business goals Archives - Canadian Small Business Women

Every website should be created with a goal in mind. This ensures that the website is focused and can help you achieve your business goals.

Start by asking yourself: “Why am I building a web site?” Is it because everyone else is doing it too? Do you have a specific purpose in mind for it?

Clearly defining your web business goals ensure that your web site is optimized to achieve them. After all, you can only meet your goals when you know what they are.

Of course, defining a web business goal may not be as easy as it sounds. It comes naturally to some of us while it is a lot harder for others. Here is a list of common web business goals:

1. Product Sales

You want to sell products to online shoppers. These products might be your own or you might be selling them as a sales representative of a company. But why would people visit your web site and not thousands of others selling products similar to yours? What makes you different from your competitors?

To create website traffic you need to promote your site. It may also help to offer something useful to your website visitors. This could be special offers or bonuses etc. For example, most web sites selling software offer a free trial download.

One good way to draw visitors to a web site, is to offer unique and useful product related information to them. For example, Amazon.com offers a number of customer reviews for each book it is selling. This serves as useful information for people who might be thinking of buying that particular book.

Observe the sites of your competitors closely and see what they are doing to draw visitors to their sites and make sales.

2. Brand Awareness

Some web sites are built to create awareness for a brand. Let’s take the example of Coke’s web site. Is it there because the Coca-Cola Company hopes to sell coke bottles on the web? No, it is there to create brand awareness and assert its brand identity.

You may decide to bring your business to the web for the sole purpose of reassuring your customers that your company is willing to evolve with the changing times. The web site that you build will center on the purpose of enhancing and reasserting the image of your company.

3. Cost Reduction

Another business goal for building a web site can be cost reduction. A web site can result in cost reductions for you in a number of ways. You may reduce

your customer services costs by having an online customer services system,
your order processing costs by having an online ordering system for distributors and retailers, and
your printing and paper costs by having brochures or product manuals online.

If your business has no offline presence, building a start up business on the web will involve minimal costs as compared to building a brick and mortar store. This is a major reason why many start up businesses are emerging on the web.

4. Providing Information

A web site can be created for the sole purpose of providing basic information about your company. Such a web site can take the form of an online brochure. It will result in cost savings from advertising for you and will be easy to build.

5. Facilitating Communication

You may build a web site to make it easy for your customers or prospects to communicate with you. A lot of television channels and periodicals have web sites where they conduct online surveys on different topics. An online survey is very easy to conduct and compile in comparison to an offline survey, and is a good source of eliciting customer opinions about a product or idea.

Moreover, traditional mediums of communication like fax, telephone, snail mail etc are expensive and time consuming. Through a web site or email, your customer can easily get in touch with you.

6. Affiliate Commissions

Another reason for building a web site may be to make money through promoting affiliate programs, which offer you a commission on sales. If you plan to build a web site for this purpose, do keep the following in mind:

Choose a program that offers useful and legitimate products/ services.
Promote programs that cater to the same target audience.
Offer information in the form of articles or compiled links that this target audience would find useful.
Do not try to over stuff your web site with banners and popups. Visitors find them very irritating.
Informative articles and reviews get more attention than a usual ad.

7. Revenue from Advertising

You may want to earn money by advertising other businesses on your web site. However this is not as easy as it sounds. The foremost concern of advertisers is the amount and quality of traffic your web site is drawing. You need to promote your web site well to ensure that it has a high amount of traffic. Moreover, you need to offer information similar to the advertisers’ products to ensure that they are getting the audience they intend to target. A good way to make money is to sign up for Google Ads.

No matter what the purpose of your web site may be, make sure that you keep track of the visitors of your web site. A traffic tracking system like Google Analytics gives you valuable information about your web site visitors. It also enables you to make important decisions related to the optimization of your web site.

Erum Zehra is a digital entrepreneur and the founder of Prestige Interactive. Prestige Interactive specializes in creating stunning business websites for female entrepreneurs to propel their business in the limelight. Download her FREE Website Planning Template today to design your website layout for success!(https://prestigeinteractive.ca/freebies).

Instagram/ https://www.instagram.com/prestigeintca

Facebook/ https://www.facebook.com/prestigeintca

Twitter/ https://twitter.com/prestigeintca

LinkedIn/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/prestige-interactive

email/ info@prestigeinteractive.ca

Website http://prestigeinteractive.ca

Part 2 of a 6 part series on Content Strategy for Your Business

In the first post in this series, I outlined what a content strategy is and why it’s a critical part of your digital business model. Over the next 5 weeks of this series, we’ll go through a full content strategy, but where to start? Sometimes it’s best to start at the end.

Governance: Start Your Strategy at the End

When it comes to Content Strategy, A Governance model is perhaps the most important factor. Why? Because if you understand up front what it will take to create, measure and maintain your online business communications, you will be more realistic and strategic when you develop your content strategy. In this post I’ll outline what your governance model will include, and then go into some detail on the creation of the first piece of your content strategy and resulting governance model.

What do I need to Govern?

Online business communications are the basics on your website, which might include

Your Home page
An “About Us” page or section
A services Section and/or product pages
Your contact page
Campaign based landing pages

Depending on your business goals, it might expand to include content marketing such as

Email communications such as e-blasts or newsletters
Blogging or articles
Info graphics or tools

And depending on your customers and where they are in the sales funnel, it might include brand awareness tactics like

Social media: Twitter, Facebook, Linked IN, Instagram, and Pinterest…
Influencer marketing

Governance of your content strategy means managing these communications, and it is like running a second business, your digital business. It is part marketing, part sales, and part corporate communications. And like any business, you need a plan: that’s what Governance is.

Your Governance model brings together all of the pieces of your content strategy into a structured, executable plan of action. Putting a realistic and actionable governance model in place means being very clear about your brand values and goals, your customer needs, knowing which platforms your ideal customers are using, and which blend of content types will give your brand voice consistency and regularity, and then putting it all in a calendar.

A Governance Model Outline

Your governance model will be made up of:

1) A clear statement of your brand purpose. This can be in the form of a mission statement, or it can be in the form of a message map, elevator pitch, or Value proposition (also sometimes called a unique selling proposition or USP).

2) A customer avatar or persona that describes your ideal customer

3) A clear idea of the conversion funnel for your ideal customer and which content types, on which platforms are likely to reach them.

4) An editorial calendar outlining when and what you are going to create or curate and some handy tools to keep it all running smoothly.

These things need to be written down! Don’t keep it all in your head. I keep my governance model in front of me in the form of sticky notes and charts pinned to a large piece of foam core that serves as my content strategy whiteboard. Knowing that these are the building blocks of your content strategy governance model, you can sketch them out very high level, and over the next 5 weeks we’ll fill in the blanks, starting this week with Brand Values.

Your Brand Values: Let’s Clarify

What are your brand values, and what are your business goals? By getting this down very clearly you will have some good material for your About Us page and a guide that will help you with your future content, customer, and platform decisions. The problem with typical mission statements is that they are very high level and often include a lot of jargon. For this reason I prefer to create more tactical artefacts, such as a Message Map or Value proposition.

Build a Message Map

A message map is perhaps the most tactical artefact you can create. It is quick and relatively easy to put together and is a good guideline document if you need to write something quickly such as a product launch announcement, or if you need to give something to your employees so they know the talking points on a particular product, initiative, or your business generally. CEO’s or PR writers use message maps if they are preparing to do a media interview, for example, or write a press release.

Watch this video about message maps, or use this basic formula, starting with a Twitter-friendly headline. This means a short, maximum 140-character statement about your brand or product. Then, write down 3 key points about your brand or product, making sure they are short bullets. Finally, for each of those three points, come up with a few supporting facts, statistics, or stories that bring the point home.

Clarify Your Value Proposition

Creating a value proposition using this template from copyhackers will give you a little bit more range of options in terms of how you might talk about your brand as a whole. Copyhackers has an excellent suite of worksheets and tools for all aspects of content strategy and a great process for figuring out your value proposition, that has you think about your brand and your service(s) or product(s) by filling in this grid. In the left-most column, write down all of the statements you can come up with that describe the benefits or features of your brand, service(s) or product(s), then really ask yourself if that statement gets a “tick” in the boxes to the right. When you have a statement that ticks all the boxes, you have a great value proposition!

My favourite tool is taken from the book “Gamestorming” because it brings customer target into the mix, and it is visual and easy to fill in the blanks. Try to make a few of these until you find a combination that feels right.

Once you have a clear idea, or collection of ideas and statements on what you have to offer as a business, the next step is having a very clear picture of your customer: knowing what they want, and where they are going to find it.

Over the next 3 installations, we’ll cover

Your Customer: figuring out what your customers want, who they are, and where they are.
Social media strategy: we’ll answer the question: do I need a website AND do social media? (The answer is, yes!)
Editorial and Content types: we’ll look at creation vs curation and finding the right balance for your brand and your customers, and why you need a schedule. Regularity and consistency is key to building audience.

This sounds like a lot of work

I could spend all of my time on creating and maintaining content. But obviously then I wouldn’t be running my business. Every business owner has to be a sales and marketing pro these days, however, and much of that sales and marketing activity is contained within the governance model of your online content strategy. It’s important to find the right balance-or governance model-for your business.

For more resources and information on Content Strategy and to download a detailed description of what content strategy entails, go to analyticalengine.ca/resources or download a Content Strategy Info graphic at http://bit.ly/1qY9tYp.

Christine McGlade is a Business Analyst, Content Strategist, and Usability Consultant. With over 25 years experience in the media business, Christine helps small business, social enterprise, and Not for Profits how to leverage the power of the Internet to grow their business. Learn more about Christine at analyticalengine.ca