Define your strategic goals (image by evelynishere)

I have often come across organisations that have decided they need a website. When I ask them what functionality they require they will readily reel off a load of internet related buzz-words such as streaming media, personalisation, google maps etc. However, when I ask them what the purpose of the website is and its objectives the answer is often “ummm….”.

This is not surprising really, it’s so easy to get carried away with the thought of new toys to play with and completely overlook the objectives for the site. Indeed, a new website may not be required at all.

Digital media is basically a tool for delivering your business objectives. Your business or organisation will usually have a clearly defined business strategy, so before you even think about your web presence you need to write a web strategy that will help you achieve those goals.

Your web strategy should drive how you use the internet and what tools you use to achieve your goals.

Simply defining your goals is only the first step, your strategy should contain 3 elements…

1. A Goal – What do you want to achieve?
2. A Method – How are you going to achieve your goal?
3. A Measure – How are you going to measure success?

Goal!!

Make sure your goals are technology independent. One of your web strategy goals may be to “increase sales by 10% in a year by improved use of online technology”, it should NOT however be to “create a new website in order to increase sales by 10% in a year”. Your strategy should not mention a particular tool or method, your strategy will determine which tools you use, not the other way around.

If your organisation does not have profit lead goals you can still clearly define what you want to achieve. For example, the NHS may have a goal to “spread information on swine flu to new audiences using digital media”.

Method

Once you have a defined goal or goals you should then be able to work out what methods you will use to achieve those goals. In many cases there will be many digital options open to you. You may decide to use multiple methods or you may decide to focus your efforts on one tool.

So in order to achieve your  goal to “spread information on swine flu to new audiences using digital media”, you may decide to use the following method….

Set up a twitter feed called NHSwineFlu to…

• spread swine flu messages
• highlighting urgent swine flu updates
• respond to events

He shoots, he scores!

Having a strategy is one thing, but how do you know if you have achieved your objectives? With a sales based goal it is relatively easy to measure success, for example by simply seeing whether you have increase sales by 10% in a year after your digital campaign started.

With less tangible goals it is possible to measure success using Key Performance Indicators (KPI). In the case of the NHS the measure of success may be defined in the following KPI’s…

• increase our twitter followers by at least 10% a month (base line this measure)
• achieve an average of 10 click-throughs/messages to any NHS sites the tweets promote.
• Achieve 50 re-tweets a week.

Go for it!

So if you are entering the digital arena for the first time or want to refresh your online prescence think Goal, Method, Measure!