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Your users’ goals: Your web site’s visitors come for a wide variety of reasons. For a B2C site, it might be
entertainment. For B-to-Bs, it will most often be education/information; they may be: - evaluating your company’s growth prospects and financial health for an investment
recommendation they are preparing - seeking background information on the company for a story in an industry magazine
- researching your product/service space and the vendors in it for an industry analytic
report, a future buying decision, or simply self-improvement
Or they may be seeking a solution to a specific problem, such as... - seeking a career change
- looking for support on a product they recently purchased from your company
- comparing your product/service with those of competitors as part of an imminent
buying decision
Note that only a few of the above examples actually represent potential leads (the major
reason we’re undertaking this entire effort); but as noted above, both true leads and the
other kinds of visitors work for the same organization and probably talk to each other ...so the
only safe choice is to make both groups happy. Note too that even the real leads come in various “temperature” categories (research phase,
early sales cycle, serious buyer, etc.), so even they can’t be treated identically. We’ll need to
take this into account in our next step. Profiling audiences:
As we’ve seen, the visitors who come to your site represent a very wide variety of goals
...even though each individual visitor may have a fairly narrow goal in mind.
What you need to do is group the various types of visitors into segments based on their likely
motivation/interest, so that you’ll be able to provide a common, satisfying experience to all of
the members of each segment. As we’ll see below, this will involve creating appropriate,
specific content for each segment, and then providing them with clear paths to that content
(navigation). Warning: this step is one of the most important in the entire process. If you don’t get this
right at the outset, you can easily end up with an ineffective web strategy. Talk to people in
your target audience, learn what they want and need, and don’t rely solely on your
perceptions. << previous | next >>
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