Communicate Your Core

What’s the core messaging you want to convey throughout the ecosystem? Maybe you have different messages for different market sectors. B2B websites often have to do multi-layered targeting so they can address different application verticals and speak to retailers/distributors while also addressing consumers. B2C websites may want to message, a set of specific personas, based on a particular product.

It’s important to make sure that the components of your ecosystem support your messaging. For example, if you say that you have the best customer service, then the customer service mechanisms on your site need to be robust. Or, at the very least, you need to have an account section on the site that anticipates major concerns and provides a smooth, streamlined flow so customers can have all their questions answered quickly and easily. The functionality you provide has to be consistent with what’s been promised by the brand.

This meets the user’s expectation of the brand and also creates a home for tactics that will bring users back. It’s fine to serve the brand expectations with self-contained applications, but you do want to make sure that users still flow back to the website. It doesn’t need to be everything to all people – you can use applications, landing pages, extranets, intranets and microsites in the extended ecosystem – but the main site should serve as a hub.