a methodology for web success
DESCRIPTION
Improving a website’s usability and experience design does in fact drive business, but you also have to ensure that it aligns to your brand to guarantee that you are maximizing the web as an effective communications channel with your customers.In this session, Mr. Lacerte will detail what a brand is, why the web is an ideal mechanism for connecting and interacting with customers, and provide some guidelines that you can use in your next website redevelopment. These guidelines will ensure that you both connect with your customers and fulfill your business objectives. An outline of these objectives could include raising brand awareness, increase sales, profit margins, market share, stock performance, competitive advantage, customer satisfaction or customer loyalty.TRANSCRIPT
Maximize your web success
A Joint Presentation of:
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
Presented by:
Bruce Lacerte, BA, MGDCPresident / Senior Brand StrategistBrandHardware Corporation
Glenn Walker, B.Comm, AIT, Google Adwords ProfessionalInternet Marketing Consultant Tiko Digital Ltd.
Curtis BarranoikPresident, Cencomp Systems
An exposé on how online marketing, brand strategy and CRM tools can effectively
generate, solidify, and convert leads into bottom-line results.
A Methodology For Web SuccessAligning your web strategy to the brand experience to maximize your organization’s bottom-line
Presented by:
Bruce Lacerte, BA, MGDCPresident / Senior Brand StrategistBrandHardware Corporation
Executive Summary With an alignment between your brand and web strategy
you will: ensure that the end result is a website that accomplishes
your business goals and will add significant value to your organization.
Proof is in the numbers Decision makers from 148 different Fortune 500 companies
stated that usability, ensuring user goals and web alignment to their brand were their top three must-haves in their website redesign strategy.
A recent usability and user experience report (July 2007), compiled by eConsultancy, revealed that improving a company’s brand by improving the usability and user experience of a company’s website increased the customer’s perception of their brand by 54%. Greater customer loyalty and retention (46%) Increased customer advocacy or Word of mouth (38%) Increased traffic (36%)
What is a brand?
Well…it’s NOT just a logo. It is: The most important asset a company can
command in its arsenal of business communication tools.
More than a name, collection of logos, images, colours, fonts, or snazzy marketing.
The Brand Experience Put simply, it is the way your brand communicates out to
the world. In the 21st century, your brand transcends more than just
paper, radio, or tv. It transcends electrons and binary, media and continents.
For consistency and clarity of message, your brand needs to have a common unified voice.
By presenting a more true-to-form version of yourself to your customers, you will gain a competitive advantage over your competitors and realize all the afore mentioned business objectives.
The Web: The 21st Century touchpoint to connect, communicate and interact with your customers.
The web is the ideal communications vehicle for the brand experience.
Why? Low cost feature-rich environment allows the brand to truly come
to life within a two dimensional medium (e.g., using dynamic capabilities through data integration, interactivity, content management, personalization, integrated communications) .
Brand Image & Action: inherent ability to display and communicate a brand’s essence while still possessing the flexibility and capability to deliver on the brand’s promise by allowing the customer to interact — and hopefully connect — with the brand.
Web Implementation & Alignment to brand Step 1. Analysis & Strategy Let’s assume we’ve created a brand strategy, positioning and
an expression for that brand. The next step becomes implementing that brand in a powerful
and compelling web experience. Every company can build a website that displays its
competencies and capabilities, but it is how you utilize the web to design and display those abilities that makes the difference with your customers and sets you apart from your competitors.
How? Your website needs to be designed first for your customers
and secondly for yourself. Your website needs to provide the value that your customer
is looking for and be able to provide it to them as quickly and easily as possible.
Your site has to align to the brand in terms of functionality, content, language, imagery, and layout.
Your website needs to easily and unswervingly be able to live up the scrutiny of web usability and experience analysis.
Web Implementation & Alignment to brand Step 2. Areas of Focus
Home page: a shared entry point for every conceivable
visitor, each one looking to the corporate homepage to help steer them swiftly to their goals, and;
a seven-second opportunity to make a first impression.
Implementation of the Brand Experience, both in image and action.
User Experience and Usability Design Use Accredited Design Firm for
Implementation Graphic Designers of Canada
Rules for a successful site design
Develop a site that won’t frustrate your customers
Provide a brand essence document for your web design / development team.
Ensure the brand essence permeates throughout your site.
Test, Test, Test. Conduct brand impairment reviews annually.
Design in action
Bernard Callebaut Website Re-design: To get an accurate measurement of their return on
investment, they “neutralized all the factors which could have independently affected the project metrics.
They did not create any advertising for their new site of any kind.
The new site was launched December 2005 and, compared with data from the same month the previous year: the average value of each online sale increased by 62% the total number of online orders increased by 63% the total number of online sales increased by 156%.
Closing
Aligning your web strategy to the brand experience will maximize your organization’s bottom-line. It is not intangible, the results are very tangible.
