Outline

• Introduction
• What is your corporate strategy/goal?
• Finding a common ground with web strategies
• Empowering your staff
• Be social
• Reenergize

Introduction

The aim of the article is to get your organization started in the web band-wagon. You may probably have started using the internet to empower your business but in one way or the other have not developed a written strategy to make your web strategies comport with your business strategies. As in various technology adoptions, a lot of people/company jump into the technology movement without even evaluate the impact it would have on their core competence, and as a result they could not get value out of their endeavor. To avoid this pitfall on the web, you should consider the following suggestions;

What is your corporate goal?

What are you running after? What is your positioning statement in the market-place? Where do you see your organization in the next 2, 3 to 5 years? What are you currently working on to reach these goals? These questions are the simple diagnosis of your organization. I believe any organization should have answers to these questions handy. If not, I will suggest reading these two books; “Good to great” by Jim Collins & Jerry Porras and “Built to last” by Jim Collins. These questions lay the foundation for your web strategies. You should not begin any web endeavour without having a clear understand of the above questions.

Finding a common ground with Web strategies

Having clearly defined and understood your Corporate Goal, the next thing to do is to find a common ground to align both strategies to drive your company growth. To create a common ground another diagnostic question will be needed to provide answers to; what are we trying to use the web for? What are our competitors doing? How can we better serve our customers with the web? How can we increase our reach with the web? These questions will be the bed rock of your web design, development, advertisement campaign and social media strategies. Your web strategies should be a propeller for your corporate strategies; else you might lose focus of the bottom-line.

Empower your staff

Your staffs are the primary implementer of your strategies, the best knowledge they have about your vision and mission couple with their attitude will be the way they see and execute your strategies. Many of your staffs might already have the knowledge of the web, while some are basic users. How do you bridge the gap? And how do you communicate your vision with your staff?

Get a consultant to design a training programme for your staffs. Many programmes failed because the primary people to run them lack the knowledge of the workings. Remember, your staffs are the ones interfacing with your clients. Get them informed first hand be launch. It could reduce your failure rate by 80%.

Be social

Have you heard about social media & Networking? Have you heard about web 2.0? Well not to worry, the power behind these technologies is that, they place the power onto the customer. Remember the age of celebrity endorsement? Advert bombardment and disruption? Things have change! The power of web 2.0 has made Word of Mouth once again the de facto in product and services promotion. Your customers are now your advocate. In this age, bonding with your client will help you hear what they are saying about your company and how they want your product. In my recent article “Creating a social bond for brand development” I elaborated on how you can use social media to bond with your customers and make social media work for you. Consider using various social media sites to reach your clients (Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin etc). There are thousand social networking sites out there, anyone that does have your target audience should NOT be your focus.

Develop an Expert Blog

Your industry might need you to provide insight into the goings in the organization or how clients/customers can better understand your products and services, a corporate blog will help you accomplish that. It will create a platform for you to bond with your customers and get first-hand feedback from them.

Measure your performance

Whatever is not measured can not be coordinated or improved, as you fashion out strategies to grow your business, a measuring metric should be developed alongside to help you check your progress. Make it clear to everyone participating in the process to understand the metrics and use it. Say, if you want to reduce your advertising cost and increase turn-over over a period of time, set how much needed to accomplish that and see the time it takes for growth to occur in the leads generated.

Reenergize

Because we cannot predict what will happen in the next minute, making our plans and strategies flexible is of a high importance. If you notice that a plan is not working over a period of time, analyze what could be wrong. You might have developed a wrong strategy for a wrong campaign, adjust and make necessary amend as applicable. On the other hand, when a strategy succeeds, check for the main step that brought about the success and improve on it. If having a subscription form on your home page has improved your client feedback, consider letting your clients/customer know of your product development so as to hear their view about it. By reenergizing you learn as you implement your strategies and you would not need to re-invent the wheel each time you need to develop one.

I sure believe the above write up will help your business if implemented. If you have problem developing the strategies, talk to an expert to help get it done.

Have you deployed a web strategy recently? What was the success rate? Do you have challenges developing one? Drop comment below…