In my consulting practice I often come across many small and even medium sized businesses that can't really answer the question of what the purpose of their web site is, why does it exist? What do they hope to gain from having it? They often give some vague answer that it was created to promote the company. Promotion is a worthy goal for a web site, but it is also an indirect benefit of your web strategy. In other words having a successful Internet marketing strategy will promote your company, but will also accomplish much more if it is designed and executed well.
For example, does your company have an eCommerce site? If yes, is the goal to create a new channel to sell your products or is it to "promote" your company. The obvious answer is it is created to boost sales. That is an easy one, but if you don't have an eCommerce site is the purpose of your site to get people to sign up for your newsletter (building your list), to call your sales department (increase sales through direct response), or is the purpose to provide information to your customers that improves their position and creates loyalty with your company and site?
Your purpose could be one of these or it could be all of them in different degrees of importance. It could be another reason like pre-qualifying customers, or creating online customer or vendor service channels to reduce costs. No matter what the primary goal of a web site is you need to know that purpose and have all of your online marketing goals prioritized.
If you don't know what your primary goals are how do you expect your customers that visit the site to know them? Once you know what your all your goals are for your web site then you can start the process of ranking them and organizing your site, navigation, information architecture, copy, and other elements of your site to channel or "push" your customers to that purpose.
However if you don't know what those goals are and have made no effort to channel your visitors to meeting that goal or purpose then your web strategy is most likely missing the mark. If you are one of the countless sites out that has an about us page, our services, and a few other "canned" elements that may entice a visitor one time to look at them, but give them no reason to stick around or come back you have what is known in the industry as a "brochureware" site. These sites will always fail to accomplish much accept take up server space.
To have a successful Internet marketing strategy know what the purpose of your site is and what all your goals in order of importance are. Work with your marketing and web departments to organize your site around these goals and give your customers a reason to spend some time on your site and come back.
I have a new article on my site on this very topic and I invite you to take a moment to visit my site and download/read the article. Pass it along to your friends in business and hopefully you will gain something from it. To access the article click on this link:
http://www.michaeltemple.com/Articles/Purpose.pdf
P.S. I also have other articles that you may find interesting and have an awesome free eNewsletter that you can sign up for.
