When you determined what content appears on your corporate website, you probably decided that is was important to feature information and services that your company provided. Depending on your company size, you planned with your management, marketing, IT or corporate Web teams to outline the points of emphasis that you deemed to be important, and placed them prominently on your home page and navigation. Your departments knew what information is important to them, and thus, it made sense to place and package this content on your site.

This internal focus is a fairly common approach that companies take when evaluating what to present on their website. While this approach seems logical, it’s not conducive to building an effective Internet strategy. In order for your site to become a business tool, you need to focus your content, messaging and navigation from the outside in.

A core component of turning your website “outside-in” is recognizing the need for customer segmentation. Whether you are an e-commerce retailer, or a business-to-business company looking to generate key leads, it is important to identify the market segments coming to your site, and packaging content that meets their needs.

The web is a unique marketing medium because unlike traditional marketing tactics, it enables a true 1:1 relationship between the user and the content. A 1:1 relationship means presenting targeted content to match what users are seeking. Building this relationship is critically important to moving users through the online conversion process from lead to prospect to customer.

The evolution of television advertising is a good analogy for defining the concept of 1:1 marketing. Marketing through the traditional network television medium represents a 1 : millions relationship. Cable television has improved upon this with niche channels for ad buying, improving the ratio between content and target audience.

The web is best marketing medium for effectively building a 1:1 relationship between the visitor and your marketing message. Too often, corporate web sites do not properly segment their target audiences for efficient content presentation. Frequent problems include:

• Overwhelmed users that are presented with a broad marketing message
• Internally motivated content that doesn’t speak externally to your target audiences.
• Users navigating through pages and pages of content before they discover what they are looking for

In order to successfully to build a 1:1 relationship model on your website, it is critical to design information architecture, plan navigational elements, and package messages that cater to each of your target audiences.  As you craft content for each target, consider the following:

Who exactly are we trying to target?

What is their buyer persona?

Why would they come to our site?

What benefits does our site provide to them?

Taking the time to answer these questions for each of your segments will help to build the branding and content presentation that actively works towards establishing the 1:1 relationship between the visitor and the site.

Utilizing the Web as a marketing medium to build a 1:1 relationship possesses the advantage of accountability. Employing Web analytics gives you a comprehensive view of how your visitors, by segment, are interacting with your site. Important in this is measuring the paths each segment of your target audience are taking in order to get to a desired outcome, such as the completion of a lead form, or a purchase. This analysis provides the opportunity to make refinements to content and navigation that are needed to enhance the conversion process.

If you see a trend of abandonment within certain areas of the site, an attribute to this could be that users are not efficiently finding the information pertinent to their segment. If this drop off is occurring, evaluate your navigational flow visitors take, and be sure you are matching that to the needs of each target audience arriving to your site.

As with all components in an Internet strategy, planning and evaluation of your customer segmentation tactics are critical. Evaluate your site, and ask yourself the question of whether you are building the 1:1 relationship with your visitors. If you are, it will have a successful impact on your Web conversion funnel, as messaging and content is presented to efficiently meets your user’s needs.

		Ryan Vartoogian is president and founder of Spartan Internet Consulting Corp., a website development firm in Lansing.