Creating an Organizational Strategy for a Disparate Ecosystem
Because of how easy it can be to spin up websites today, there are more and more organisations with disparate ecosystems and digital properties. So now organisations are faced with the challenge of bringing everyone together to define an organisational strategy for websites.
It has become so easy to spin off new websites today, we are seeing more and more organisations with disparate ecosystems, including websites, mobile sites and other digital properties. Where marketing managers and department leads believe they are saving their organisation time and money while creating a vehicle for their ‘unique’ story, they are impacting the end user’s experience in a pretty negative way.
So now organisations are faced with the challenge of bringing everyone together to define an organisational strategy for websites.
Think about it. If an organization has multiple event websites, portals, microsites, campaign landing pages, product sites, blogs and global sites in addition to a primary dot-com site, it can take a user way too many clicks to accomplish their ‘job-to-be-done.’
This proliferation of websites can also present a splintered brand experience while creating an ecosystem of multiple technologies that are limited in the way these sites support the organization’s overarching needs.
So now organizations are faced with the challenge of bringing everyone together to define an organizational strategy for websites.
One of the best ways to calm the ecosystem chaos and get to that strategy is to map out the roles and responsibilities of each site that exists today. Bring together the owners of each site and start with a diagram that shows how vast (and disparate) the ecosystem actually is. From there, work through an exercise to say what each site does and does not do.
For example...
“The dot-com site tells the brand story and highlights thought leadership but does not sell products,” or “the product sites deliver ecommerce experiences but do not showcase long-form content (i.e.blogs or thought leadership.)”
Once this is done for all sites, there will be clear overlap of sites that are serving similar purposes and sites that are duplicative and can be considered for consolidation. To calm the ecosystem chaos even further, aligning the remaining sites/digital properties with existing personas will ensure user needs are being met through the remaining sites.
Not only will a roles and responsibility mapping exercise start to “trim the fat” in terms of sites to maintain, it will create additional operational efficiencies through the sharing of content, technologies, best practices, workflows and more. Plus, your users are going have a much more pleasant experience with your brand. Everyone wins!