Now that we've got the ground rules covered, let's dive directly into six typical strategic marketing objectives and how your website design can help achieve them.

1. Targeting key market segments
Anyone worth their marketing salt knows that a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing is a recipe for disaster. Smart marketers invest limited resources identifying and targeting the highest opportunity segments. The starting point for doing this online is using sound market research to create personas, which are fictitious characters that represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site. A good design process uses personas to build scenarios for site interaction, then designs the site to make the scenarios easy to access and use.

But what happens to personas after a website is built? Often, the personas lie fallow, and the question of how the new site is performing in terms of reaching the targeted segments goes unanswered. Instead of falling into this trap, you should use personas as an ongoing performance management tool by documenting key persona scenarios, then conducting visitor path analysis to analyze persona traffic.

One caveat is that real-world visitors may not follow the exact paths the design team anticipated. A second caveat is that detail path traffic trends can be very fragmented. Instead of getting bogged down in complexity, keep it simple. Create content with specific segments in mind, then analyze visitors based on the type of content they access during their visits, not the sequence in which they access it. The design implication is that content should differentiate among personas.

The persona-centric design of Fidelity's website provides a great example of how you can map website traffic to personas in three clicks or less. Take a look at this homepage callout:

There's a pretty high likelihood that I'm an investment professional if I click on that link (unless, of course, I'm writing an article for iMedia Connection and doing screen captures). If, in turn, I click on one of the links in the pop-up box, I'm likely to be a member of, or to have similar interests to, one of the groups in the box. This is a great example of two-click persona mapping using website traffic.