How to optimise your business online presence or service (manuscript)
If you are looking to improve your online presence, either it be through a website re-design or just to refine and improve your service experience and offering online, this is a manuscript you can use to help you in the process. Feel free to subtract, add and refine 🙂
Overarching questions & material
- Information about your customer journey
- Path to purchase
- Internal purchase process – what internal touch points do you have for a sale to go through? who are involved?
- How and when do you communicate with your customer during their purchase process? who does it? (department and responsibility)
- Who are your biggest competitors? and how do your company differentiate from them?
Organisational questions (for internal use – meant to be answered by your company)
- What is your biggest challenge/s today? and why?
- Why do your business have a website?
- What role does the website have in your business?
- How can and should your company website can support your business?How do you measure the success today? (with the website and also your business – what is success)
- What are your KPIs?
- How can we measure success in the future?
Target audience
- Who are they? define target groups (i.e working moms, business owners etc)
- What do they need? what motivations do they have? What do they want? (Contact, book, buy, ask questions or answer to questions, learn more?) Define the pain points.
- What “problem” solves does your business solve per target audience? (how do your business ease the pain or remove it completely?)
- What information do you have about the existing customer today? surveys / studies?
Current site
Evaluate it against your current service offering with your customers in mind. Focus on their needs and questions and how the website can cater for this – within seconds:
- What pages are important in their journey/path to purchase (if you are unsure, see the previous article on content audit)
- Geographically – where do they come from and the service is available in their city?
- Contact – who should they call? When? How? Are the contact details obvious and easily accessible if you offer your service in more then one location?
- Can you offer price calculations for your service (if its a service that needs to be quoted individually you can ask for certain information beforehand and offer a rough pricing)
- How do your company win your customers trust? (Testimonials from current customers, photos of people in environments they help in?)
Current customer
What is the goal of the website for a current customer, what should they do and what want to have to to do that? How do you take care of your customers today? Do you want them to buy more services from you? And how do they want to take care of them? what information do they need?
- Your current customers – what do you know about them?
- What percentage of today’s customer portfolio returns and purchases services from you again?
- How long is the life cycle of the customers?
- Why does a customer leave your business and choose another provider? (is it location, service offering? availability?)
- How happy is your customer with your service and business today?
- When a customer leaves you for another service provider – do you know which competitor they choose over you?
- If you have more then one service and target audience – are there services that overlap between the different target audiences? Ie are there are solutions/services that different target audiences can buy from you?
Potential new customer – what should they do? Call? Fill forms? Book a time? Depending on the service you offer online – pin down what you want a potential new customer to do, i.e a person evaluating different options prior purchase – what do they need? and how can your website cater for this?
The sales process – applicable even if your website is generating leads for your sales reps or department:
What is your conversion rate today?
What is a lead? call / fill a the contact form / calculate a price / book or download?
How many leads do you get from the site today? And what happens then? and do you track how many leads are converted to customers?
What is the process? How do I book a time? How the process works today?
Or if your website sell gods or services – what is the process? before and after purchase?
Quick questions for your website analytics;
- Where visitors come from?
- Where do they leave the site?
- What primary pages are important in the purchase process? investigate how they perform
- Conversion rate? goal?
- Geography – where do they come from?
- Devices (in relation to mobile first)
- Average time, pv / how long they stay? (on key pages)
- Bounce rate on key pages
- Exit rate on key pages
- What keywords do your visitors use when searching and ending up on your website?
- What exit rate do your lead form or sales pages have? (the pages that close a deal?)
- What content do the visitors engage with? (download, forms, click to call, external and internal link clicks, etc)
Other digital touch points (not only your website)
- What other digital touch points do your company have?
- Social channels?
- Newsletters?
- Paid media?
- How do they tie together? what purpose does each channel have?
- Do they deliver? and what?
- Are they on brand?
- How can they support your company better?
- Do you measure traffic and conversions from these?
Image copyright by: fleximize.com