I am regularly asked to help start-up businesses to increase their revenue growth, and this often ends up with a discussion about how well the website.
Sometimes this can be improved by changing the look and feel of your website or increasing the technical quality of the site and sharpening your SEO. Unfortunately, these approaches can end up with an expensive rebuild of the whole website.
But a bigger and more fundamental problem for many websites is that they can often shift away from their original business goals or were never set up with clear business goals in mind in the first place.
Once this happens, it is likely that your products and services won’t connect with your target customers. Consequently, your website is going to be a lot less effective in driving revenue for your business.
I am going to suggest a way of testing how well your website is meeting your customers’ needs.
Reverse Engineering your strategy
The overall idea behind this approach is that if your website is aligned to your business strategy, it should be clear:
what the primary business of your website is
what our the most important things you want your visitors to do.
Who are your customers
Are the benefits of your products / services clearly articulated.
Are there clear and relevant calls to action
This approach uses a survey and asking friends acquaintances to look at your website and answer a series of questions about what they find. The principle behind this survey is that is your website is going to achieve your business goals, it will need to align your products and services with the challenges and opportunities of your target customers.
Question 1: What do you think the primary purpose of this website is?
Your website should be very clear about what it is trying to do. Although a website is often asked to do many things for a business, unless you have a primary purpose for your website you will confuse your customers. You want to avoid the main purpose of your website being obscured by peripheral objectives.
Question 2: What are the three important items promoted on the website?
You would be surprised how often minor campaigns and tactical objectives can overtake a website.
Think carefully about the three most important actions that you want your visitors to take and ensure that they are most prominent in your website messaging.
It is essential that visitors to your website understand what actions are most important! If not, you have got your messaging seriously wrong.
Question 3: Who are the types of customers that would want to buy these products and services?
It should be clear to visitors to your website who your ideal customers are, because if it's not you are going to struggle to connect with them.
Your customers need to know that they come to the right place and the products or services have been designed with them in mind. You need to ensure that your messaging is talking to the customer groups that you have identified in your strategy.
Question 4: What the benefits will your products and services provide your customers?
Is it obvious on your website what the key benefits that your customers get from the products or services you're selling. What value will it give them?
Many websites tend to talk about the features of their products, without explaining what your potential customers what is in it for them.
If this is not clear, you will fail the “so what?” about whether your products are relevant to your website visitors.
Question 5: What actions does the website what customers to do?
If you have the right products and you have attracted the right visitors, the last point is whether you have clear calls-to-action on the website. This aspect is important because not only is it important to make it clear what you want your visitors to do, it also needs to reflect the stage in the customer journey. It is estimated that a customer has around 7 marketing touchpoints before their convert (either to buy or contact the sales team). So your calls-to-action need to be relevant to the stage in the buyer journey.
For example, for a first-time visitor, “talk to a salesperson” or “book a demo” are going to be too a great commitment. These calls-to-action are going to be more relevant for a later visit to your website. The call to action at an early stage is going be something like, “learn more” or “watch this video”. Other mid-funnel calls-to-action can include “gated” content, which is more focused on the buyers needs but can only be accessed through sharing of contact details such as email address. This can help you in further marketing activities.
How to use these questions?
Give this questionnaire to someone who is not closely involved in your business and ask them for their responses. It shouldn’t take more than 10 -15 minutes to complete.
I would suggest that ideally that you should ask between 5 and 10 people to complete the survey. This would be manageable number and give sufficient range of opinion. This will give you an idea of inconsistencies in the understanding of your site by different visitors.
TLDR: What you will learn?
Is it easy for a visitor to understand what your primary business goal is?
Is your value proposition clear to potential customers?
Is it clear what your target audience is?
Why would they want to buy from you?
Use these insights to map back onto your strategy. If there isn’t a strong overlap, then it may be that you will need to either change your strategy because it is no longer fit for purpose or change your website to make sure that it more clearly reflects your strategic goals.
Below is the business model canvas. The insights from the questionnaire can provide information on several of the customer facing elements of the canvas.