To really make an impact, your website needs to be awesome – as opposed to simply good. Below are the essential “herbs and spices” for awesomeness, followed by techniques for developing an awesome web strategy.
Some questions to ask yourself about your existing website:
Google’s digital brain is aware of more than 1 trillion URL’s. That’s a lot of competition for your website.
Your customers are busier than ever, and getting better each day at filtering out noise. As web users gain experience they get better at finding (and returning to) the awesome websites that make their lives easier.
Your competitors are only ever one click away. People generally don’t waste time on the second best website in a given category. Websites that are not awesome risk being ignored.
Your customers regularly surf between your website, and the best websites in the world. Websites like YouTube, Google, Facebook, Flickr set the user experience standards that your customers now expect. If your website is not awesome it may annoy your customers, and actually damage your brand.
Great design, content and functionality are now expected. While these ingredients are essential, they are not THE essential ingredients that determine an awesome website.
While researching this article (and a webinar delivered for SmartCompany on the same topic) I went out to the Twitterati and asked for examples of awesome websites.
Every example I received back was both incredibly unique and particularly relevant to the individual who thought it to be awesome.
This reinforced my theory that truly awesome websites (the type that people love to visit, contribute to and send to friends) include two key ingredients: relevance and uniqueness.
The key to being relevant is simply to understand your audience (and their needs). You can then use this understanding to create an online strategy that revolves around them.
Listening to your customers is easy. If you are a smaller business you can simply talk to them. For big brands, you can run focus groups, online surveys or purchase market research.
Your goal should be to identify your customers’ needs that you are well-placed to fulfill online.
By being relevant you can also be generous. Your customers will be buying into your website with the most precious currency they have – their time. What will they get in return? How will you provide more value than your competitors do?
View the development of your website as being akin to the creation of a new product. You need to develop a clear proposition for your website, otherwise it won’t sell.
The web rewards specialists over generalists every time. It is far easier to build an awesome website about ‘1967 Ford Mustangs’ than a website about ‘cars’.
It is critical that you aim to be the best at something.
Develop clear communication around your awesome something, and perhaps even a sub-brand (and unique domain) to help sell it. Make sure that your unique proposition is the first thing your customers see when they come to your website.
Also remember that your unique awesomeness does not need to happen on your corporate domain. In many cases it is both easier and more effective for it to be somewhat independent.
You can have relevant ideas that are not unique, and unique ideas that are not relevant. An awesome website needs to be both. Your awesome web strategy will come from the overlapping intersection of both relevant content and functionality, and unique ideas for your competitive category.
Developing an awesome strategy
Research firm Forrester recommends what they call the “POST” strategy for customer engagement. This means doing your thinking in the following order:
People is all about understanding and relevance as it relates to your target audience. As described above.
Objectives are about what you hope to achieve; we will discuss this further in a minute.
Strategy is your unique idea, as discussed above. There are more examples of this below.
Technology is how you execute your strategy, and should be defined by the P, O and S.
A very common mistake is to pick a technology platform for implementation first, and then work backward towards figuring out your objectives and creating a value proposition for users. Technology should never dictate or constrain strategy. This is most certainly the wrong way to achieve success online.
Let’s look at some quick examples. These have been put together for smaller businesses to prove that awesome relevance and uniqueness need not be expensive or difficult. We have assumed in all cases that the objective is to create a meaningful connection with customers online.
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