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Oct
06
2008

Creating an Internet Business Strategy – Implementation

By | News & Notes, Strategy

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gnrimplementationWe’re in the home stretch of our Internet Business Strategy planning, but let’s quickly review the parts of the plan:

  • Executive Summary
  • Methodologies
  • Current Situation
  • Vision & Goals
  • Requirements
  • Implementation

The implementation portion of the Internet Business Strategy planning is not intended to be a full implementation plan.  Once you have your strategy, you’ll need to create detailed implementation plans.  For your Internet business strategy, consider the following for implementation :

  • Lessons Learned – Are there any previous projects we can learn from?  Are there external sources that have implemented similar strategies?
  • Implementation of Sub-Projects – Does it make sense to divide the project into smaller, easier-to-manage proejcts?  How will you divide up the implementation into sub-projects? Who is responsible for each sub-project?  How will the sub-projects be managed in order to move towards a common goal?
  • Phasing and Milestones – What is a realistic timeline for implementation?  Should we divide up implementation into phases? What are the various phases of implementation?  What are target dates for each phase?
  • Budget Plan – What are the budgetary requirements for any phasing and sub-projects?  Are there any opportunities for cost-sharing with other organizations? What are the specifics of our financial processes?  Who is the financial authority for administration the budget? How does the available budget affect the time periods for phases and milestones?
  • Marketing – How will we get the word out about our strategy?  Who is the target audience?  Are there any events we should attend?  What is our marketing budget?
  • Measuring Success and Making Adjustments – What are the critical success factors that should be communicated to our stakeholders?  What performance metrics should we use? What cost avoidance can be expected and how can it be measured?  How often do we assess our progress to determine if adjustments need to be made?

Once you have created your Internet business strategy, you will need to work to implement and communicate your vision throughout your organization.  We’ll cover these topics in future posts.

(photo by qnr @ Flickr CC)

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Sep
30
2008

What are the Requirements for your Internet Business Strategy to Succeed?

By | News & Notes, Strategy

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boullosatrainwindowNow that you’ve considered the methodologies for your Internet Business Strategy, assessed the current situation, and created vision and goals, it’s time to figure out all the requirements.  Requirements in terms of an Internet strategy plan are much broader than normal project requirements.  These requirements need to encompass everything needed by the organization to reach your vision and goals.  Think broadly.

Here are some requirements to consider:

  • Data Requirements – What data and information do we need to attain our goals?  What information do we need for monitoring our efforts?  What content do we need?  Where can we get access to this data and information?  How does the data and information need to be analyzed?
  • Technology Requirements – What infrastructure do we need to support our strategy (network, servers, etc)?  What system architecture is needed (operating systems, web browsers, etc.)?  What applications need to be supported (or purchased)?  Do any of the systems or applications need to work together?  How?  Do we have any legacy systems that need to be integrated?
  • Resource Requirements – What skills and expertise are needed for our strategy?  Are the skills available within the organization?  Will new staff need to be hired?  Are consultants required?  Are there any other resources we can use to meet our requirements (voluntary, part-time, interns)?
  • Standards Requirements – Are there any organizational or external standards that require compliance?  What standards should be required or created in order to assure quality?  How will these standards be monitored?
  • Organizational Requirements – Are there any organizational changes needed to meet our goals?  Are the people resources required spread out throughout the organization?  How will they be organized and managed?
  • Executive Support – What is required to ensure top-level executive support and buy-in?  How will executives be briefed on progress?  What involvement is required by executives to ensure success?
  • Coordination & Oversight Requirements – Who is responsible for coordinating strategy efforts?  Who is responsible for making decisions related to strategy implementation?  Who is the champion of the strategy?  What responsibilities are required and how are they assigned?  Who is monitoring progress and how is progress reported?  Who in these cases does not need to be an individual.  A team may be more effective especially if diverse departments are involved.
  • Policy Requirements – Are there any existing policies that need to be considered and possibly altered to attain our goals?  Do any policies need to be put into place?  Are there any external policies that need to be followed?
  • Staffing Requirements – If we need more staff, how do we justify them?  What qualifications should new staff have?  What support personnel are needed for implementation and supporting new staff?  Can volunteers be used?  Part-time personnel?  Interns?  Are there any professional credentials or certifications that are relevant?  What are the job descriptions for any new positions (or changes)?
  • Budget Requirements – What funding is required?  How will we be funded?  Can we redirect existing funding?  Are there opportunities for cost sharing?  How do we get more funding/money?  How will staff positions be allocated?  How will expenses and profits be allocated?  How can we mitigate any future budget shortfalls?
  • Community & Outreach Requirements – What communications are required to keep implementation of our goals on track?  Who will be responsible for coordinating any communications?  Who needs to be informed of progress?  Are any external organizations or stakeholders involved?
  • Risk Assessment Requirements – What major challenges could affect the outcome of our strategy (both internally and externally)?  How will we recognize risks and overcome them?  What might happen if we do not overcome obstacles?

Gathering all the requirements probably seems very time consuming.  And it is, but if it is done properly it will make the next step, implementation, much easier.  Requirements gathering is a great place to get many people involved.  Many different types of expertise are needed to gather some of the requirements.  Dividing and conquering can save a lot of time and effort and create a much more robust set of requirements.

What other requirements have you considered when strategizing for Internet business?

(photo by nicolas.boullosa @ Flickr CC)

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Sep
25
2008

Vision & Goals for your Internet Business Strategy

By | Strategy

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Once you’ve figured out the methodologies for your Internet strategy and analyzed your current situation, the next step is to craft your vision and goals.  Here are some questions to consider when creating your vision and goals:

  • What do we stand for?
  • What are we trying to accomplish?
  • Are our goals measurable?  How will we know when we’ve achieved them?
  • How should we prioritize our goals?
  • Where do we want to be in a year?  Where do we want to be in five years?
  • What should our mission statement be, given our goals?
  • Are our goals concise and understandable?
  • Can we form concrete objectives and tasks from our goals?

goaldogfrogOnce you have a clear, concise vision and set of goals, have several people in your organization review them.  It is important that your vision and goals are created in such a way that anyone understands what needs to be done, and more critically, where the organization is headed.

Think about your least business-saavy employee.  Will they be able to understand the vision and goals that you have set for the company?  You may think that only high level executives need to understand where the company is going.  However, if the entire team is moving in the same direction, it is much more efficient and effective.  You’ll find benefits you may not have accounted for, such as great customer service throughout the organization.

(photo by dogfrog)

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Sep
22
2008

Internet Business Strategy – What is the Current Situation?

By | Analytics, Content, Design, News & Notes, Strategy, Usability

situationargenbergBefore beginning to strategize, you need to create goals for your business.  In order to create goals you need a solid grasp of your current situation on the Internet (your current web presence). To get an idea of your current internet situation take a look at:

Website – Ideally your website is the hub of your Internet presence with customer-centric design and content.

  • Analytics – How well is your website performing?  Basic statistics such as page views, visits and uniques are useful.  But more importantly, how many leads and conversions are you getting?  Where is your traffic coming from?  How useable is your website?  Are people getting frustrated?
  • Usability – Can visitors find what they are looking for on your website?  Is it easy to use?  What could be improved?
  • Content – Great content provides your customers with the information they need to succeed.  Creating content should be a continual process.  What content do your customers want to see?  What expertise can you provide?
  • Design – Your website needs to be easy to use (usability), but also should be eye-catching and professional.  Are the fonts need to be easy to read and does the layout should draw visitors into your message?

Community & Brand Reputation- Your customers are talking about you both online and offline.  Find where your customers are and join the conversation to get key insights into improving your business.

  • Blog – If you have a blog, what feedback have your readers given you? What are other bloggers saying?  Who has linked to your blog and what have they said?
  • Forum / Discussion Boards – If you don’t have discussion boards on your website, find places where your customers frequent.  Listen to concerns and join the conversation with suggestions for improvement.
  • Social Networks – Your customers are probably on social networks already (if they aren’t they probably will be soon).  Find social networks where your customers frequent and see what they are saying.  Join the social networks to give them an opportunity to connect.
  • Reviews – Have there been any reviews of your products and services?  What can be improved?

Search Engines – Many potential customers will find your website through search engines so it is important to understand how search engines currently crawl and index your site.

  • Keywords – What keywords do the search engines see on your site?  Where does your site rank for various keywords?  It can be helpful to pick the top 100 to monitor at first.  There are a number of free tools available to help (Google Webmaster tools, Rank Checker for Firefox, SEO Quake for Firefox and Internet Explorer).
  • Indexed Pages – How many pages on your website (and blog) do the search engines include in their indices?  (SEO Quake and Website Grader can help).
  • Incoming Links – How many other sites are linking to your website?  What are they linking to?  What are they saying? (SEO Quake and Website Grader).
  • Outgoing Links – What other websites are you linking to? (Google Webmaster tools, SEO Quake).
  • Cache – What pages are the search engines displaying in their results?  What do they have saved that may be old content?  (Google Webmaster Tools).

Marketing – What is your company trying to say to customers and potential customers?  What are the current marketing messages your company is using?  What is the status of any advertising or sales campaigns?  What is the return on investment (ROI) of any campaigns?

  • Advertising – It is important to understand how any advertising is impacting your bottom line and helping to reach your goals.  Besides budgets, clicks, and impressions, it is important to measure leads, conversions, or sales – what return you are getting on your investment (ROI).
  • Competitors – Who are your competitors?  What are their web presences?  What marketing and advertising are they doing?  What are their strengths and weaknesses?  What opportunities and threats exist?

There is quite a bit of information to gather, but once you have it you’ll be able to get a good overview of what your current Internet presence is.  You should be able to find opportunities to improve and be able to formulate some business goals. As you can see, Internet business strategy merges into traditional business strategy by using the Internet to collect information and feedback and to further business goals.  Next we’ll talk about vision and goals.

(photo by argenberg @ Flickr CC)

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Sep
18
2008

How to Create an Internet Business Strategy – Methodologies

By | Strategy

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cloudsthejamokerIn the last post in this series we summarized the steps of a internet strategy plan.  In the next series of posts, we’ll go into more detail.  Thinking about methodology or what steps you are going to take to come up with your plan is an important step.  While this may seem like planning to plan, good strategic planning involves all the major stakeholders in the company, which takes good planning to accomplish.

Stakeholders

Who are they and why are they important?  Stakeholders are anyone who has a major stake in the strategic plan.  Put differently, they are people who are affected or affect the plan.  Obviously there could be herds of people affected, so strategy planning focuses on major stakeholders (usually high level managers). Once major stakeholders have been identified, you should also think about who is responsible for what in the strategic planning process and who is supervising the entire process.

Planning to Plan

Will the strategic planning process be handled internally or by consultants?  Does the process need to completed by a certain date? Are there other strategy plans that this fits into (IT, finance, human resources, etc.)? Should the planning be split into phases?  What are the roadblocks to the process (internal politics, resources, budget, etc.)?  What are the factors for success?  Are there any collaboration tools to help the process?

Strategizing

How do you identify quick opportunities for success?  How will you identify opportunities for improvement?  How will you come up with solutions?  What time limits will you impose on the planning process (strategic plans that take too long can have situations change thereby changing solutions)?  What are the realistic goals for the business?  How will you market your strategies?

Monitoring

A key factor to the success of strategic planning is being able to monitor the solutions.  Once you’ve come up with solutions you are going to implement, figure out what to monitor to make sure those solutions are working.  If they aren’t working, how can you change them?  Also important to consider is who will be responsible for monitoring solutions and making decisions about what needs to change (if anything).

Summary

You’ll notice that there are a lot of questions to ask (and try to answer).  Strategic planning is  thinking about the questions that need to be asked and then trying to answer them.  Asking questions helps to develop an understanding of the challenges facing the organization.  Once the challenges have been identified, it becomes easier to come up with solutions.

So far the Internet strategic plan is no different from an overall strategic plan.  A good Internet strategic plan should involve a most of the organization and follows similar methodologies.

Next we’ll discuss how to analyze your current Internet situation.

(photo by The Jamoker)

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Sep
15
2008

How to Create an Internet Business Strategy – Introduction

By | Strategy

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chesspshutterbugOne of the main services we provide to clients is creating an Internet Business Strategy.  While I’d like to think there is a certain level of expertise to creating a formal Internet strategic plan, I do believe that every business owner can get into the mindset of thinking strategically.  Even if you feel you’re not up to the task of creating your own Internet strategic plan, understanding what goes into creating one can help you think about ways to improve how you do business online.

At the heart of formal strategic planning is creating a strategic plan.  While there are many different details that can go into a strategic plan, there are some basics that are important to think about:

  • Executive Summary – Every formal report should have an executive summary which highlights the main findings.  The summary should include all the top-level information that a CEO needs to know to make a decision (without reading the rest of the report).  The trick is to keep the summary to only one page, so being concise is important.
  • Methodologies – As part of the planning, think about who needs to be involved in the Internet strategy, how you’re going to plan the strategy, how to strategize, who is going to write the plan, and how to monitor the plan.
  • Current Situation – Where does the company currently stand as far as web presence?  What does the company stand for online?  What do other people think of the company and products?  What are your online competitors?
  • Vision & Goals – What does the company want to accomplish online?
  • Requirements – What are the requirements in order to meet the goals?  These requirements need to incorporate all aspects of the company that are affected by the implementation.
  • Implementation – How are you going to accomplish your goals?  The plan needs to include milestones, budget, marketing, and, most importantly, how you will monitor for success.

This is the first in a series of posts discussing Internet Business Strategy.  In the next set of posts, we’ll discuss these steps of an Internet strategic plan in more detail.

(photo by pshutterbug)

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Sep
09
2008

What is a Brand?

By | Internet Advertising, Marketing

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Our recent discussions on branding (here and here) brought up an important topic – what is a brand? Sometimes business owners think a brand is just a logo or a marketing message, but I think it’s much more:

  • Visual – A brand usually has a visual representation in terms of a logo or graphic that is easily recognizable.  Brands can also be identified by a spokesperson or icon (for example, the energizer bunny). Sometimes there are also visual representations that have been created by customers instead of the company.
  • Auditory – Many brands have a signature theme song or jingle (think rhapsody in blue for united airlines, or the Intel chimes) which can bring to mind the company when heard outside of advertisements.
  • Verbal – Through marketing, sales, and customer service, a company creates verbal impressions of what the company stands for in various situations.
  • Emotional – Brands evoke an emotional response in customers (hopefully good emotions), which are influenced by their interactions with the brand (advertising, purchasing, customer service, other customers, etc.).
  • Communal – With the ease of communication available on the Internet, customers can easily share opinions, feelings, and experiences about your brand with or without your influence.
  • Instinctive – Closely tied with emotional and communal influences, customers have instinctual feelings and opinions about your brand even before they’ve interacted with your company, formed through advertising and information from other customers.
  • Evolutionary – Brands are constantly evolving through interaction and shared experiences of customers, non-customers and companies.  A company can try to influence the evolution, but is no longer in complete control of the brand.
  • Descriptive -  By combining the various interactions with a brand, an overall impression of what the company stands for is shared among customers and non-customers. A brand is descriptive of what a company, product, and/or service stands for, in terms of all the elements above (visual, auditory, verbal, emotional, etc.).

What else does a brand mean? What does your brand mean to you?  What do other brands mean?  Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Aug
20
2008

B2B Website

By | B2B, Content, Design

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If you are a business-to-business (B2B) company, your website audience is quite a bit different than a company who targets consumers (B2C).  To get the most of your business website, you’ll need to account for these differences in both your design and content.

Intent

Website visitors to a B2B website are people from other companies who are also trying to do business.  Their intent with visiting your site is to help them make money – by purchasing your products or services, gathering information, etc.  The B2B audience is usually online from their workplace, so time is valuable.

Small, targeted audience

The audience for B2B sites is usually much smaller than B2C, but is much more targeted.  Keep your targeted audience in mind when designing the site and writing content.  You have an opportunity to reach just the audience that you want – your customers.

Behavior

Because they are using your website for business decisions, the B2B audience will be focused on finding the information they need to make those decisions.  If they can’t easily find it, they’ll quickly move elsewhere.  However, B2B visitors are also looking to build relationships with companies and people they can trust.  If you provide valuable information, products and services, there is an opportunity for long-term partnerships.

Expertise

Your B2B visitors are experts in their field and expect the same expertise in potential partners and vendors.  They probably know your products or services better than you, so website content and layout needs to focus on this sophisticated audience.

Buying Process

The buying process in B2B is much longer and more involved than in B2C.  B2B customers are making rational purchase decisions based on business value.  They want products that will help their business be successful.  B2C customers make emotional purchase decisions based on personal value.  Information about your products and services needs to focus on business value and information necessary to make a rational purchase decision.

Value of Sale

Purchases made by B2B customers are typically much larger than B2C customers, so there is a great deal of value in the sale to your company.  It is worthwhile to put the time and effort into providing your customers exactly what they need to succeed – they will reward you with sales.

Listen

Because your B2B customers are experts in their fields, they are a valuable resource to your company.  Listen to what they have to say about your products, services and website.  Since they are looking for long-term relationships, they are often more likely to spend the time to help you improve.  Your B2B website should include opportunities to interact with your customers and for them to interact with each other.  You’ll find valueable information that usually comes with the high costs of a customer research firm.

If you have a B2B website, how do you use your website to reach your B2B audience?

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Aug
18
2008

Using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns to Attain Business Goals

By | Internet Advertising, News & Notes

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Sadly enough, too many advertisers initiate PPC campaigns without knowing what the end goal is. A word of caution: Traffic is not an end goal! …PPC campaign effectiveness is judged by its impact on the company’s bottom line, and the return on investment. Campaign optimization is measured by an increase in CTR and improved quality score. – Ask Enquiro – Key PPC Best Practices (Part 1 of 4)

I’ve had many clients who ask me to increase the traffic to their website by helping them optimize their Google AdWords (PPC) campaign.  Often the client is already getting pretty good traffic to their site through the AdWords, search engines and direct traffic – the problem is that all the traffic isn’t helping them attain their business goals – increased leads and sales.  In these cases taking a look at the landing pages and the usability of the site can often give clues as to why the traffic is not converting to sales/leads (we’ll cover that in more depth in a future post).  Most importantly, think about what the business goals are for your PPC advertising and maintain consistent wording on ads, landing pages and through out the site.  To measure effectiveness of your PPC campaigns, think in terms of business goals – conversions, sales and ROI.  The Ask Enquiro article has good information to help you run effective PPC campaigns.

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