Strategic Internet Planning: the base ingredients

Internet strategy is what brought Adviso into existence. From the very start, we were convinced that a web presence is not only a technological affaire, and that technology was not a means to an end but rather a medium, despite the excitement at that time (2001). Still today, we feel a technological excitement with the web 2.0, but Adviso continues to say the same thing: if web 2.0 technologies or other technologies reinforce the business strategy and create a new lever, than yes these are integrated into the web presence.

It is this coldness towards internet technologies (even if we love them passionately) that allows us to align our clients towards successful profitable affaires, sometimes more discrete on a strict technological plan.

Today I deliver you four ingredients that allowed Adviso to emerge as a leader in the Internet strategy field. These four simple ingredients are almost if not always neglected even by strategists of high caliber that I encounter during my practice. Internet strategy is our core competency and is nourished by our profound culture of strategic management. It is what I believe that distinguishes us on the market.

Analysis of the environment and enterprise

Classic. There isn’t another word for it. But so essential, this stage helps evaluate and study the competitive landscape of the organization and determine the its actual position against its competitors, its substitutes and of its environment, in other words the PESTE (Political, Economical, Social, Technological and Ecological). This analysis helps forecast changes. Everyone already claims to know this they tell me. But no, not everyone does because I teach it rather re-teach it to dozens of advertising executives and managers each month. It’s normal when you have your nose glued to your affaires to sometimes forget to take a step back.

Especially, this exercise forces the managers to come out of their comfort zone and closely observe their enterprise and consolidate all their apprehensions, opportunities, visions and perceptions of the market they have each. At this stage and when this information gets shared, you can extract a lot of data for the analysis that wouldn’t have been normally extracted. You formulate everything with the SWOT, or more francophone, the strengths and weaknesses of the organization within its environment, in which opportunities and threats will be identified.

Adviso did not invent this, but we apply the exercise to the letter in all our mandates.

Persona and website analysis

We are already in a more web mind frame, with the arrival of personas, even if these can apply to other contexts that have nothing to do with the web.

This exercise has as objective to really understand each targeted audience of the organization and oblige the organization to make a choice. If we listen to the managers, everyone would find their account on the site: the greater public, the investors, ect. But who of them are the real target audience of the organization? To illustrate the matter, I present them a 500 by 500 square pixels and ask them to write a few messages within it that they would like their website to communicate. They understand very quickly with this exercise the ergonomic constraints and realize they cannot please everyone within a small space. From this sprouts a prioritization exercise. Certain audiences are more important than others; you do not have a choice.

Not only do you need to prioritize, but also characterize. To accomplish this we use divers ways: interview the management, the important actors in the organization that have direct contact with the personas, review of the internal and external documentation, feedback or qualitative data gathered on the personas throughout time. The analysis of the website and its accompanied statistics equally bring value to the personas.

From there we create a short list of personas with each being assigned names, objectives, intentions and constraints. We associate characteristics linked to the desired experience outcome with the content and functionality necessary to support the intentions of the personas.

This practice tends to greatly modify the site and content architecture. The classic misconception is to think it is completely about the site architecture or content of the organization, but not the needs of the client.

Complementary reading on personas

Search Trends

We use historical search data from major search engines within the geography of the personas for further insight on them. This stage complements the previous one. The analysis of the personas molds the search trends analysis. These are therefore stages that must be completed in parallel but with frequent exchanges.

Search trends express the demand that was impossible to get throughout the history of marketing. It is what consumers are looking for, as if they verbalized their problems or their research queries. For those that say this exercise does not apply to consumers (or those that buy business solutions) are wrong. Search engines are extremely used within a B2B context, especially in the early stages used to identify criterions for product or service provider selection.

This search trend analysis will allow you to create a strategy, content architecture as well as functionalities that are in line with the research findings of your personas. This goes without saying that they will find you more easily on search engines.

Comparative Analysis or the Benchmark

In the last step, but not the least, before elaborating on preliminary recommendations is of course the comparative analysis, the process of which you get inspired from competitors, substitutes or equivalents in other geographic locations. However, you should not restrain to those that are sometimes too apparent. You must go beyound the obvious, and into other industries that may have experienced similar problems as yours and reacted differently.

Finally, the benchmark lets you extract a list of exemplary and innovative practices. But you cannot always bring innovation. Choices need to be made. This is where you make the link between the analysis and the organization: you’ll choose innovation where the organization can really stand out, but innovation is expensive. Where an organization stands out less easily and follows the best practices will prove a judicious and less risky choice.

Complementary reading on Benchmark

In short, it is with these ingredients that you can bring forth detailed preliminary recommendations that let the project manager in charge to fully visualize the Web presence and the efforts and resources necessary to maintain them. After this, you pass to the next big stage, the one where every details counts, the check book.