Global Web Effectiveness Audits & Change Management
Global Web Effectiveness is not just another buzzword, it’s a crucial aspect of your digital transformation journey. It encompasses the holistic experience of usability, technical infrastructure, brand identity, and best practices in website management, all tailored for a worldwide audience. These practices must be documented and enforceable to maintain consistency and quality. We offer a unique approach that integrates process management frameworks with global digital strategies that leverage your existing operational framework to ensure ongoing compliance and governance of these methods, especially during times of hyper-growth. Our many years of experience consulting and managing for some of the largest brands has given us a unique experience to help multinational companies future-proof their global website strategy and be more successful. The following are some of the key steps in this process.
Website and Target Market Alignment
During this step, we will review your global universe of sites to ensure they align with the business model and market business goals to ensure the alignment of the website operating model. Unfortunately, many companies try to leverage the same copycat model in all markets, which may miss out on significant revenue opportunities. We work with your teams and the markets to understand any necessity of the current approach and collaborate with the global and market teams to develop the appropriate roadmap for improvement.
Develop and Refine Operating Models for Scale
Surprisingly, with all the hype around digital transformation, there are very few guides and operating models for global web expansion. We have seen several approaches to international expansion, most of which are highly ineffective. The most common are those without any framework, who clone an existing site, have it localized, and assume it is good enough for the local market. Yet others force compliance with outdated and inflexible models that prevent any required market adoptions. The other common approach is the free-for-all which it is market-driven and creates web infrastructures that lack economies of scale, adhere to brand and web standards, and do not offer integration or collaboration with other platforms. We will work with the teams to get alignment across best practices, technology, operations, and people and will provide any necessary upskilling of staff to achieve success.
Minimize Traffic Cannibalization & Lead Discards
In many situations, we find one or more markets cannibalizing traffic from another due to how the website is created and the technology to redirect users to specific markets. This is common outside of the United States, resulting in a significant loss in traffic and revenue to the correct market. In a worst-case scenario, a market may not want or be able to manage leads from another market or language, resulting in many being discarded. During one client’s audit, we identified multiple markets with $1 and $5 million in discarded potential lead revenue. We can convert these discards into incremental sales by ensuring the website and content are aligned to the correct market.
Digital Best Practices Upskilling
Digital skills are in high demand, making those experts with them hard to find and expensive to hire. We can work with you to identify existing staff and develop training programs to upskill current employees with significant institutional knowledge and technical skills and give them the missing knowledge to create the perfect team.
Develop Agile Operating Models
We collaborate with the DevOps, Marketing, and Sales teams to identify changes and deploy the best solution to meet your company’s unique operational, strategic, and market goals, resolve any errors, and, if necessary, develop a severity/business case to justify the technology resources for any recommended changes.
Benefits of Global Web Effectiveness Audits
Our experience and unique approach have proven successful for many multinational clients in augmenting their existing programs or adding skills for those just getting started in globalization.
Current State Audit to Identify Gaps and Skill Shortages: Several companies will use our audits to understand the current state of their organization. This is common when a new global manager takes over and wants a neutral assessment of how the organization is doing. By being neutral and not embedded in the existing workflow, we will have a fresh set of eyes on the programs and process, which makes it easier to spot challenges, process gaps, and skill shortages.
Enable Brand and Market Teams Focus:
Often local markets and brands do not have the resources or skills to deploy top-down processes. By understanding what should be done centrally and using scale methods, we can shift activities to where there are resources and eliminate the need to do them locally. For example, for one multi-brand company that required age restriction capability on some of their brands, we found this was created and deployed in 87 different methods by as many separate agencies and teams. Since this was a core requirement, developing the full specifications and deploying an internal team to develop and manage all brands and markets not only saved an aggregate of $4 million in redundant development costs but increased efficiency, reduced problems, and, most importantly, reduced site entry friction by 2,500% resulting in more traffic, leads and downstream sales.