Gathering Requirements for a Web Campaign
A web campaign can have many or one purpose. It can help sell products or it can market and inform users about the company. Either way, the obvious end goal of a web campaign is to generate some form of business.
The idea of a web campaign is to get the end user to do something. What is it?
Thanks to low costs and quick turnarounds, breaking even on the cost of building a web campaign does not take much work, but the difference between making a small or large profit margin is a thin and can be addressed before the web campaign is ever even made.
Below are some questions to consider when determining the business needs/requirements of your web campaign.
1. What is the end goal?
A web campaign needs to be tailored to the direct business needs. In today’s Internet users are becoming experienced. Gone are the days when a customer would peruse a website just to play with all the cool new features. Today there is a lot of information and not many people that want to read it all. To combat this, a web campaign needs to be tailored to the exact business needs. No fluff, just the information the customer needs.
Do you want to build an email list? Sell a product? Strictly inform customers about your business?
Before there is even any consideration in how a website should look or what features are wanted, a full analysis should be done on what the actual end goal of the website is.
2. Do you plan to update/manage content?
Dynamic content is great. It fosters recurring visitors and builds search and other forms of incoming traffic; however, dynamic content that becomes static is often worse than no dynamic content at all.
Before requesting a blog to be added, understand what and whose job it is to manage this updating content. What kind of content will you share? Lay ideas and thoughts out, and, if there is not enough substance there, then do not force dynamic content. Rather rely on key and information heavy pillar articles.
3. Are there future plans or ideas to build on?’
Similar to a house, if a website is left unattended and not maintained it becomes outdated and ultimately useless. Web tools are always evolving and business needs generally tend to change or alter as a company grows. Is your website prepared to handle this demand or addition of services?
By laying out possible future plans early on in the web development process it can save both time and money when implementing those new plans later on down the road as the foundation will already be set.
4. How will analytics being tracked? What is a successful campaign?
Once a website is ready to go live, the job is not over. How do we know that the website is fully meeting the business needs? What other strategies can we explore to meet our goals? Tracking analytics of performance and how users interact with a website can give us key insight into what potential customers are actually looking for.
Your Turn! Talk with a design specialist to see what are the best requirements for your web campaign.