For many, a website is treated as part of their marketing campaigns, not a permanent element of brand communication.
This means that it gets looked at when there’s a campaign budget, but ignored the rest of the time. This neglect leads to the usual problems of out-dated information and a drop in visits after the initial burst of activity.
Many clients are then left with an old campaign site that offers no value and costs more time and effort to update next time… or is simply thrown away at the end of the campaign.
We prefer to approach websites from the perspective of continuous improvement. The launch of a new website should be seen as the beginning of campaign planning, not the end result.
This may sound obvious, but it requires a fundamental shift in thinking.
Many campaigns spend all the money up-front developing a site that's launched with great fanfare, then largely forgotten. A new budget is then required before any post-launch learnings can be implemented.
This is not ideal as often it’s only after launch that you find out more about what visitors want from your site.
A continuous improvement approach ensures that budgets and resources are planned over a longer term. It encourages online marketing to be treated as an on-going project, not as a campaign deliverable. It’s our belief that a website should effectively be in constant ‘beta’.
For continuous improvement projects, establishing and monitoring measurement benchmarks is the key to success. You need a clear goal and consistent measurement.
Start by identifying some simple objectives for your site. Then begin measuring the success, or otherwise, of those goals. From this point onwards, effort should be focused on optimisation and conversion of those goals.
The web is a constantly evolving channel, as are your customers’ habits, needs and desires. Having a program in place to respond to these variables provides the best opportunity to deliver a ‘continuous’ return on investment.