorities.

This strategy is broken.

Marketing is what drives customers to company and brand websites, not what should exist on the website.

What should exist is content designed to help customers accomplish two goals: research and purchase products.

Your content should be focused on helping customers research and purchase products. Click To Tweet

The old brand strategy

Most companies are organized to manufacture and deliver products across a complex supply chain. They have processes for managing production, margins, quality assurance, advertising, marketing, PR, and communications.

These processes extend to the company website strategy that witness a biennial exercise in hiring a marketing agency to redesign the website completely with reckless disregard for past lessons, but with cool new features and design.

This old model lacks an effective process for managing customer service and success on the company website. This makes it nearly impossible to create or redesign a website that is relevant to customers. Ultimately, this directly affects the revenue earning potential of the website.

Typical business website strategy

  • Exists to serve the brand
  • Reflects the company organization, rather than being organized around customer goals
  • Is not regularly tested with users
  • Is not regularly updated to improve user experience
  • Is completely redesigned every 2-3 years from the ground up
  • Is purchased through an ineffective Request For Proposal (RFP) process
  • Has poorly integrated technology and is hampered by regular re-platforming
  • Has little to no data tracking installed, and reports on the wrong metrics
  • Have little to no inventory management
  • Is supported by a company’s marketing budget
  • Is understaffed by over-tasked people

Profitable business website strategy

  • Exists to serve the customer
  • Is built from the ground up for customer goals: research, purchase, and support
  • Is constantly tested with users and are regularly optimized based on findings
  • Has high quality content that is regularly curated to help customers get things done
  • Has complete data tracking installed and uses regular data analysis to identify opportunities to improve experience
  • Displays and interacts perfectly on any device
  • Has simple organization and is regularly updated based on use
  • Is optimized continually for design, content, and navigation improvements
  • Has a dedicated budget and dedicated staff to support customers and manage site content and inventory
  • Have a team that regularly connects with customer service to improve site content and functionality

The new brand model

The ultimate goal of the new model is to have a company’s digital marketing team completely focused on ensuring that everything goes right for its customers online.

If the team understands what the company’s customers are trying to accomplish online, it can spend its time solving the problems they run into along that path.

Websites organized around the customer convert more and make more money. The more you invest in making your site serve your customers, the better it will serve your business and its bottom line.

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The Good