8 Steps for Driving Success with Web Engagement Management
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NLC’s expert guide to making the right choice for your organization
Release Date:
October 2011
Author:
Randy Woods
8 Steps for Driving Success with Web Engagement Management
NLC’s expert guide to making the right choice for your organization
Web Engagement Management is a cluster of ideas as much as a coherent strategy. WEM platforms allow you to undertake a confusingly large number of very different kinds of marketing activities. To be effective, WEM initiatives require significant investments – both of dollars and, perhaps more critically, of marketing attention.
Given this combination of complexity and investment, we strongly encourage our clients to:
- Begin simply
- Target an important objective.
Both parts are important. Beginning with a simple initiative that you can measure and optimize ensures you can deliver clear success in a reasonable time period. Focusing on an important objective allows you to translate early success into a corporate commitment to WEM tactics.
The eight steps in this whitepaper will let you select the most important place to start and position you to build a plan for ongoing optimization. Throughout, we use four case studies to make the discussion concrete:
- An institute of higher education
- A technology company in the business- to- business (B2B)space that sells HR software solutions
- A business-to-consumer (B2C) company with an e-commerce website
- A national, not for- profit organization
We consider WEM as the processes and tools that marketers use to more effectively manage the path that prospects follow on their way to becoming customers. It can include a wide variety of tactics:
- Proactively targeting advertisements on your site
- Testing of content on your site– either simple A|B testing or multivariate testing
- Developing, testing and marketing to personas
- Scripting a lead nurturing cycle that allows marketers to shepherd prospects through the buying cycle
- Creating integrated campaigns across multiple channels (e.g. mobile, social, web, etc.)
- Deeply informing sales activities by integrating prospect profiles with CRM or sales force automation systems
- Surfacing analytics that allow marketers to evaluate the value of content
None of these tactics are new but many organizations continue to have different platforms for web content management, analytics, consumer relations management and online marketing. What is new is the field of WEM that merges them and the ability to execute all of these, easily, within a unified platform. In a broad sense, the advent of Web Engagement Management represents a shift from using technology to manage the publication of content online (web content management) to using technology to optimize the business results that your online activities deliver.
About non-linear creations
non-linear creations is a leading Canadian Internet consulting firm, which was formed in 1995 with a powerful vision: leveraging the business benefits of Internet technology to drive a strong return on investment for our clients. This focus on delivering results is baked into NLC's corporate DNA and drives each of our areas of practice, including: Enterprise & Web Content Management, Enterprise Search & Navigation, Online Strategy,
Search Engine Marketing, Email Marketing, Application Development & Integration, Site Design & Multimedia and Web Analytics.
With a portfolio of more than 750 online projects and clients around the globe, non~linear creations continues to deliver impressive online results. For more information, visit www.nonlinearcreations.com.
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