Marketers and web designers create their web sites to meet many goals – the site needs to be usable and accessible, it needs to convert well and be maintainable, it needs to satisfy new visitors, existing customers, investors, and job seekers.
Here’s one more requirement for a web site. The site needs to be a marketing platform for your organization.
Web sites are not static. Not only is content being added constantly, companies are constantly testing and analyzing landing pages, promotions, pricing, and layout. Online marketing makes it possible to always be in a mode of “test and learn”. This mode is good for visitors because the site continues to improve in its ability to meet their needs. And it’s good for the organization because it can try a new idea, split test the results, and within days or even hours find out which one works best.
This ability to rapidly make changes and see the results is a competitive edge for the companies that take advantage of it.
- These companies can take many risks, because each one is small and they will see the results soon. If a change to the site doesn’t work, back it out and try something else!
- These companies learn faster because they deploy a change quickly and start measuring the results immediately. The more they turn the faster they learn, especially compared to competitors who take weeks or months to make a change to their site.
- These companies let their visitors and customers teach them. They come up with a range of ideas, but they test them and the visitor usage provides the results.
But in order to work in this mode, it has to be easy for marketers to make changes quickly and to have the technical support to make it happen. The Kellogg School of Management and Sapient recently looked at the relationship between Marketing and Information Technology groups (blogged here). In their study titled “The New Marketing – IT Power Partnership“, Mark Jeffery and David Bond declare that the technology revolution in marketing is not about web sites and interactive advertising, it’s about “speed and the customer’s experience with the brand”. They looked at several companies who are focused on this strategy and observe that (in these companies) marketing and technology strategies are more tightly aligned than is often seen.
By working closely with the technology groups, marketing at these companies has been able to integrate their customer touch points (web site, call centers, retail outlets) and to increase the speed of marketing innovation. They have made their site a marketing platform by focusing on the customer experience, using analytics to find opportunities and measure results, and by building flexible underlying systems.
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