Web (Social & Mobile) Product Management
Your web, social, mobile and other digital assets need constant attention in any competitive environment. As a consultant in this area, my objective is to clearly identify your objectives then apply optimization recommendations around these guidelines. During the process of evaluating, building or redesigning, I will consider the following:
Personas or audience identification: Who will our website be communicating with? Constructing content and design around your audience is a critical first step. You need to construct your assets to guide your targets through an experience designed for them, not you.
Stakeholder opinions: While your primary stakeholders are customers, other people need the website to fulfill additional purposes. Always identify and interview additional stakeholders in order for their input to be included in the process.
Identify primary objectives: Whether it's ecommerce sales, leads, user acquisition or brand building, it's smart to document and commnicate these primary objectives. Secondary objectives like talent acquisition, investor relations, etc. should also be identified and documented.
Management and administration: Who will be managing the content and/or design on an ongoing basis? Considering this is important when choosing a CMS and understanding the scope of the administrator's capabilities.
General Usability: Make sure your environment is easy to use and navigate. Don't use new technology because it's cool or will impress one person in your company. Build a UI and navigation around your audience, personas and other stakeholders. They are who matter most.
Organic Search Optimization, or SEO: Use best practices when building out your page, linking and content development infrastructure. Also, make sure your CMS (if you're using one), does not hinder your ability to optimize for organic search optimization. I have seen this many times in the past.
Social Media Integration: Socializing your business is a two-way street. In some cases you are making sure people can share and publish your content, and other times you want to include fresh social content within your own environment. This kind of push - pull strategy in your web assets will keep you optimized for social distribution, but also keeping your website refreshing with new content. Social also means managing external content and environments, like Facebook and Twitter.
Mobile: Not thinking about mobile accessibility to your content and functionality is a sure way to kill most marketing efforts. Not every business needs an "app", but you do need to consider the ever increasing number of mobile users when desiging your web experience. At a minimum, make sure your website is optimized for mobile web viewing AND your conversion opportunities function properly.
Conversion Optimization: Going back to your primary objectives, are you optimizing the environment for this conversion? Make sure you understand what you are trying to achieve and optimize for that final conversion. There are cases where there will be multiple steps to get to the final objective, so each step needs to be optimized and measured for effectiveness.
Analytics: The importance of analytics is not reflected in the order it is listed here. Without knowing if you are meeting your behavioral and conversion objectives, it is impossible to understand what is working and what is not. The right analytics package and resources are critical in extracting data and providing actionable insights into the performance of your digital assets. Make sure your analytics are solid!