So, you are responsible for digital marketing for a big company? You’re probably not the CMO, however. That whole big Web site isn’t your problem. You are just responsible for one product line. Or one country. Or one product line within one country. Or maybe even something smaller than that. But have you ever say down and really decided which pages on the Web site are exactly yours to worry abut? Often, I find the answer is no.
So, why do you need to figure this out anyway? If you are the product manager for US sales of product X, isn’t that good enough? I mean, you know where the home page is of your Web site. If you haven’t spent the time to identify every blessed page that pertains to your country and your product, what’s the harm? After all, you’re busy with a lot of other things.
Well, think about a few points:
- Your budget probably pays for these pages. Most companies use chargeback systems where your IT team, copywriters and other shared resources are paid by the page. Or you have a dedicated team spending time on these pages–some that you might not even know about. Is this where you want your money going?
- You want to know the traffic to these pages. Do you regularly check how many visitors come to these pages? And from what other sites? Can you tie back your traffic to your inbound marketing campaigns? If you can’t identify all the pages that are yours, then you can’t do any of this, either–and you won’t know which marketing efforts are working and which aren’t.
- You want to know the conversions from these pages. You also want to measure (and improve) the conversions from these pages. Every page needs to be doing some work to move visitors closer to a sale. Most of us don’t have e-Commerce sites, but we all have something we want our Web visitors to do to gain an offline sale. We need to be sure that every page has a job to do (even if it is just to get a click to another page) and that we measure how well it is doing it.
It might be easy to identify your site, even when you work in a big company. If you are the worldwide product manager for Crest toothpaste, you site is crest.com, even though you work in the bowels of the behemoth Procter & Gamble. But usually big company sites are a bit harder to pin down for you. I remember when I worked for IBM, it was common for me to be speaking with someone whose responsibility was software in Germany, whose site was all of the pages underneath www.ibm.com/de/software–any many had even smaller responsibilities with even more arcane URLs that definied their scope. Whatever yours is, you need to treat every page within it as yours, which starts by identifying what your site is. What exactly are you responsible for?
If this sounds a bit persnickety, ask yourself this: Do you have any trouble identifying which ad campaigns are yours? Which brochures? Which commercials? Which coupons? I thought so.
Don’t be sloppy about your digital marketing. It’s easy to be vague about your Web site scope in a big company. Focus your sights on your sites–just like small companies do–so that you have the focus that drives improved results.
