Does Your Website Reflect a Healthy Marketing Communication Strategy?

Does Your Website Reflect a Healthy Marketing Communication Strategy?

Many of our strategic marketing consulting engagements come about because a prospective client is looking for help to re-design a website. For us – these requests are akin to a patient going to their physician with a ready-made diagnosis looking for a brand name medication promoted by a new ad-driven blitz promoting the latest cholesterol reducing drug or the inevitable little blue pill.

More Than Just a Website Assessment

In many cases, the initial request for a site refresh appeared quite specific, but pulling back the covers during an initial website assessment soon revealed the greater underlying problems to be solved.

Like a good physician, we take a methodical, objective approach to understanding what each specific ache or pain might mean for the general health of the patient, and what red flags will help us address more serious organizational issues that must be tackled to make a site refresh successful for the long-haul – a sustainable web health maintenance plan, if you will.

As an outsourced marketing firm we have been asked to develop sites from scratch – finding an effective way to develop and tell a story when the message (and market) had not been fully understood. In one case, we were tasked with helping combine the web content of three distinct organizations that were merged through acquisition – and had to work through the sudden retrenchment of several key members of the project team before the task was complete – essentially playing the role of EMT to transition the project (alive and kicking) to a new administration that was still formulating a joint messaging strategy.

The Benefit of an Outside In Marketing Diagnosis

In another case, the desire for a refresh was prompted by a change in executive leadership – with a much larger underlying need to bring the external message in line with the core internal mission driving the business. The pressures of perceived new competition had pushed the company’s external positioning away from the essential values that had made it successful in the first place. Our “outside-in” methodology revealed a simple truth – “Go back to basics to position your company as distinct from the competition – the pioneering legacy you have developed still sets you apart in the marketplace”.

The newly revitalized site focused more on industry leadership and differentiated market needs, not just engaging in a broad, never-ending cycle of technical spec one-upmanship that can easily silence the trusted voice that communicates actual benefits to the customer.

What Symptoms to Look For on Your Site?

Here are some of the symptoms we look for as a strategic marketing team assessing the health of a prospect's website:

• Who in the organization is driving the website refresh - and why?
• Is the desire for a change aesthetic or functional?
• Are the needs of the customer real or hearsay?
• Are there clearly stated goals and success metrics in place for the existing site that are understood throughout the organization?
• Are there baseline analytics and historic performance data against which to assess the performance of the new site?
• What is the sustainable content development plan for the new site?
• Do the subject matter experts within the organization understand their obligation to support site content – will they blog?
• Is there a part of the organization that feels pressured to jump on the social media "bandwagon" – which, and why?
• Do sales and marketing agree on the role of the site in supporting lead generation programs?

If you’d really like to dig much deeper into some actual metrics around site re-design, Hubspot CMO Mike Volpe has some great research data measuring a wide range of drivers and success criteria in his webinar - The Science of Website Redesign

So - get some exercise, eat your veggies and take a look at your website with the objective eye of a good diagnostician. Your site is a key public face of your organization. What is it telling the outside world about the marketing health of your company?