Snackable Marketing Episode 03: Defining Your Goals

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In this episode, I'll be discussing the importance of having a strategy with clearly defined goals for your website. Just by doing these two things, you're going to be giving yourself a huge advantage. Let's get to it.

Defining Your Goals

What are your business goals for your website? What do you want people to do when they get there? One goal could be converting them into a customer or at least a lead but you need to define that and know what it is so that you can move forward. Once you have your business goals for your website defined, then it's time to define exactly who your target audience is going to be. You're going to want to think about your ideal customer or client–the one that you absolutely love and would love to clone if you could. Who is that person? What are they like? What's their age? What's their gender? Where in the world do they live? What language do they speak? What time zone are they in? Where are they online? Because you'll want to be there too to engage with them. You might end up having different personas or different kinds of ideal clients. Let's say that you're a Mexican restaurant owner and your two main clients that you want to target with your website are m iddle-income families and business owners that are local to your store. You would want to define both of those separately so that you can use those personas to build a strategy for your website and your online marketing in general.

Prioritize

Once you have your goals and target audience(s) defined. You're going to need to prioritize those in some kind of hierarchy so that you can then apply them to your website and each individual page. For the home page for instance, you'll want to have the top of it be the most important goal because it will be seen the most. Further down the page less people will see it so you'll use less important content. At the top, make sure what your business does is immediately clear and obvious. Then take each priority and start putting them down the page.

An Easy Way to Make a Mockup

An easy way to do this to take pieces of paper, maybe more than one, stack them if you need to, and then start cutting them up by drawing lines across them to make rows. Each row is as tall as needed but often they are about 3-6 when on a piece of paper. Inside each row, start putting elements like pictures, text, and call to actions. (Use actually cut out images, or just draw in place holders.) But make sure each element has a specific purpose and that it's working towards fulfilling a specific goal–whatever the goal for that row is. Once you're finished with outlining your goals and adding elements to each row on your page, then what you're left with is a wire frame of that web page.

Next Steps

Next, all you have to do is either make that yourself or give it to your web developer and have them make it for you. You can also take the idea of breaking down a page into rows with individual elements and their associated goals to a more macro approach to structure the pages of your website to create a sitemap. That structure would have the same hierarchical thinking as the goals on an individual page layout but applied to the entire site. Depending on your goals, you might only want to have a few pages or you might need to have hundreds of pages with some pages being more important in your strategy than others.

A Clearly Defined Roadmap

At this point, you'll have a hierarchy of the pages for your website and for each page you'll have wire frames set up and created with elements in them that you can then hand off to your web developer. You'll also have all of your goals mapped out visually for your website. All this adds up to a clearly defined road map for you to move forward with, which your visitors will love because everything will be laid out logically for them. Just by completing this step you'll have a huge advantage over your competition. This is the biggest problem for most people because they dive into making a website but they don't have any clear ideas of what the website is supposed to achieve. Now that you have your website planned out with different elements and rows, and the hierarchy of your pages, it's time to start populating those with content.

In the next episode, I'll be discussing the importance of visuals like pictures, videos, infographics, and icons, and how important they are to your website. Surprise: they're critical so the next one will be a great episode and I hope you'll join me for that. Thanks again for listening.

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