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Planing
- Piloting
your Web project
The first
step in developing a Web strategy is isolating goals for your
online property and ensuring that these match the larger business
goals of the company. Your director of business development
should already have the business goals established. Your job
is to decide how your Web strategy will address these goals
and to lay a course for success.
The initial
draft of a Web strategy should present:
- a direct
correspondence between the Web strategy and specific business
goals. For example, if your company's main goal in the coming
quarter is to increase revenue, how will a plan to develop
new editorial content address that objective?
- a high-level
road map of strategy components. Eventually, these components
will be developed in detail, but during the initial planning
stages, more broadly defined elements should suffice.
- demonstrable
benchmarks, such as projected page views, revenue, mailing
list subscriptions, and other measurable data.
As an example, let's examine the Web strategy of a company
that sells coffee tables and has a peripheral online property.
For the upcoming quarter, the company plans to expand into
the bar stool market, and overall business goals include
repositioning the company brand and increasing revenue.
A Web
strategy designed to address these dual business goals might
include elements such as developing new content related to
both bar stools and the new corporate brand, restructuring
the site's architecture or implementing a multiphase redesign,
adding new e-commerce components, and selling additional advertising
space. Besides setting benchmarks for projected revenue, one
of the strategy components might be a user survey that would
generate data on brand perception and the relative success
of the strategy's brand-repositioning efforts.
While
developing your short-term and long-term Web strategies, don't
forget to:
undertake
a competitive analysis before formalizing any large-scale
implementation;
stay informed
on future business goals and how they may affect the scalability
of your current strategy;
talk to
your business director about future partnerships or third-party
relationships that could facilitate the implementation of
your strategy;
plan ahead
for the integration of offline and online data.
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