At Alpha Alias, we believe the most critical activity in any project is understanding its purpose in your higher business strategy and producing it to bring value to the core objectives. We do this by combining digital and website strategy into a comprehensive plan that strikes the perfect balance between your business objectives and the technology needed to achieve them.
A website strategy is a comprehensive plan used to direct ongoing development and optimization to achieve long-term goals. Forming a website strategy takes into account these objectives and tailors the planned activity to achieve them.
Here are just some of the website strategy segments for planning and improving digital business:
These deliverables connect to form a more comprehensive strategic approach to building, operating and optimizing your website.
Most websites won’t need every type of strategy, which is why you should select a digital strategist who understands what is necessary to achieve the nuanced goals of your business.
Your digital strategist should take a practical approach when working with you to outline the business goals and website objectives. This information is the driving determinant of how strategic deliverables are selected.
Websites that support strategic business goals should have a website strategy.
Some website strategies are more robust than others. As a digital strategist agency, Alpha Alias takes the approach of considering whether a website falls into one of the following three categories:
A business card website strategy might include a streamlined content and search engine optimization strategy for the limited content presented. Calling these deliverables “strategies” could be considered overkill, but even a business card website, we still consider how we can optimize for its purpose.
A supportive business website typically includes a proper content strategy, an SEO strategy, information architecture design, and conversion optimization strategy. Smart websites also have a content personalization automation strategy.
For business-critical websites to be developed properly, they must have the following three strategic deliverables in place:
The information architecture will explain content prioritization and how it can be placed throughout a website to be the most effective. It defines the highest-level structure before a sitemap and can help to identify what needs to be built both functionally and regarding the technical content structure.
Content strategy is vital to building a business-critical website because it defines how you create and present your content. With various forms of media, interactivity, and presentation formats, outlining how the website displays content becomes essential to optimize the user experience.
Content creation and organization within the website structure are two more vital elements to the content strategy. Planning the organization of content within the website defines how we can support pillar and content clusters, blogs, e-commerce merchandising, top-level pages, etc. The content organization effort helps determine what to show and what not to show at various touchpoints throughout the website.
Content creation fits into the overall content strategy by taking the previously mentioned deliverables and defining how to create for each circumstance. The content creation strategy establishes how content is created, curated, or otherwise produced. There are many ways to optimize workflow and output, including using artificial intelligence to write blogs and integrate content personalization automation tools.
Planning and building a website can take various nuances depending on your industry, the market for what you offer, and how critical the website is to your business activity. Those websites considered business-critical or support business activity with some priority should have a strategy for achieving success. A success strategy can be built with elements from three optimization strategies:
A conversion optimization strategy supports success by focusing on what compels a target audience to convert. This activity looks at what attracts website visitors, engages them, convinces them to convert, and the conversion touchpoint itself.
The SEO optimization strategy supports success by optimizing your website’s single most valuable asset: content. For those websites currently running in a live environment, auditing the content can focus on a few specific tasks:
We also look at the volume of content created, the frequency of publishing new content, and how other publishers find your content and link to it.
Because the evolutionary cycle of the web churns so quickly, the search engine optimization strategy should define intervals in which this audit renews.
The data-driven optimization strategy supports success by aggregating information from multiple tools to create an objective view of how the website is performing. The plan should identify the tools and KPIs you care about, intervals for optimization and instruct us on how to implement optimizations found using this strategy.
A successful data-driven optimization workflow should include:
In the early days of a website’s existence, this strategy helps identify many of the low-hanging fruit items that can be upgraded. It should naturally evolve into a workflow that drives new value from existing content and helps plan new content and features to bring value to the business.
A business website should feel like one of the most valuable assets of any company. This is because a website’s worth is unlimited. The more you invest in a website, the more you will get out of it.
Website strategy is the foundation of what, how, where, and when you should invest in building and upgrading your website. It defines how these investments are used and under what conditions particular activity is expected to happen.
Website strategy also defines how marketing and sales teams use the features that have been designed to enhance their output. The tools built to optimize how you reach your target audience integrate seamlessly with those that manage relationships and leads. The way to use this workflow successfully is defined with a website strategy.
A digital strategy is an approach to developing or using software and technology to drive value for your business. Alpha Alias uses digital strategy to understand how we can bring value with the tools we build and how the tools themselves can be optimized with the operational workflow we create.
Digital strategy is about more than one tool; it’s about all the tools used and how they benefit your business.
Without a plan, we are simply reacting. We react to what our competitors are doing, to what the market is doing, and to anomalies in our data. We react to opinions.
Reacting is not leadership.
If we want to become leaders in our respective markets, we must be forward-thinking and devise an approach that takes us there. It is vital that your digital strategy accurately represents the investment you make into your business’s future.
Alpha Alias combines digital strategy and website strategy to develop a comprehensive approach for building a website’s digital ecosystem and operational workflow. We do this by:
In contrast with conventional website agencies, Alpha Alias employs an operational model that allows the goals of each project to define the technologies necessary to achieve them. Put simply, we outline the objectives needed to achieve the goals and select the most appropriate technologies to satisfy them.
Here’s how we do it:
You can learn more about our Project First operational model in the blog post, “What Is Project First?” https://www.alphaalias.com/blog/insights/what-is-project-first/
As your digital strategist, Alpha Alias works with your business to understand how each of your digital touchpoints fits into the broader digital strategy and how each can be optimized to accomplish the larger goals.
The role of a digital strategist is typically focused on digital marketing and understanding how that effort fits into the broader marketing effort. Alpha Alias takes the digital strategist role forward by considering how your website, mailing list, conversational touchpoints, and social channels work together in a conversion funnel.
A content strategy is a plan of action for how content is utilized to achieve business goals. At Alpha Alias, content is the key to building successful smart websites. That means a well-planned content strategy is vital to have in place before content creation can begin.
An impactful content strategy will be a mixture of the effective best practices of how humans interact with digital touchpoints right now and the nuanced approach to how your business handles communications.
A content strategy starts with identifying your business goals.
We can define an approach that enhances content creation by understanding the primary objectives you hope to achieve with your business. Further, it will help us optimize the overarching digital strategy.
This is the first step toward content creation becoming a science and not an art.
The art of content creation is an essential element that would have a hard time being replaced by a machine, but the science of content is objective and quantifiable. Let’s not forget we need to convince machines to show content to humans and persuade humans to convert.
This is why the Alpha Alias approach is a perfect marriage of the two.
Alpha Alias uses artificial intelligence to assist in creating keywords, keyphrases, content ideas, content outlines, draft content, and much more.
Once we have our draft text, we humanize the content and add any new, inspired thoughts. The way content flows can shift to communicate it in an appropriate way for the target audience.
We then implement the humanized text into a machine to leverage artificial intelligence that helps optimize the overall content for grammar mistakes, clarity in communication, measure its engagement and ensure it matches our desired tone of voice. This process is monitored by a human and optimized by a machine.
We start with a series of AI-powered machines to generate needed textual content, move on to human adaptation, and polish the final result with AI-powered recommendations approved by a human.
Content strategy helps with content creation by providing the context in which all content should be created. We validate our decision-making during each content creation step by verifying that it meets the expectations of the content strategy.
