eCommerce
Popular eCommerce sites include the likes of Amazon, eBay, and Walmart, all whose purpose is pretty obvious, selling products.
Optimizing for their goal is pretty straight forward; to make it easy for customers to find the products they are looking for, while suggesting related products in an attempt to increase up-sale opportunities.
For a large eCommerce store, intuitive product search functionality is crucial. While for a small store front with just a few products, it would be more beneficial to use resources to promote and showcase the individual products.
Lead Generation
The goal of lead generation websites is to generate leads, either through calls, contact form submissions, or by collecting email addresses for an email marketing list. Many industries utilize contact forms and provide their phone numbers on their sites for prospective clients, in hopes of scheduling appointments and reaching new clients.
Focusing on this particular goal allows for website creators to prioritize optimization for this kind of conversion, usually achieved by making phone numbers large and easy to find, and including catchy call-to-action items that direct a viewer to a contact form.
Most of our client’s sites serve this primary purpose, for some examples take a look at our Web Projects Portfolio.
Branding
Branding sites are found more with large companies promoting new product lines, and with existing brands wanting to reinforce or expand their presence.
The purpose of these sites is to focus-in specifically on promoting the brand; either to drum up interest for a new product release a few months down the road to increase sales (think Nike or Apple), or to spark interest in the brand itself in an attempt to gain more customers and enforce brand loyalty.
A branding site is about building hype and getting a company’s name out to a broader audience, so that later those people will end up either on your eCommerce site or in your brick and mortar locations.
Publishing
Primarily news sites and blogs are the most common kinds of publishing sites. Their intent is to provide content to visitors in the form of articles, and can be about anything from news stories like Forbes, DIY tutorials, product reviews, to cooking recipes like i am a food blog.
These sites make their revenue by including sponsored ads in their articles from display ad services such as AdSense.
Support
These kinds of sites serve to continue ongoing support of a company’s services or products in the form of detailed documentation, chat support, driver downloads, instructions and/or F.A.Q.s, most commonly found with larger technology companies.
The Google Support and jQuery sites are good examples of this, they both have in-depth documentation and up to date examples that inform developers how to use their products.
An example of a website with vague goals:
An eCommerce shop that sells trendy apparel, which also has a tourism blog, and has several pages dedicated to promoting the owner’s espresso machine repair services. For anyone ending up at the site, two thirds of the site’s content would be about something the prospective client is not looking for, making the overall impression fairly unfocused.
This would make it harder to funnel them to a desired conversion, and may even give the impression that the business doesn’t have a clear structure. This same business owner would have a lot more success with three separate websites, each designed to focus on their individual goals.
This is because the call to actions and web design strategies are significantly different for each these three types of business websites, and trying to mix them together generally gets pretty messy and convoluted.
If you are interested in learning more about how Advantage Media Partners can help you achieve your business goals, give us a call at (888) 475-7532 or reach out to us via the contact page!