If your public relations strategy calls for a website, there are five building blocks you should consider. Today people want to interact with the content you produce and having a website with interactivity as a key component could mean the difference between success and failure of the overall campaign.
Website design has evolved for its early days. Before you start building, however, you should answer one vital question: “What do you want to accomplish?”
After you have answered that question, any good public relations campaign strategy, where the web will be a communication medium, begins with understanding the audience. That in mind, content, interactivity, usability, and innovation are the five pillars of an engaging website.
- Audience: You website can’t be everything to everyone. It must be targeted to a specific group of people For example, if your business is financial planning and investment advisory, then the people who are interested in that information are people with means to plan, save, invest and grow their money and assets.
- Content: From a deep understanding of what your audience needs and wants, you can begin developing a content strategy that meets those expectations, and yours as well. A key question to answer is this, “What content will they be seeking?” As one public relations professional put it: ” Tying together audience and content are the most important initial steps to creating a great website.” This content must be relevant, provide value, and help people seeking information solve their problem.
- Interactivity: With the advent of social media tools, we know have the technology to empower people to engage with the content by sharing it with friends, as well as adding their point of view. A properly designed website is essentially the new marketplace of ideas. It is the new town square. Research tells us that people want to do something with the information on your website. They also want to do the same transactions on the website that are normally done in-house.
- Usability: Making a website easy to use is just as important as its content and its interactivity. The key to usability is simplicity. That means high-end graphics should be kept to a minimum and the nomenclature of the navigation should be jargon-free and reflect the wording the audience uses, not how you understand the information to be.
- Innovate: Use your creativity and offer new ways of leveraging technology to make interacting with your website easier, more productive, and fun. One professional says this: ” … innovation is not about technology alone, it’s about applying the technology creatively to meet the needs of the visitor.”
This is fine and dandy, but where do you begin? I’ve compiled a short short list of resources that will help you get the website you want for a successful public relations campaign. The strategy to success begins with thinking about your audience first. Here are those resources:
