Analyzing Your Corporate Web Site

To perform the most efficient analysis and maximize the performance and value of your corporate Web site, you must start with the right fundamental perception of your site on your mind.

Fundamentally, it is not a work of art (although it might look like one). It is not a tool for communicating with your stakeholders (although it certainly must behave like one). It is not even your Internet store or your sales office (even if it has these functions). And not an information/knowledge portal for your stakeholders (although it might very well contain a wealth of knowledge highly valuable to them).

Fundamentally, your Web site is a money-making machine for you and your company – and, therefore, must be perceived, analyzed and managed as such. Its key objective is generate sales, profits, free cash flows and financial value. Cut and dry, plain and simple. Just good old common sense.

Consequently, the two key components of description and analysis of your corporate Web site are (1) its financial valuation model and (2) the corporate process of generating financial value with your Web site.

In other words, you must treat your Web site design/development (or redesign) project as an investment project. With all usual KPI – free cash flows, payback period, NPV, IRR/MIRR, WACC and economic profit. All other KPI – number of unique visitors, page views, usability, etc. are only as valuable as they help you understand, design and optimize financial value generation process and maximize financial value created by your Web site for your company.

Hence, when designing, developing and redesigning your Web site, you must first and foremost think of ‘dollar signs’. Or euro. Of yens. Or Swiss francs. Or whatever currency is appropriate for your business endeavor.

Which means that the key (and absolutely vital) requirement for you Web site is that it must motivate your customers to maximize their purchases of your products and services. Motivate with both appearance and content of your Web site; both irresistible logic and equally irresistible emotional impact.  

But first you must make sure that your clients visit your site on a regular basis. Because you can influence your client with your Web site only if he or she is looking at it. And – as the great Dale Carnegie teaches us - the only way to make your client come to your site, look at your site and stay on your site is to make him want to do that.

And the only way to make him/her do that is to offer something of aggregate value – financial, functional and emotional. A free product or service, free and valuable information, etc.

But in order to make sure this freebie is, indeed, valuable to your client, you must know for a fact that it does satisfy financial, functional and/or emotional needs and desires of your clients. Which means that you need to know these needs and desires very well.

Obviously, to satisfy these needs and maximize your overall (emotional and logical) impact on your client, you must ensure that your Web site is well-structured (in terms of both structure proper and its content), logical and exhibits the best possible usability. Which, in turn, requires a perfect match with behavioral patterns (perceptions, thinking, decisions and actions) of your clients (your Web site visitors).

A good (although not 100% perfect) way of obtaining this information is by soliciting feedback from your clients – actual and prospective. Either directly – via surveys, online focus groups, etc. – or indirectly (by offering interactive functions such as forums, user blogs, maybe even specialized, narrowly-focused social networks with limited functionality).

However, you must always keep in mind that this feedback is seldom (if ever) statistically significant. To obtain statistically significant (and, therefore, the most accurate and reliable) results, you must conduct the appropriate market research.  

To visit your site, your client must first find it. And not just find it, but develop an irresistible desire (‘itch’) to visit your site. There are essentially two ways for you to make it happen. The first one – pretty straightforward – is to embed into each of your communication campaign a message (textual and/or visual) that will create this ‘itch’.

The second way is a lot more complicated. You would want your client to find and visit your Web site when he or she is looking for something else – product, service or information. To make it happen, you will need to use tools and techniques commonly known as search engine optimization (SEO). Which can be either paid (a form of advertising that you must analyze like any other communication campaign) or unpaid (‘organic’).

The SEO thing is quite involved (and quite technical); however, it is quite manageable and usable if you know what you need to know about it. Essentially, you need to know (1) what your potential clients are looking for; (2) how they are looking for it and (3) how the top search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Ask and Aol) work.

In other words, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by your targeted audience.

Based on this knowledge, you optimize the structure and content of your site in such a way that makes a link to it appear in top 10, 20 or 30 results of a typical Web search. Such optimization, however, always requires services of very experienced outside SEO professionals.

Your site essentially has four fundamental components – structure, content (which needs to be always accurate, and up-to-date), style and interactive features. Obviously, all four must be (a) perfectly balanced and (b) exhibit the maximum possible synergy.

To accomplish all the abovementioned objectives, you will need a highly competent Web design and development team (almost always outsourced), Web site manager (in-house; this is a very important position on a corporate communication team in a corporate marketing department), content manager(s) – almost always in-house and Web administrator (who can be either in-house or outsourced, depending on a specific company). That must follow a solid Web site management methodology and business process.

As for the ‘quality-of-fit’, your Web site obviously must match your KEF (especially technological and social/cultural), your DCI, your corporate mission statement (if you have one), your corporate vision statement, your marketing and information management strategy, your UVP, your corporate culture and code of conduct.

To maximize its impact on its visitors (and therefore financial value generated), your Web site must be highly adaptable to changes in your corporate environment and in behavioral patterns of your stakeholders. And sometimes you must change your Web site simply to prevent it from becoming boring.

To make your site adaptable enough, you must design and implement a highly efficient corporate process of monitoring your corporate environment and making the appropriate changes to your Web site structure, content and style.

Oh, it goes without saying that your site must be accessible (online) 24/7; load lightning-fast even on slow hardware and look and work equally well in any Web browser (IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera), in any operation system (Windows, Unix and Mac OS) and on any platform – desktop, notebook, tablet (iPad and Android) and smartphone (ditto).  

As in our ‘information age’ and ‘knowledge economy’ many (for many companies – most if not practically all) business interactions happen online, your Web site must be tightly integrated into your overall strategic and operational management system.