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Learning to develop your online strategy to make your web site successful

by Gregory Brine

I’ll start by saying that I’m not an expert in this area (yet), so everything you read hear is a combination of my broad range of experience and knowledge, combined with my enthusiasm for online success. I’m currently filtering these ideas into my work, and evolving my skills to help better myself, my company and most importantly, my customers.

There’s more to driving your site to succeed online than just adding a blog and content syndication to your site. You need to market it, and in turn your brand (often yourself). With the birth of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, it has become common practice to think that a site will succeed purely by bolting on a blog, and sticking up some photos and regularly updating the content.

At to that the social phenomenon, people started adding send to a friend links and social network tags, such as Digg and Facebook. Those are great tools, as long as your users click on them and share your message. You could do it yourself, or ask your friends to do it, but it starts to look a little bit obvious and also reduces your rating on those sites if you continually push your own content in. You need to come up with ways to connect with them and make them want to do it. If you’re really good, and connect well, you don’t even need these tools - look at how well Apple does if you need proof.

This is where the advertising industry has one up on web development companies, and where they should learn from each other. Part of their mission is to connect with the customer - in this case, your site’s user - and make them feel you know them and that they’re special. Rather than relying on you to try and work out what to do and write, they aim to deliver elements that appeal to a broad audience, and bring them in by going a few steps further.

1. Know the brand’s customers. OK, for a new brand, this is where the brand and marketing guys come in, and it’s a little more tricky to get right first time, but what I’m going to say in this blog covers that (think competitors). But what does knowing the customer mean? It means start by looking at who your loyal customers are. The ones that have been with you a while, and will stay with you. I’ll say for example to be generic, that might be the 30-50 age group who grew up with your brand and stayed with it. Then look at the ones around that. How can you market to them without alienating the ones you already do so well with? Read what they read. Watch what they watch. It’s tricky, and something that takes a lot to get just right - I’m about to start doing this for one of my clients and I’m can’t wait to start!

2. Get to know the brand’s rivals. This is a bit of a no-brainer if you think about it. We all know it makes perfect sense, but we also know it’s an easy thing to forget or skim over. What are they doing? When are they doing? And most importantly, what do we do better than them that could boost our market share? Then ask if there’s anything they do better that we need to steer clear of - that’s not to that if they really do do it better, you can’t use it, but make sure it won’t come back to have a detrimental effect on what you’re trying to achieve.

3. Know the brand’s products. Does this sound like an extension of the last points in a way? It shouldn’t! If you don’t know everything about the products you’re trying to sell, how can you do a better job of selling them to people who know nothing about it? Know the strengths. Know the weaknesses (but don’t tell the client). Live and breath their products if you can - or find someone that does.

4. Stay in touch with your users. In the day and age of database this, and database that, it’s easy to slap a ‘Stay in touch’ box on a website. But ask yourself what that actually means? Does it mean a monthly, or bi-annual newsletter perhaps? Perhaps it never gets used. I don’t know. All I know is that when I see that box, and I see it not used to it’s best effect, I get upset. That box means that someone has looked at your site, and thinks that you have something that others don’t, and they want to make sure you tell them what you’re doing. If you don’t talk to them, you’re missing a real opportunity and at the same time letting them down! But then, why not go one step further if the product permits. Why not encourage your users to turn that email address into a user account on your site? One that lets them enter competitions periodically? One that actively encourages them to come back, and also gives you the chance to make their experience that little bit more personal? Make them realise that you really connect with them, and want to ensure they get even more from you than they already have.

5. Get to know them better. When users register for a site, you general collect the basic information. Collecting more than that is difficult, but why not ask them anyway? If you can find out that a large chunk of your sites users actually fall into a category that you want to target in point 1, then you know you’re on the right track or have succeeded. Why not ask them how old they are, what they do, how they found you, would they recommend you, and what they think of you. That’s all information you can potentially use later on to do an email or other promotion to them to help make them feel special and that the brand connects with them. OK, so some of those questions are a little sensitive, and they don’t need to be mandatory, but you could give them an incentive to tell you - and that might encourage them to tell their friends too… Suddenly for that one person, you might have 10-20 more customers just for asking more questions to sell to them.

6. Now work out how to deliver. This is a huge topic, and something that I couldn’t possibly cover here. What sites to advertise on. What sites to contribute to. What will appeal to the online community? Should you be thinking about a viral campaign or a competition? Would a Facebook application or Facebook group work well for you? Perhaps a blog would be enough… Ultimately, it boils down to your client’s budget, but you also need to make them aware of what can be done to give them the best return on their investment.

So that’s 6 points. There’s a lot more than that I could write, but that’s a brief take on what I see as a basic strategy to beginning to succeed online. There’s more to come that feeds off that, like viral marketing, banners, offline to online. The list goes on, but you can see where my head is. I’m in the position of moving from being the Technical Director in charge of delivering sites, to being someone more strategic who comes up with the ideas.

I see the web as a world of opportunity. And damn I’m excited by the direction I’m moving in! Please let me know if I’ve said anything you disagree or perhaps really like. And if you want to give me some words of encouragement that I’m going in exactly the right direction, I always welcome and encourage any feedback.

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June 15, 2008   1 Comment

When building a successful website, think beyond the presentation and back-end code

by Gregory Brine

Following on from my recent post, My concerns about Web Developer’s skill sets since asp.NET came to be, I thought I would justify why I think developers need to know more than just how to code a part of a website.

Lets start with coding itself. A lot of back end (ASP.NET for example) developers don’t care about front-end (presentation layer) code because they believe it is below them for some reason. Unfortunately, what they fail to understand is that knowing the basic principals of how to code the presentation layer can actually be influenced how you do certain things on the back end. It’s OK to rely on the built in controls, they work, that’s why Microsoft put them in, but they also put a lot in to give you that choice and flexibility!

Think about that for a second. Is there a chance that they are too generic and slightly bulky? Is there a chance that one may be quicker to implement, but another will actually give you far more control over the aesthetics of the site (the presentation layer). If you can control that, it will allow the designer to express themselves better, and the client to be more impressed.

The same goes for front-end code. Would making an element a user control or list speed things up, or frustrate the developer that’s got to plug-in the code that will integrate the presentation code with the CMS back end?

But, why stop there? Why not think about how those objects will then affect the performance of the site in terms of speed, longevity and marketing (SEO, SEM, analytics, campaigns, viral, RSS, etc.). If you construct a page in a certain way, you can maximise how Bots for example, index the site. If you build forms and databases in a certain way, you can collect data in a way that makes utilising it for profiling and targeting emails.

OK, so the data collection bit comes under a different area of the process, but it’s a very useful skill to know! If you look at a site, and see a missed opportunity, how good will that make you look? That idea to collect an additional piece of data, or make the user profiling module that bit more flexible suddenly opens the site up to a whole new world of selling back into the client, and in turn, maximising their return, and future spend! You’ve made you company money with an idea, that will hopefully ultimately see you rewarded!

Then there’s SEO and analytics. 2 very broad topics that I will only touch on, but 2 very important ones! If you have some down time, go and have a look at the stats, and see if you can spot anything unusual or useful. Perhaps a page isn’t appearing that you’re sure should be there. Has something happened that could be making that page less favourable to the search engines? Is there a page or particular area of a page that’s performing better than expected? Is there an opportunity to leverage that to drive more people to key information?

And one that amazes me, is how many people in the web industry still don’t know what a blog is, and how an RSS feed should actually work including ‘pinging’. For anyone that wants to work for me, there’s a very good hint as to one of my favourite interview questions!

You can see that there’s more to just coding a website for it to work. It is an area the web is still learning, and it’s only those web site developers that go to the effort of learning above and beyond one area of code, that will ever be a true legend on the web and let them make a name for themselves.

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May 24, 2008   No Comments