The most important way to run a new website project is to engage directly with end users and the goals of the business. By talking to people in person the insight gained is invaluable. However, this can definitely be complimented by a decent amount of desk research.

Over the last few weeks we've been pulling together all the data sources at our disposal to get a full picture of our current users. We also have a lot of extra information around key clients and opportunities in our increasingly powerful CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

Social media

One task which we're looking at is an overview of our current social media channels. This isn't a full review of their effectiveness to define the strategy, but more taking stock of where we currently are. After all, I have to have a project to keep me busy once the website is live! I'm looking at:

• The most shared content from us and our competitors
• Phraseology to determine discipline around industry language
• Positive and negative sentiment to inform the content strategy and customer service focus 

This will give us a good insight into how our current channels and the terminology used on the website will work together.

Existing site map

It's important to have this logged before work begins! A nice free tool for doing this to GlooMaps. It has all the sharing and export options you could possibly need and is really user friendly.

Contact us form

Our current form pipes queries through to the relevant part of the business based on the enquiry type. This means we can export a full report of all submissions from 2017-18. By mapping them to different parts of the business we can identify how this important section will take shape on the new website.

Internal search terms

We're pulling together a years' worth of search terms and am organising them by key themes. For example, those related to job searches. This informs the weighting of content for the new site and identifies specific times when certain content is more popular for the content strategy.

Referral terms

For this we're using SEMRush which is an extremely powerful SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) suite. This allows us to determine how users have found our website and the terms used. Rather than using Google Analytics data it has the added bonus of giving us a comparative positioning map. This identifies competitors and shows the strengths and weaknesses of their domains' presence in organic search results.

Branded traffic

SEMrush's split of branded vs. unbranded traffic is a really interesting metric for us. It identifies the 'best in class' competitor websites who have traffic we could gain by increasing our own ranking for non-branded keywords.

Keyword opportunities

Whilst SEMrush has a massive amount of data on the opportunities available we've been complimenting this with WordStream. Their free keyword tool shows search volume, competition and opportunity score. Structural/civil engineer have been identified as some of the terms we need to definitely rank for in the future!

Business insight

The challenge here is to first decide on what will be useful to inform the content strategy. To begin, We're identifying key clients by region and looking at separate HR job search data. CRM is essential in showing us how we currently map sectors and for identifying the stages of our current bid processes.

These are just some of the ways we're pulling together our current data. The key is ensuring everything we have gives us actionable insight. Ultimately, we want an informed content strategy for our new website which puts the user's needs first.

I'm already learning so much about the business, our online community and our competitors. This should mean that maintaining the website becomes a much easier, more strategic task post launch!

Our physical Pinterest board

It's been a week of getting away from our desks and spending our time sticking things on walls!

One discussion point, which came up at a recent team meeting, was the importance of sharing best practice internally. Whether it be in person, on email or via Yammer all of us in Marcomms have something to share with each other. So, to take this a step further, I took it upon myself to create a real-life Pinterest board next to my desk!

After a little bit of whiteboard pen calligraphy it was good to go (I may have spent too long on this bit!) The idea is that the team can now pin up any great examples of Marketing, PR and Internal Communications that inspire them. It's already looking great, and has become an office talking point, with loads of fun contributions from the whole team.

On a more serious note, and to begin the discovery phase of our new website, this week I ran an away day in Solihull with colleagues from Kier construction.

The objectives for this session were to gather true internal business insight. We wanted to look at how we win and retain business and 'our perception of how we are perceived' by clients. This exercise will of course be mandated by taking the opposite approach from the outside in (i.e from a client's point of view). But by starting with our people it eased us in to collecting a great deal of useful data.

As our construction business operates very regionally we expected a nuanced view from all involved. For example, some are working on very different types of job depending on the geography. 

Representatives from each of these 7 regions were given different coloured post it notes to differentiate them. We then asked them to write on separate notes the sectors in which they operate (i.e. education). They then placed these on the wall in two separate columns labeled as 'maintain' or 'grow'. The instruction was to place them lower on the wall if the opportunity was less and higher if it was more. So if there is a low ambition to grow in that sector it should be nearer the bottom. Similarly, a high ambition to maintain in a sector means the note should be nearer the top of that column.

This allowed us to see the synergies between the targets of different regions at a glance. It also gave us an idea of how they classify each client for whom they build. We ensured we took lots of photos throughout the day so we could write up the notes later.

The next step was to create new columns on the wall for each individual sector (x-axis). For each of these we then created sub headings horizontally (y-axis). These included key clients, capabilities, unique selling points and keywords. By working through each one individually we compiled a powerful list to inform the weighting of our web content. I think that without running a 'post it notes on the wall' exercise like this you can't say you're a proper digital marketer! Perhaps I took my passion for Trello a bit far by recreating it in real life...

To finish I gave a short presentation on our current Google ranking for certain keywords versus our competitors. This highlighted missed opportunities and showed how we will use all the data we just collected.

Days like this are essential to gain a real understanding of the business. Whilst it will be the first of many it energised me into looking at this project from the point of view of how the business thinks and talks. Most importantly it will give our website users what they want in terms of the content weighting and language.

In my next post I'll discuss some desk based methods for gathering this type of intelligence which I'm currently undertaking. By the end of this process I'll be so buried in data that the formality of building the website will be easy (or not!)