Listen to your Clients before Changing your Website!

Websites are too easy to blame! 

Most businesses genuinely do not know who their current website engages with. Not because they do not want to, but quite often because they are badly advised or they suffer from data saturation and they do not know where to start. This can result in wasting money on very expensive web projects that do not bring the expected results.  

Justify your web project spending

Why is it important to understand who is engaging with your website?  

Website rebuilds and changes are expensive. They cost a lot of money and time. A common mistake people make when building websites is that often they do it for themselves and not for their clients.  

It is absolutely critical to understand what your clients and prospects think and do on your website before embarking on any web project.  

The more information you have about who is currently engaging with you through the web the easier it will be to justify your web spending and to use it in an efficient way.

There are three ways of getting information from companies you care more about:

1. Monitoring clients’/prospects’ behaviour online 
2. Client surveys (phone or face to face)
3. Web and online surveys

The results we found on some of the websites we audited were quite surprising. In several cases, the website actually engaged more with a particular vertical than was previously thought. 

What the web audit should enable you to do?

Once you have data from clients to support your business case, it is much easier to decide where your budgets need to focus on.  (i.e.: content, functionality, design etc.)

Knowing which of your customers and target companies use your website and how they use it will enable you to 

• Make an informed decision about web budget spending
• Get internal buy-in for any web projects
• Improve the content strategy going forward (format, access routes etc.)
• Adapt your marketing activities (i.e. your brand might be well known in specific sectors but not for all verticals)
• Adapt your marketing channels (i.e. is social media engages with the right target audiences?) 

Information on all of the above will help you make better decisions about defining key objectives, prioritising action items and building better business cases for other marketing initiatives. 

For any questions and comments please email me on fanni.vig@trovus.co.uk 

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