In my last video we looked at how business strategies should be involved in your new website strategy and how to connect the dots between the top five C’s of Company, Capabilities, Customers, Climate and Competitors, and how that contributes to the decision making process when you’re planning your new site. Today I wanted to dive deeper into just this first one, ‘company’ and how we look from an internal perspective of where you’re at now, what are your capabilities as your company sits right now to move forward into that next step.
Connectivity between business goals and your website’s purpose
So what do we look at? First of all we look at your short-term goals, six-month, 12-month goals through to your three to five year goals – where do you really want to be? How are you positioned with your competitors? Do you want more market share? Are you trying to launch a new product? Are you just wanting to serve your customers better with a better distribution method or a digital engagement piece customer portal or whatever that might be. So there’s a whole bunch of options here and they are very specific to your business. So we contribute those back into how a new website is connected to those goals.
SWOT
The next thing we look at are very standard MBA components – your SWOT analysis. So what are your current strengths, What are you currently really good at? And how can we leverage that strength and really drive your company harder. As an example of that, you know we we’ve worked with a manufacturer, who is brilliant at producing products, and creates some fantastic high quality goods. But their weakness was their marketing, they just had not communicated their strengths and couldn’t communicate that to the broader market. So their inquiries were suffering. So there’s a massive opportunity there in that process to really bring that company to life online, and introduce new customers to them. What a great opportunity to use digital for that experience.
The next example of that was someone who’s pretty much the opposite actually – a really good self promoter – so getting masses of leads, but had a really shit delivery. So they’ve got bad reviews, and they might have a history of online reviews that are not so great. So that situation needs a different approach. When we’re creating a new website, we’ve got to go into sort of a bit of “rescue mode” to look at how we broaden the message out to really drive and turn that ship around, if you like, from a communications perspective online. So there’s lots of different nuances as to how a new website can tackle those components.
Culture, brand and positioning
The third is culture, so culture really sets the tone for the messages on your site. So how integrated are you going to present your team? What is the team’s profile? Is it going to drive through LinkedIn and through socials -Facebook, Instagram, and what are the photographic components going to be that you use on the site? How is that going to connect to your unique culture? Your personal brand, your brand position in your site. So where does that sit now and obviously where do you want that to be with any new site. So it’s your messaging and the integration of that tied in.
The Four P’s of Marketing
So the fourth but certainly not last, I call it the 4Ps. For those marketers out there, a very familiar term and with my MBA hat on – the first one is Product. So what is it you are actually selling? Is it a physical product? or digital product or service? Is it a mix of physical product that needs support? Is it a digital piece of software and that needs support? What are the components that go into that? How do you can’t really sell that now what does that look like?
The second is price… and I’ve done a few videos on how to deliver price and present value online. As soon as you publish that price online obviously you’re competing with the rest of the planet. So there’s a whole argument around how you build value online, and that’s a big discussion outside of this, but please have a look at some of my other videos on on that.
The next is around “place”. So the consideration about places and distribution method. Are you distributing online? Are you particularly located in a particular region? Because if you are, you can use your marketing in a more targeted way with regional search and geo targeting. But you might be global… so how are you distributing that? Are you using 3PL out of China for your inventory tracking? You know there’s a whole, complex web of decisions to be made, depending on the type of product and service that you’re offering – when related to your place.
The fourth [but people think is probably the most important] is promotion. And when you’re thinking about your website, you automatically think – I just got to promote my business better… promotion is the key. Well promotion comes after all of this is sorted and planned and delivered. So you can see how critical everything else is. So, what is promotion… well it’s how you sit in google search, the organic search results. It’s how you do paid advertising in Facebook or Google. It’s whether you do print or outdoor advertising with signage. How are you going to engage the user? Using influences on Instagram and connecting those sales right through that process? How are you going to integrate those influences? If you’re using broadcast, if you’re appearing on television ads you’re going to have masses of audience and visitors to your site sometimes in a very short space of time, therefore your technology choices need to be very very supportive of that. Being able to deliver to a bunch of traffic is just such a critical part of that technology choice.
So you can see here, just this first component, is so much to think about. Our process at KND takes you through that and we really get you comfortable with where you’re at now, and where your new your website can integrate with each of those components. In my next video I’m going to talk about the capabilities of your business and how that relates to your new site.