Help, there's a customer on my corporate website!

9 jul 2008

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How do you successfully cater for your customers on your corporate website, ensure that they are partial to your brand and end up at the right place? Customers rarely receive much attention on corporate websites any more. This is a wasted opportunity. Corporate sites can be used as an effective corporate marketing tool. Jungle Rating provides real-life examples and pointers on how to achieve this.

Corporate websites have traditionally been aimed at investors, analysts and journalists, and job-seekers to inform them about a company’s results. If the financial world is kept effectively and fully up to date about the company’s strategy and results, and if the website lists the latest vacancies, then companies are generally satisfied. But there’s one target group that usually misses out: the customers. In fact, they get a raw deal. If they happen to accidentally visit the corporate site, then they have to make do with a short text about the company’s vision of products and services. After looking around a bit, they may even find a link to a product – or a country site. That’s a shame, because corporate sites also offer a golden opportunity to establish a preferred position with customers and potential customers. Moreover, it’s also a good way of generating business leads. Therefore, corporate websites can actually play a part in a company’s results. In practice, Jungle Rating has noticed that companies are increasingly seizing the opportunity to approach customers on their corporate websites.

Following the steps below will enable you to attract customers and send them to the right place.

1. Research: who visits these sites?

It may sound obvious, but make sure you know who is visiting your corporate site. If you discover that 30% of your visitors are customers or potential customers, that’s an excellent opportunity to gain and retain them. An online survey will help you to establish your visitor’s profile. And don’t forget there are a variety of profiles. A job-seeker can be a customer too. But you may also encounter a ‘lost’ customer, whom you will want to direct to the right place as quickly a possible.

2. Research: what do customers want?

Subsequently, find out exactly what your customers want to know about your company. What are their basic needs, what do they know about your company from news, campaigns or other communications? What are the main points you want to convey as an organization? With international multinationals, it’s difficult to find a common denominator that’s specific enough to trigger a response. Products or services frequently differ per country, despite the fact that corporate websites are often internationally oriented. User research, usability tests or focus groups will enable you to acquire detailed information about visitors’ wishes and expectations. An online survey will enable you to establish people’s motives for visiting the site. For example, website visitors may want news, market information or general product information, or they may want to know at which locations a company is situated. Sometimes contact information is the most important motive. In such cases, it’s important to give contact information a prominent place, without inundating the press officer or the IR contact person with call-centre questions.

Nokia’s homepage invites visitors to their corporate website to contact them.

Direct contact with Nokia for customers, IR and the press

3. Develop a strategic corporate marketing vision

Once you’ve established that there is sufficient potential and that you have an idea what your stakeholders want, make sure that you develop a ‘corporate marketing strategy’. What is your view of customers visiting corporate websites? To ensure that they seek immediate contact with an account manager or to refer them as quickly as possible to a relevant business site? What is the minimum customers should retain when leaving the corporate site? What is your distinguishing capacity as a company and how can you make it relevant to your customers? In addition, you should define concrete objectives, for example:

Lead generation for business (number of people that visit business sites, but also revenue generated per lead)
Direct sales
Event registration
Cost reduction (lower service/handling costs)
Branding (which brand values have to be top of mind)

This will enable you to produce concrete results that will make the revenues generated by the corporate website clearly visible. This is also important for internally justifying the corporate website: it yields something instead of ‘only costing money’.

4. Tell your corporate story

Show the story behind the company, the corporate story. What does the company stand for and what are its distinguishing features? Siemens does this immediately on the homepage with an eye-catching video visual of a case study of London. With concrete examples and results, Siemens demonstrates how they contribute to achieving the city’s environmental objectives by conducting research into the effect of technological developments in public transport. Site visitors who want to know more can download the research report or have it sent to them, and they can look at the press special with, among other things, pod casts and photos. The combination of the picture and concrete examples, as well as results, makes the Siemens story stick in the minds of siemens.com customers before they go on to a specific business segment.

Prominent multimedia visual on siemens.com with concrete examples and results

5. Show the customer the right way

Not everyone will have the time or inclination to watch a video. Ensure that those who want to go straight to a business portal can do so quickly and easily. Thomson Reuters does this by offering a comprehensive business portal, in addition to the corporate sections.

Extensive business portals on thomsonreuters.com

Right on its homepage, UBS offers various types of customers the opportunity to continue on the menu to the left or go to a customer login on the right.

Immediate access to the right information at UBS

A product finder is also an alternative for quick redirection. Customers of the Spanish construction company Abertis can see immediately by means of the interactive product finder where the company has built motorways, airports or car parks. That enables them to see straightaway whether Abertis operates in their country or region and what precisely they have done. A product finder is also convenient from an online branding point of view. You show all the locations where you operate and you can further enhance that with visuals by means of rich internet applications.

Abertis’ interactive product finder

There are various options for serving customers on a corporate website. Jungle Rating has observed that the traditional difference between corporate and marketing target audiences is becoming blurred. In practice, they seem to be able to co-exist well, and customers receive more attention in a corporate environment. As a result, the corporate site not only has more impact, but also yields concrete returns. And the customers? They receive immediate service, and isn’t that your ultimate goal?