Website Goals and Strategy
Your website should be designed for your target viewer.
The first step in developing a web strategy is to know your goals. The next step is to understand your target viewers - the people who you would like to attract to your website. If you know your viewers you can:
- Provide what they are looking for and answer their questions
- Provide web design that appeals to the particular group
- Adjust language and length of copy to suit
- Target online advertising and other media to appropriate sites and locales
What are your goals?
Think about all the possible things a website could do for your business. Some possibilities:
Promote the brand
- Enhance the image of your company or product.
Increase Sales
- sell to a global market
- sell outside normal business hours
- attract new leads
- promote new products
- sell affiliate products
Increase Customer Loyalty
Support your customers with
- frequently asked questions
- technical specifications
- product instructions
- pricing and stock level information
Provide information
Save time and money on printing costs and phone calls by providing
- product and technical updates
- company information
- location and phone numbers
- hours and holidays
Increase productivity
- Allow staff to work effectively from outside the office by providing resources and demos for sales people.
- Save data entry time by collecting customer information or product registration into a database.
Who will use the website?
List the different groups of viewers who need to come to your website to fulfill the goals you have established. These could be:
- Potential customers
- Existing customers
- Partners, or potential partners
- Potential employees
- Existing employees
- Suppliers seeking delivery information
- Researchers or journalists
Describe each viewer group. Try to generalise on
- age
- income
- gender
- geographic location
- lifestyle
- internet access
Most viewers will be looking for one or two things from your website.
Write down what you think each viewer group is looking for. What does each group need to do for the business to achieve its goals? What would make them want to do this?
List the words or phrases which you think the viewers will use to search for what they want.
More Resources
The Step-By-Step Copywriting Course
This eBook is a great resource for identifying different groups of readers and learning what type of online copy is effective for each group.
