What does success look like?
This is the second part to our blog series where I am looking at key questions to consider when planning a redesign or a brand new website. Last time I introduced this series and explained the importance of considering your website under the umbrella of more general marketing terms and why planning and preparation is the key to success. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, it might worth be checking it out first before carrying on.
So what might our goals look like?
Well lets start broad. It might seem an obvious question but what is the overall purpose of your site going to be? For example, if this is a website for your business we can probably assume you want to drive more custom but that would be the overall purpose of your marketing, your site should have a more specific role to play. Some examples might be:
- To provide a platform for our existing customers to receive advice and customer support
- To directly sell our products to the consumer
- To directly sell products to other businesses
- To specifically promote new products and services
- To educate and provide resources to a specific market sector
- To drum up support for a campaign
- To promote local events in the community
- To change opinion or correct a misconception
- To provide a platform for social interaction between your market peers
- To provide a way for potential new customers to contact you for a quote for further information
I could go on forever, but there are just a few to get you thinking. Try and be as specific as you can. Of course it is highly probable that your site will have multiple goals and functions. It is a worthwhile exercise to write them down in order of importance. For example:
My primary goal is: To promote our services to new potential clients and provide a channel for them to contact us through.
My secondary goal is: To advertise and provide means for customers to book courses, training days and webinars
My tertiary goal is: To increase the number of newsletter subscriptions to allow us to promote services and courses through email marketing
With these three goals in place the purpose, structure and even design of the site is beginning to form as we now have some criteria that needs to be met.
Its well worth taking your time over this initial stage. When you start to ask these questions, quite often ideas begin to surface. Chat to colleagues, brainstorm ideas, research competitors and hone your ideas until you have a solid and specific list of goals.
The SMART (ER) method
If you are like me, you can only listen to theories for so long before you start to get frustrated and want to get into the nitty gritty of what it means in practice and how you action it. This is why I like the SMART method for goal setting. SMART is a criteria for helping to set goals and objectives and is commonly attributed to Peter Ducker’s ‘Management by Objectives’ concept. The letters broadly conform to the words:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound.
I say broadly because other words are sometimes used although the overall meaning stays largely the same. Using this method helps us to be practical about our goals and how we go about achieving them.
I will just briefly go through this method to try and explain how you can use it to set goals for your site.
Specific
We have already touched on the need to make specific goals rather than just general and ambiguous ones - however, there are four key questions we can use to help us do this.
What - What do I want to achieve?
Why - Why is achieving this goal important?
Who - Who needs to be involved? Who is the target audience? (more on this in a later blog post)
How - What needs to be in place for this to happen.
The how question is interesting. Lets take one of our previous goals as an example.
To increase the number of newsletter subscriptions to allow us to promote services and courses through email marketing
So what is required to satisfy this goal?
- A sign up form that the user can easily find and enter their details into
- Some sort of spam prevention
- Clear description that the user knows exactly what they are signing up to
- Possibly some sort of incentive of why they should sign up?
- High quality content the the page - so that the user has confident that they newsletters will be of a good quality
- Some explanation of the content of the newsletters so the user can make an informed decision if they want to sign up
- Information on the frequency of newsletters
- Clear reasons why the user would be missing out if they didn’t sign up
- Multiple opportunities on the site to sign up
- Premium position on the page for the sign up form
This is just naming a few, but you can see if you want your users to sign up to your newsletter there is a lot of information and things to consider to enable them to do so.
Measurable
Simply put - If your goal is not measurable then you won’t know if it is a success or not. In our example one measure would be to know if we are receiving more newsletter sign ups or not but that doesn’t give us a huge amount of information about the whole customer experience and journey. Maybe the visitor is clicking on a link to the newsletter sign up page but not entering their details, or maybe they are but they are not clicking on the link in the confirmation email. If this is the case then we will need to review these stages and look at why this might be happening.
Google analytics is one of the most useful tools you have freely at your disposal for measuring success of goals and where in the customer journey needs improving. We will do a specific blog post on analytics at a later date.
Attainable
We need to be realistic with our goals. Its great to dream big but it might be asking a little to much to expect your newsletter subscription list to grow from 200 to 2 million in a month! A key question to refer to here is our how question. How will the goal be accomplished? Do our solutions to this question make our goal attainable or not?
Relevant
Although on the surface this seems obvious, we do need to seriously consider how relevant our goals are, that we have set. These goals need to sit inline with our brand and other marketing efforts. Some key questions to ask are:
- Is the goal worthwhile?
- Is it the right time?
- Is your website the right tool to achieve this goal with?
- Is it in line with your business/organisation goals and overall marketing strategy?
Your goal might be a great idea but unless you can answer yes to these questions it might not pass the relevancy test.
Time-bound
Setting a time frame for your goal is a key aspect to your goal setting. It helps to focus your time and efforts and helps to stop your stop jumping from one task to another. It helps establish a sense of urgency. Of course, if your goal is highly relevant there should be a level of urgency to your goal anyway. It can be useful to set both short and long term time frames with perhaps some key miles stones on the way.
So what is SMARTER?
SMARTER extends the SMART concept and includes Evaluate and Re-evaluate. As our businesses and organisations grow and evolve our goals and ways in which we achieve them will also. Marketing is an ongoing process and we can never really say our website is “finished” and move onto something else.
Hopefully this post has given you a kick start and some tools to help you with the planning process for your website. Getting these fundamentals right at the start can really make a big difference in the success of your website.
Next time we will look at your target audience and how you can make sure your site is suitable for your potential visitors.
