Feature Article

Defining A Clear Goal For Your Site

by: Yuri Filimonov Improve the Web

Back in the days, everyone and their dog wanted to have a website for any reason. Even just to display dog/cat photos.

But when it comes to business websites, there is investment and return involved. If you invest in the website, you expect to get a return on investment (ROI). And to get any return, your site needs to have a goal, according to which all the actions will be compared.

What is a website goal?

Basically any website can have a goal:

• inform family and friends of life happenings
• share news, thoughts and links about one's interests
• * communicate with people across the globe
• * have fun, entertain oneself and others
• * make profit by selling information, services, software, etc

When you define the goal of your website, it should become more clear about:

• who your audience is
• what exactly you are offering
• what the benefits of your offer are
• what you need to have on your website
• where online and offline your audience roams

Ultimately, by knowing your goal, you'll be able to define the action your audience needs to perform on your website. It is the only or primary action you want your visitors to do. It can be anything:

• contacting you
• signing up for a newsletter, newspaper, magazine, etc
• downloading/buying software
• buying an ebook, article
• successfully using an online tool
• posting an article/post, commenting
• any other traceable action important both to you and your audience

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How to define website goal?

As mentioned above, the site goal comes from the reason to have a website. You want the website for something? Then someone has to do something on the website. That action is your website goal.

Imagine that you can have only one action on the website. What would it be? That's your website goal. Beyond this definition, only you can define what exactly you want to do on your website or have other people do something on your website.

By defining the action you want your visitors to perform on your website, you make it incredibly easy to build your website about it, as well as to track your website and your audience progres.

How to benefit from the goal?

First of all, knowing the goal helps you define your actions you will need to do around the website:

• research your audience, market, competition
• research keywords
• structure the website
• design your website
• create content
• make the site easy to use (including accessible to people with limitations)
• promote the website

When you research the audience and the market, you see if the audience will be willing to do what you want them to do on your website.

Another important moment about having a clear goal in mind is that you'll be able to target at your audience precisely and neglect untargeted ideas, tips and whatever someone without the right knowledge will come up with.

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By peeking at your competition, you check if there is anyone doing what you are going to do. If not, good. If yes, you can make your offer unique from scratch.

While researching keywords, you'll think what people using those queries were searching for and how likely they will be to complete the desired goal on your website.

The website design will depend on how the audience is succeptible to the visuals. If your target audience is women and you sell furniture or expensive clothes, you'll need a bright, fashionable website with plenty of high resolution photos. If you are targetting librarians, you might as well stick with text.

Obviously, the website will be structured around the site goal, along with the click path and information scent.

Depending on the goal, you'll create the content around it and your target audience.

Of course, making it extremely easy to complete the goal should be great. You can measure the time it takes to complete it, as well as the percentage of visitors that complete it (conversion rate).

By making your website accessible, you may also increase your customer base by 10-20% (the amount of people with disabilities in US/UK).

And, naturally, all the above, including the goal, will influence how successful you are with promoting your website, as well as the tactics you use to market it.

Just as well your site will be highly targeted and will be perceived as very useful to your audience, ultimately leading to increased conversions, whatever the conversion is.

Rounding up

Regardless of where you are in improving your website, having a clear goal in mind always helps.

If you don't have one (the goal, or both), investing time, efforts and money in the website will probably not pay off, unless you do it for entertainment, learning something new and other intangible personal reasons.

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Yuri Filimonov is a freelance website optimization and usability consultant, who writes about improving websites to gain more visitors, customers and profit at his blog, www.ImproveTheWeb.com

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Second Article

Event Marketing

by: Scott Geld Blaster

Event marketing is one of the more popular forms of subtle but successful marketing. These days, events are a large part of the marketing mix for some companies. Companies are successfully using events for marketing and promotion, as they would use any of the more traditional forms of advertising to promote their products and services.

Events offer a more personalized and customized message to the audience. Events bring the actual product to the customer and consciously and little subtly it gives a message about the product to the audience. Events tend to bring the products to the customer directly, though it targets a much smaller audience than other tools of advertising. Events like trade shows, sporting events, concerts etc which allow the customer to try and feel the products is a good way to make the customer aware of your products, because there is a clutter of brands today and unless special effort is made your brand could get lost in this clutter.

A company's main aim is to increase its sales and it does this by bringing its services directly to the customers. In a store, you might sell some products incidentally to people looking for something else. But it makes a lot of difference when the person gets to try out the product or even receive a sample of it at various events. This is because experiential marketing has lot of scope in today's society as it gives the customer a direct opportunity to try out something new and accept it only when he likes it.

Events are also important tools to maintain relationship with old customers and pitch in to new prospective customers. The existing customers are often given free entry to such events, and probably given some incentive to attend the event. The presence of the old customers is beneficial for the company because they are likely to give testimonial about your products in the presence of other audience. And of course in any event the number of people attending the event is crucial and the existing customers even though may not buy still add to the number of people attending the event.

Event marketing is based on the premise that a customer is most likely to remember what he has experienced himself. Therefore, to achieve this, you need to make your demonstrations interactive so that people will remember them and indirectly your product, even after they have gone home. This is the most effective way of marketing.

Popularity of event marketing is increasing by the day and more companies are adopting it as a favored marketing tool that it is taken up as a specialist career profession. Courses are being offered at universities and colleges where candidates learn skills to host and execute events of all sizes and types. Because of this increasing popularity of event marketing, many companies and big businesses are employing professionals with formal education in the field.

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Scott Geld is the owner and operator of Marketing Blaster which is a premier resource for marketing information. For questions go to www.MarketingBlaster.com

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