Pillar 1 | Online Strategy

Online Strategy
Data Driven Insights

New Opportunities and Insightful Ideas
Growing your business online requires progressive marketing skills, technical savvy and most importantly a blend of strategic insight and diligent analysis that are nimble enough to meet shifting consumer and business demands. Whether you are selling online, finding prospects, or providing information it is imperative to define a strategic approach and then measure website interactions and marketing activities to gauge the effectiveness of the efforts. By establishing an initial baseline and then tracking the progress of each strategic initiative you can continuously evaluate the key metrics that will determine brand awareness, visitor engagement or conversion successes.

Ensuring positive online experiences for your website audience is achieved by following these fundamental strategic guidelines. As a business leader, senior marketer or small business owner, these key principals all apply to you and should be disseminated through your organization:

Define the Core Business Goals
Don't get caught up in the online hype that swirls around our industry and leads many to believe that by launching a website your existing business will flourish with new sales or a new business venture will spark overnight. Whether you are moving your business online to expand new revenue lines or launching a new business online, many of the age old business principals apply. So before you (re)launch a new site, take a step back and ask yourself and your team, "Why are we planning to do with this website?" Once you answer this overarching question, you can then move onto the micro aspects such as what are the success factors of the website. Will it be sales, leads, visibility or just a place for customers to learn more about your business. As you dive deeper into your online strategy, every single metric you measure should be tied back to your core business goals, which typically are revenue and profits. Make sure you map out these goals and get buy in from your President/CEO, Controller/CFO and others from marketing, operations and IT. By aligning all parties with consistent business goals and getting them all involved in the success of your online ventures, accountability will be clear and success will be more closely measured and achievable.

Define Your Online Audience
Whether keyword, demographic or site targeted advertising campaigns, your objective is to decrease cost-per-acquisition and increase return on ad spend. In order to achieve this, you need to ensure you understand who your target customer is first, then identify the online acquisition channels where you will find this customer, and then then launch campaigns that are closely monitored with analytics to gauge if they are successful or not. Some make the mistake by assuming their online customer base will be a replication of their offline customer base. Not true, especially for old business models. I can think of many consumer DM oriented organizations that had massive customer lists and then when launching online thinking those same customers would follow. This is also true of two other industries, banking and newspaper, where both had aging customer bases that tip-toed into the online world while the emerging customer base of tweens and gen x'ers never walked into a bank branch or read a newspaper. The motto here is that an online strategy can not be "one-size-fits-all". You need to consider how each customer segment will interact online and create experiences for each segment.

Awareness + Accountability with Analytics
The problem with most marketers is they never had the level of accountability that a President or Controller had in an organization. However, they never needed to because as long as the organization was doing well and the brand "looked good" then there wasn't an issue. To a marketers defense (and I'm one of them), if the organization wasn't doing well, they were the first to blame, even though it could have been a poor executive strategy that was flawed, a lackluster sales staff, or just a poor product/service to begin with. Analytics to the resue. Web analytics is where marketing and accounting intersect. The combination of creativity and accountability. See, in accounting, although there is certainly creative ways to work with the numbers and reporting, for the most part all aspects are measured and accountable . There is little grey area, at least not these days post Enron scandal. Plus much of accounting is rigid and structured. As an entrepreneur and CEO, I am always immersed in analytics in business as it revolves around an Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement. So for us executives that have a flavor for marketing, analytics is nothing new. However, for much of the web industry and traditional marketers, the ideas of numbers driving strategies and the concept of being "measured" is relatively new. I am in no way proposing that marketers shed their creative skills and ambitions, rather balance them with analytics to create accountability to ensure you are measuring what is working and what is not.

Balance Design and Function
There is a wealth of customer data that is too often ignored. It is free and it if you listen you can hear your customers telling you exactly what they are looking for. So with this, the world of web design needs to further evolve to involve more function with the aesthetics. I personally love great design, strong branding and integrated identity systems. But, they need to work. What I propose is a separate between the core brand design and the functional design application. What does that mean? In no way should an analyst be telling a marketer that they need to change their logo, swap their identify system from black and white to pink and purple or to scrap the custom font their design team created. What needs to happen though is more integration of user experience best practices for navigation, search results landing pages and overall content layout. This area of strategy could go on for pages, because you need to also include consideration for SEO best practices, like scrapping the pretty headline tag that is an image for a clean H1 title tag that will be indexed better by search engines. The point is to involve analysts and user experience professionals in the website design process, advertising creation and overall design strategy to ensure your design is not only inline with your brand/identity system, but is also working to function for the users that will be interacting with your brand.

Initiate New Ideas
Never stop evolving. The web moves so fast sometimes my team at EpikOne thinks I'm insane because we evolve our business model so often. What sometimes they don't understand is that I need to in order to stay competitive. Although we are an online consultancy and deeply embroiled in this space, it does not mean companies like us should be the only ones consistently initiating new ideas online. I'll sway this to the B2B industry, but it could apply to B2C as well. Having a website is no longer enough. You need to have a more holistic online strategy that engages your customers, retains them and makes them love your brand. An e-commerce retailer can no longer just be a "commerce" company, but also a "content" company. This is something I've preached for years, better alignment of commerce and content. Customers don't want to come back and shop every day, but you could be publishing content every day to keep them coming back. For B2B, having your services, company bio, key leaders and contact information is no different than having a brochure splattered online. Here is what we've done at EpikOne to retain customers online, add value to our customers, expand our reach and visibility and position ourselves as thought leaders.

Tools/Applications:
SiteScan - www.sitescanga.com
AnalyticsView - www.analyticsview.com

Content:
AnalyticsExperts - www.analyticsexperts.com
Analytics Talk - www.epikone.com/blog

We've also launched a free Google Analytics Setup Guide, a free Regular Expression Tester and many other tools and articles to strenghthen our community. It takes time and commitment but it will pay off in the end by increasing your volume of leads and visibility within your industry. Point is, don't be content with a single website; expand your web presence and constantly initiate new ideas in your organization to stay ahead of the competition. Especially in times like this, where being in a recession requires you to work harder to keep your edge.