We’ve all been there. You hire a website designer to develop a website for you. The domain name finally gets connected and you sit back and smile. It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for, right? Your brand new website is now live to the world. It’s exciting… at first. But as the days, weeks, and months tick on, you start to realize that it’s not really working.
What happened to the swarms of leads you thought you’d be getting by now? Shouldn’t your phone be ringing off the hook? The problem is actually fairly clear. It isn’t enough anymore to simply have a website. After all, anyone can get a website “whipped up real quick.” The real question, then, is what sets yours apart? What helps you to stand out against the millions of other websites in the world? The fact is, your website isn’t going to do what it’s meant to do if it isn’t crafted with an intentional strategy.
Below, I’ll unpack the website strategy framework that we’ve used to help hundreds of organizations like yours revive their dying websites. Feel free to watch the accompanying video for even more details.
Mission: A map, guiding your efforts so that your website strategy aligns with your overarching goals.
Zig Ziglar would often say, “If you aim at nothing you will hit it every time.” In order to achieve success, you must first identify what success looks like. If you don’t have an “X marks the spot” in your mind, how do you know what you’re working toward? If you don’t have a specific destination in mind, how will you know when you arrive?
If you have any experience planning a roadtrip, you know the importance of navigation. Road signs are great tools. But without a central navigation tool pointing you in the right direction, you have nothing tethering you to your course. In the same way that a map can help navigate your journey, the Mission part of this four-part framework is your navigation tool, designed to help you find your website strategy’s “true north” and to keep you on track along the way.
To engage with the “Mission” part of this framework, you should:
- Identify a passionate purpose or meaningful “why” for your website which will keep you on course when things get hard
- Set intentional goals for your organization’s website
- Track and measure goals so you know when you’re making progress or falling behind
- “Course correct” and make changes when something isn’t working
Messaging: A series of road signs, guiding website visitors and communicating to them in a clear and compelling way.
Author, speaker, and business coach Donald Miller has often been quoted as saying, “If you confuse, you lose.” You could be the most passionate website owner alive, but if you fail to communicate the right things about your organization in a compelling way, people won’t take the next step.
Some website owners think it’s enough to have a beautiful website. “It’s hip. It’s trendy. It looks good.” Aesthetics will only get you so far in the world of website strategy. Don’t get me wrong, the way your website looks is important. But if it’s hard for someone to understand who you are, what you do, or why they should care… they simply won’t.
While a road map is an essential piece of equipment for any form of travel, it will only get you so far if you don’t have navigational signage along the way. In the same way that road signs communicate to drivers on the road, the Messaging part of this four-part framework is your navigational signage, guiding visitors through your site and communicating your unique value proposition and calls to action in a compelling way.
To engage with the “Messaging” part of this framework, you should:
- Identify your website’s unique audience so you can speak to them directly
- Craft a compelling clarity statement for your website
- Identify which website sections carry the most weight and how to optimize them
- Build an intentional “call-to-action” strategy that will result in more clicks and engagement
Marketing: Billboards, attracting and engaging your target audience and helping them to take the next step on your website.
Maya Angelou once said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” At the end of the day, that’s what we’re trying to accomplish with good marketing… not just selling a product or service. Selling an experience and making your website visitor feel something that elicits an emotional response that results in them taking the next step toward your organization.
If Messaging is all about what you should communicate to your website audience, Marketing is all about how you package and present that communication. How does your website look? Colors. Fonts. Look and feel. Are you using the right kinds of photos? Are they showing up in the right places? Aside from engaging your website visitors, marketing also provides you with the resources needed to attract your audience to your brand in the first place. Are you utilizing all of the marketing tools at your disposal to help your website to be found online, both organically and through paid ads? Are you collecting email addresses from your online visitors? And if so, what are you doing with those email addresses?
We talked about the importance of a map and road signs, but it isn’t only stop signs and street names that inform our decision making on the road. We’re lured by promotional signage. Billboards catch our attention and help us decide which exits to entertain and which attractions to visit. The Marketing part of this four-part framework is your billboard, attracting and engaging your target audience and helping them to take the next step on your website.
To engage with the “Marketing” part of this framework, you should:
- Build a strategic wireframe for your website so that you’ll know how and where content will be deployed
- Understand the importance of branding and the crucial role it plays in your website’s overall success
- Attract website visitors through organic SEO, paid ads, and other marketing channels
- Attract qualified leads and nurture them over time
Meaningful Experiences: An enjoyable journey, rid of friction and filled with memorable moments and outcomes.
In Chip Heath’s book The Power of Moments, he writes that “for an individual human being, moments are the thing. Moments are what we remember and what we cherish. Certainly we might celebrate achieving a goal, such as completing a marathon or landing a significant client—but the achievement is embedded in a moment.”
You’ve likely experienced what it’s like when a trip or journey goes right and when one goes wrong. What makes a “good trip” good and a “bad trip” bad? Perhaps a “good trip” includes scenic views, enjoyable company, good music, or comfortable seating. In contrast, car repairs, forgotten luggage, traffic, broken car radios or faulty air condition systems are a few things that come to mind that might lead to labeling a trip as a “bad trip.”
Yes, your destination is important. You want to get where you’ve set out for. But you also want to enjoy the journey along the way with as few potholes and inconveniences as possible.
The Meaningful Experiences part of this four-part framework is the journey itself. What experience does your website audience have when scrolling through the pages of your website? Is it functional? Clunky? Outdated? Is it mobile responsive? Is it hard for your audience to find the information they’re looking for?
At this point, we’ve communicated the necessity for a website, but your website is rendered useless if it confuses people, turns people off, and makes potential leads give up and go somewhere else.
The Meaningful Experiences part of this four-part framework is your audience journey, ensuring that your website’s loose ends are tightened up so that your audience won’t lose interest.
To engage with the Meaningful Experiences part of this framework, you should:
- Make sure your website is mobile responsive on every breakpoint and device
- Identify and eliminate friction on your website
- Tighten up the “loose ends” on your website, keeping your audience engaged rather than confused and frustrated
Putting it All Together
At this point, we’ve gone over a 30,000 foot view of each of these four parts of the framework, but heed my words when I say that one or two or three of these parts isn’t enough for an effective website strategy. All four parts of the framework work in tandem with one another and each one must be understood, uniquely crafted and effectively deployed if you really want to see your online goals come to fruition.
For instance, if you utilize all three of the other parts of the framework, but ignore the Mission component of your website strategy, you’ll be aiming at nothing. You won’t know what you’re accomplishing or why you’re accomplishing it. You’ll be a passenger on a journey with no sense of direction. Lost. Confused. Driving in the fog.
If you utilize all three of the other parts of the framework, but ignore the Messaging component, you may have some clear goals and ideas of what you want to accomplish online, but your website copy will be confusing. You won’t be intentionally sharing your story or inviting your audience into a story. People won’t know where to go next. The process will seem vague. Your audience will be travelers on a journey with no wayfinding signage. No road signs. They’ll cluelessly guess as they take turn after turn with no guidance or clear direction. And this will result in them abandoning the journey altogether.
If you utilize all three of the other parts of the framework, but ignore the Marketing component, your website copy may be clear and succinct, but your website will be a visual “turn off” to your audience. You won’t have an effective channel for getting users to your site in the first place and once someone finally does arrive to your website, you won’t be able to capture lead information, funnel them through a pipeline, or convert that website visitor into a sale or donation. With no marketing strategy, your audience has a poor likelihood of even starting the journey in the first place and once they do embark, there will be nothing to point them toward which decisions to make along the way.
If you utilize all three of the other parts of the framework, but ignore the Meaningful Experiences component, your marketing plan may attract regular visitors onto the pages of your website, but they’ll be dissatisfied with the user experience. The text will be too small. Buttons will be broken. Pages will take too long to load. Without striving to provide meaningful experiences to your website visitors, your audience will be traveling on a road filled with potholes and dead ends. They’ll be frustrated with every challenge and inconvenience that comes their way, which will make them wonder why they embarked on the journey to begin with.
