So, I have been off the radar lately. There are a few reasons for this, the least of which is the fact that I have moved from the Middle East back to the West Coast of Canada. (no culture shock there)... Besides moving home I have started working with a great IT company that has some awesome people!
The other day we were in a marketing meeting and discussing the development of a 'sales deck' (I will preface this with the fact that I was just facilitating). What we were doing was storyboarding the initial concept to work through any major needs issues from the sales group. However, the conversation came around to "Who is our audience?" The next thought naturally followed through to our current website; again with the same question.
The answer here is not simple, but I think we can put people in a few different buckets. First, we have to cater to the C-Suite crowd who we are doing the initial selling to. This group will usually visit the website for around 60 seconds to view the front page and then flip over to the management team page to see if they know anyone.
The second audience bucket is composed of the people we are actually going to be working with (middle management and general workers). These people are usually in the tail boomer / gen-x category who will spend some time on the site and dig in a little bit more if they are interested. For the more tech-savvy; it is quite likely they will also delve into some of our other social networking efforts and judge us based on that information in combination with any personal (or second hand) information.
The final audience is one that I am not sure we have catered to, and that is our potential new employees. Our company is growing right now and they need new talent! But our site doesn't really draw anyone to entice them to work here. (Interesting!).
So of course I went out and had a look around at other sites. Funny enough the worst of them is McKinsey who is in BAD need of a site overhaul. Some of the better ones are boutique consulting firms that have personalized portions of their site and therefore speak to the appropriate audience for that page.
However, since I am not involved in this side of the business much I will sit back and see what bubbles! Who is your website aimed at? Have you addressed who they are and their surfing habits?
