Developing a best in class website that provides business solutions
07/09/09 06:24 AM Filed in: Internet
Trends
Facebook and
Twitter have a lot in common but the one thing that
they probably would not like to share is that they
have not yet figured out how to monetize their
social media sites to provide an ROI. The key
lesson here is that ROI measurement and tools have
to be integrated into the strategy BEFORE you
launch an online program. The model of “build it,
get the audience and add ROI later” doesn’t work
because more and more users control the web not
you.
Step 1: Define you business objectives
-What are the marketing objectives in the marketing plan?
-What can we do online to meet the marketing objectives?
-What are key measurement criteria to ensure success? (i.e. awareness level with target audience of X%)
Step 2: What are our user needs and wants?
-What do users want when they come to our website?
-How to they want the information?
-How can we pull them into the website for a great brand experience?
-What are our competitors saying about us on their website?
Step 3 ROI
-How are we going to measure ROI?
-What tools do we need to measure ROI?
-How can we integrate the tools into our website ?
-How can we ensure that we meet both business objectives and user needs for best ROI?
The biggest challenge seems to be marrying the ROI to both user needs and business objectives. Make the website too user friendly and there is a chance that you won’t meet ROI...make it too much about ROI and your users will leave your site with a high bounce rate and very little overall time on the site. How do you do this?
1. Acknowledge and sell to your internal influencers that the website is not about you or your brand/product it’s about users.
2. Ensure that you communicate across the organization how you are going to measure ROI for online marketing and get buy-in before you execute. You don’t want someone in finance saying that your ROI is not accurate after you launch.
3. Segment the messages: It’s about mass segmentation of one now. How can you provide each user with a customized message and great experience?