Methodology Part 3: Audience Focused Optimization
Return to Methodology Part 2: Rich Personae Development
The second crucial element is doing what NextStage calls Audience Focused Optimization (NextStage will be offering an Audience Focused Optimization workshop at the DC Emetrics ’07 Summit). This is where the receiver gets built.
The website can already exist or be in the development stage, it doesn't matter. All that really matters is that the end result be something your target audience will both pay attention to and favorably respond to.
Several market-specific suggestions were made to the Emetrics Summit staff prior to the May 2007 San Francisco Summit, some of which were documented in previous columns. I also shared some of these suggestions and visitor responses to them in my Emetrics Summit presentation, "Quantifying and Optimizing the Human Side of Online Marketing." For example, knowing how the audience thinks enabled design modifications that kept visitors engaged and returning through the redesign process. The end result of these efforts was demonstrated by visitor comments and emails.
The simple fact that Jim Sterne and his crew let visitors know ahead of time when a redesign would be online resulted in three major outcomes:
- The day the redesign went live, the site experienced huge spikes in traffic, levels of interest and navigation.
- People emailed that they'd been on the Emetrics Summit site and noted the update announcement.
- Other emails demonstrated that people had returned specifically to discover what had changed since their last visit. (The wording in that last line is intentional. People didn't return to "see," they returned to "discover." They were on the site thinking, evaluating, analyzing, interpreting. In other words, they were engaged.)
Automating the Suggestion Process
NextStage's Active Intelligence tool combines these three steps and generates a design modifications report containing a series of suggestions for new and existing marketing materials. (These suggestions are generalized for this column and please, please, please don't assume they apply to every event and conference site out there.)
Each level contains critical, important and desirable elements. Further, each level is built on completion of the previous level's suggestions. In all cases, the suggestions are meant to be simple modifications to existing sites and easily implemented directives for sites in the making.
Some of the suggestions provided for Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit included:
Critical:
- Use fewer menu items
- Rename remaining menu items so that they are questions that can be answered
- Make the menu system/structure completely consistent from page to page
Important:
- Make the progression of pages tell a story so that one web page logically and thematically leads to the next web page
- Make the menu system either consistently horizontal or consistently vertical (remove top-of-page city menu and replace it with graphic links that already exist within the banner image)
Desirable: