Editorial Articles

In today’s competitive and cost-conscious climate, a company’s website is a primary resource for connecting with customers. But it is only one of a number of channels a business must use to spread awareness of its goods and services. Publishing personalised content on the website is just the beginning. This article focuses on how targeted content can help turn casual visitors to the website into buyers.

Marshalling Content for Customer Insights
Producing content that can answer any customer question and solve their issues creates an explosion in the amount of content produced for your website. This content has to be managed in a systematic fashion. Also the context for content delivery is important. Customer experiences must somehow be measured. A way to easily capture these results, and rapidly interpret them in the context of the overall digital ecosystem is needed. This is where an integrated web content management system (WCMS) and online marketing suite comes into its own.

Connecting Campaign Content with Outcomes
Prior to launching a marketing campaign it is essential to prepare by ensuring the website goals are in line with the overall business objectives. It’s important to focus on the actions you expect customers to take so that you can track which actions on the website contribute most to business results. Having a handle on this kind of operational data helps to quickly spot trends, test alternative content delivery strategies and make adjustments as needed. Campaigning with content leads to informed design decisions and marketing initiatives.

From Defining a Goal to Calculating a Conversion Rate
When defining site goals marketers should seek to manage the relevant content and deliver compelling experiences that correlate with the website objectives. In effect the site design and information architecture should trigger experiences when customers perform certain actions that move them to the next step in your sales or support process. Implicitly or explicitly, the aim is to lead customers through a series of predefined steps.

Designing a Dashboard for Campaign Effectiveness
The next step is to create a dashboard that shows the operational results from multiple marketing campaigns on the same page. This is important for tracking what’s happening and allowing decisions to be taken in real time regarding what is working, and where attention should be focused next. If you are using a customer intelligence engine you can capture conversions and determine an overall conversion rate. Not all conversions are equal – some have a greater impact than others. If you assign the value of each conversion in the form of a point score, it should be possible to weigh the relative importance of one goal relative to the other site goals.

Refining the Web Experience by Testing Alternatives
Defining goals and calculating conversion rates helps to rapidly test alternative designs, quickly evaluate results, revise and update scenarios and thus accelerate the design decision-making process. To test alternative content components they must first be dynamically assembled into the web pages. Begin with two choices for the same section of a web page. Both alternatives should be designed to achieve the same site goal. Successful campaigns will have higher conversion rates leading to better business results.

Refining your web content is a continual process. Testing alternatives helps give customers the right content for making decisions. The function of the website is ultimately to replicate the kinds of experience customers would normally expect from good sales staff. It’s essential to be able to link one scenario to another as an ongoing chain of events. When they come back for more their multiple interactions with the website are recorded and they are automatically taken to personally relevant content and the next stage of the process. By linking site goals together to replicate the end-to-end buying process you can deliver content that customers will find immediately useful. You can even provide a foretaste of what’s to come and prime them for continuing their interaction at a later stage.

Geoffrey Bock, Principal, Bock & Company & Darren Guarnaccia, VP Product Marketing, Sitecore