Catering your website content to all stakeholders
When considering the content of a corporate website for a listed business, planning is often heavily focused on the needs of the investment community. However, there are a variety of stakeholders that may use the corporate website, in order to gain a better understanding of the business, and their needs may not clearly intersect with investors.
Employees, government and regulators, customers, potential strategic partners and journalists will all clearly be seeking different information from each other and from investors and shareholders. The corporate website should, therefore, meet their needs too.
We believe that a key stage of content planning for a corporate website is the generation of user profiles for each potential user group. The first consideration when creating a user profile is their key needs, desires and pain points. This captures what the user is trying to achieve by accessing the website, what their ideal outcomes are, and what challenges they are trying to avoid. Once you have a clear idea of the various user groups, and what they will be looking to use on a website, it will then be easy to identify the content each of the user groups will be most interested in. For example, a potential employee of a company would be most interested in understanding why a company would be good to work for, with content on their values and culture and approach to training and development being most important. Whereas local communities and government would be most interested in understanding the economic and social impact of the company's operations.
It can also help to consider prioritisation. Within each user group, there could be "power users", who are users that will be accessing the website frequently. They should be able to quickly access the content that they are interested in, which can be done through linking on landing pages and also easily found in the website navigation. Once all of the content needs of the various user groups have been considered and prioritised, this will make the creation of a site map for the website a straightforward process.
While many stakeholders benefit from different content, there are a few content areas that are particularly beneficial to cover well, as they are of interest to many stakeholders. Comprehensive background information on the company and its industry is useful for all user groups, as it will mean that the website can inform stakeholders who are learning about the company for the first time. This background information should include details on the company strategy, business model, divisions, and market environment. Another area of high interest to many stakeholder groups is sustainability. Many stakeholders are keen to understand how the company is addressing key sustainability risks and opportunities and whether a company is committed to creating a positive impact on its external environment. A website user should be able to get a quick understanding of the company's approach to sustainability, its key impacts (both positive and negative) on its stakeholders, and data on how well the company is meeting its sustainability targets.
If you would like some further support in catering your content to all stakeholders, get in touch with us, we would love to help!