Social media guru Brian Solis recently wrote an article entitled, “Why Brands are Becoming Media.” In this landmark piece, he identified social media for what it is: a component of content strategy.

“One of the greatest challenges I encounter today is not the willingness of a brand to engage, but its ability to create. When blueprinting a social media strategy, enthusiasm and support typically derails when examining the resources and commitment required to produce regular content. Most companies can’t sustain social media engagement because they lack the internal editorial infrastructure to support it.

They don’t have a content strategy.”

Most businesses mistakenly believe that content strategy is simply a function of information input. The more information the better, right? What many businesses are starting to realize is that content strategy is really a function of information insight. Ask yourself–what information is most important to your customer? Why is this information important? How are we going to deliver this information in a way that is consistent with our brand?

Once you start looking at content strategy as the centerpiece of our entire digital presence (website, social media, mobile apps, etc.), then you’ll begin to understand how your brand becomes its own media. You are creating interesting, relevant and customized content across every online touchpoint.

Yes, it’s a lot of work. But a well conceived content strategy would go a long way toward helping your brand become a viable and valuable media.

Contact Mark Smither, VP, creative director at Paulsen Marketing to learn more.

In this digital media dominated world with audiences starving for constant information, misinformation and error in a time of crisis can be fatal to your image. That’s why it’s important to have a crisis communication plan staffed by an effective crisis team ready to put it into action.

You need to build an ethical, diverse, responsive, responsible crisis communications team. Consider these qualities very carefully, because each team member must possess strengths to match them. They must be able to manage their time and others effectively, have a quick, analytical mind, and an understanding and appreciation for the media and its role. The team will be responsible for analyzing the situation and assessing the information at hand. The support of top management and key departments, such as legal or human resources, is vital. The team members will also craft key messages to address the heart of the matter and do so when time and media pressures are most intense.

This work is not for the faint of heart. So make sure your crisis team has the “right stuff” to do the hard work that can save your company’s reputation.

Click to learn more about crisis communications.

As marketers, we have seemingly endless opportunities with mobile, but it should go without saying that mobile is only part of a well-defined marketing strategy. Begin by identifying audience usage and any existing marketing efforts that may lead the user to your website on a mobile device. There’s a pretty good chance your first order of business will be to mobile-enable your existing website. After that, marketing efforts and user behavior can drive ongoing mobile strategy.

The Mobile Website

There are multiple levels of mobile website development.

Option 1: Mobile-friendly

In this example, most of the functionality and design will work on a smartphone, but it will require a lot of “pinch and zoom” to navigate and see content. On iPhone and iPad devices, Flash elements will be broken unless replaced with HTML5.

Option 2: Responsive Web Programming

When a mobile device visits your website, user agent detection is used to display the website design specific to that screen size. Essentially, different experiences are designed for everything from large computer monitors to vertical smartphones. All Flash is replaced with HTML5 to accommodate the iPhone and iPad.

Visit hubbardlife.com on your mobile device for an example of Responsive Web programming. For an example of a website with massive daily content, visit thebostonglobe.com.

Option 3: Custom Mobile

Use analytics to determine sections of the website that are most important to mobile users. User agent detection allows display of a separate website specifically designed for the mobile experience, usually with focused content. Users can switch back to the full version website at any time (after Responsive Web is complete).

This can be a great approach to very task-oriented landing pages that fit mobile behaviors like snapping a QR code at a dealership for product information and pricing. These sites are also often supported with a special URL such as mobile.yourdomain.com. Paulsenmarketing.com is an example of custom mobile.

Beyond Mobile Websites

Once your current website is ready for mobile, you are ready for the myriad of options available. Native apps, web apps, QR codes, email marketing, content rich apps, text messaging and mobile advertising can all be part of an effective mobile strategy. Don’t let the technology derail you from core marketing principals. Brand integrity, user experience and marketing strategy should influence mobile considerations. A coordinated and methodical mobile strategy can equal more than the sum of its tactics – a strategy and execution that drives sales and builds customer relationships.

Contact Sara Steever, VP, digital services at Paulsen Marketing to learn more.

A crisis can be an event or series of events that puts your company’s reputation at risk. Crisis communication can’t help mitigate that risk, and it won’t make your company safer or healthier. But it can help keep your business from being destroyed through misinformation, rumor and innuendo. Thorough crisis planning and management will help an organization survive and continue to operate.

Define Communication Channels

You should take all forms of communication, both internal and external, into consideration when you’re in the early stages of crisis communication planning. That’s everything from interoffice channels to a communication vehicle for mass media, responding to an individual reporter’s questions or keeping your company social media sites updated. All these elements must be included and then a plan for coordinated communication developed. To avoid even one aspect of crisis communications can be detrimental to your reputation.

Another question that has to be determined quickly is if there is a need for a crisis response website. Such a site can be valuable as a resource for both the media and stakeholders and key influencers. We recommend that your company create the shell of such a site and have it ready to be used when it is determined that the crisis is of such a level that the site will prove a valuable resource. Once that determination is made, the site can be populated with additional information and background regarding the crisis.

You should also work hard to find credible resources that have a relationship with your company and can vouch for your business practices, ethics and reliability. These relationships should already be in place, but it is important to communicate to these sources that you would like to use them as contacts and references in specific crisis situations.

Information Gathering

In any crisis details are your best resource. Facts and figures, background information on the company and specific sources of information that will be available are all necessary to make sure you can provide the essential information that can be distributed to all your constituent publics and stakeholders quickly and accurately.

Develop Key Messages and Stay on Message

Consistency is a great asset that should never be taken for granted in a crisis. Your crisis team should include members from top management that include safety, human resources and legal department representatives along with the CEO, COO and CFO from the executive suite. This team works together with the spokesperson/s to develop key messages and craft the initial statement.

One Consistent Voice

It is vitally important that part of your plan include designating and thoroughly training a designated spokesperson or spokespersons. These individuals are your company’s representatives to the media or your stakeholders and key influencers. Ideally a single spokesperson should represent the company before its key publics on a given issue. If you do need more than one spokesperson, make sure each one is completely briefed on what the others are saying and they all have the same set of key messages. The support of top management and key departments, such as legal or human resources, is vital.

It is also very important to maintain control of social media channels and communicate to all employees how important it is to refrain from discussing or speculating about the crisis on their personal social media pages. It is best to offer a simple instruction to refer any inquiries or statements made by “friends” on their sites to the home page or crisis response site that has been set up by the company.

Rapid Response

As we’ve seen recently in the Lean, Finely Textured Beef issue, timing is crucial. The first 24 hours of a crisis are the key to your company’s fate. The longer you wait, the more likely falsehoods become accepted truth. That was certainly the case with the BPI situation, when the pejorative term “pink slime” was spread throughout traditional, digital and social media. Never let misinformation or mischaracterizations go unchallenged. The errors are usually based on inaccurate or fragmentary information.

When a crisis happens a rapid, accurate response is essential. How rapid? If you have an effective plan in place, your company should be prepared to issue an initial statement within sixty minutes of the first development, provided that the important facts can be assessed that quickly. The first statement should go immediately to key stakeholders and influencers as well as the media. The media filter can often leave out key elements, and it’s important that the people who will have your back have the same information that you’ve sent to the media. Rumor control begins with your friends and colleagues. This initial statement should be followed with an alert to all concerned audiences that additional details will be made available as soon as possible. When you can fill information vacuums with your perspective, you can begin to take control of the crisis communication battle. And it’s important to be quick to correct any misinformation, communicating directly with the reporter, editor or blogger who published it.

Stand Up and Be Heard

Assessing blame or fault in a crisis situation can take days, weeks, months, weeks and even years. Your initial communication should never try to assess blame or fault. But that doesn’t mean you can’t stand up, take control of the situation as best as possible and be heard. By conveying your company’s sense of responsibility and commitment to resolving the situation and your expressions of concern and empathy, you build instant trust and credibility with the media and your stakeholders.

The Media is NOT the Enemy

It’s important to remember that the media doesn’t hate you. They don’t love you either. And in most cases, they’re not out to get you. They’re out to get the facts about what happened and get the story out. When you see them as being helpful in telling your side of the story, and have an organized and informed approach to providing them with the key facts and information that will reinforce that, you will be moving along the road to a successful communication effort. There’s nothing that raises the hackles of the media than when a company or an individual withholds essential information or closes itself off to any inquiry whatsoever. Creating a strong relationship with the media should begin immediately, hopefully long before a crisis occurs.

Now is the perfect time to review your crisis plan. If it includes a communication element, great! If you’re not sure if all your communication bases are covered, give us a call at (605) 336-1745 or contact Bryan Bjerke to learn more.

• Be transparent
• Be authentic
• Be relevant
• Be consistent
• Be patient

But because the interactive landscape continues to shift beneath our feet, I feel the need to add a sixth fundamental rule.

• Be brave

Branding in the digital age requires a high degree of courage that very few companies possess. Let me clarify something—it doesn’t take a lot of nerve to pull the trigger on a geotargeted social media campaign that is tied to a promotional QR code and a finely tuned pay-per-click strategy. This is a tactical execution with a set budget and predicted metrics in place. Sure, it’s extremely smart. But it’s not always gutsy.

Being brave means trying something new and perhaps failing. What would happen if you invested an uncomfortable amount of marketing dollars into your next digital campaign and it only generated five new friends on Facebook? Ask yourself— what will you do differently next time? (And yes, there will be a next time.) Was your message on target? Were you reaching the right audience? Was your creative strategy well focused?

There are many variables that separate success from failure. If you are willing to learn something in the process and apply that hard-earned knowledge to your next digital campaign, then you are more likely to succeed in the future. All it takes is a little courage.

Click to learn more about branding in the digital age.

Identifying a website’s users and building a site that caters to their needs is fundamental to the success of the website. As specialists in marketing to agriculture and rural lifestyle audiences, we devote countless hours of research and observation to better understand the website visitors we serve and the websites we build.

If you polled most people, they would probably classify farmers as luddites. In fact, 94 percent of farmers own a smartphone or cell phone – 11 percent higher than the general public¹. We know from our research that farmers are tech-savvy business owners who need to make market decisions on the fly. Studying producer behaviors keeps us from assumptions that would under-serve this audience. It’s a lesson anyone building a website must learn.

The techniques below will lay the proper foundation for a website that meets your audience’s needs.

1. Gather Materials

Locate all of the marketing, educational and research materials you’ve produced over the last couple of years. These should provide clues for audience identification, and you will need them eventually for content development, branding references and stakeholder review. Sometimes documents are produced internally because marketing materials don’t do an adequate job of speaking to a specific audience. Dig deep!

2. Tap Stakeholders

Within your company or client’s operation is a cross-section of individuals who will understand the people that comprise your audiences. You will need their buy-in for many tasks during the development process, but for this exercise you need them for identifying audiences, locating potential interview candidates and participating in a goal setting session.

The best mix is representative of all viewpoints across the company, but in order to manage your group, try to keep the number of stakeholders to a minimum—seven or fewer is ideal. Marketing, sales, product or division managers, IT and C-level staff are typical, but the group depends on the size and management of your company or client. Before you meet as a group, streamline the process by gathering the following Internal Assessment information and summarizing findings for presentation.

3. Internal Assessment

Who are your audiences?

While this should be mostly understood, here are some additional places to research:

• Interview your stakeholders individually, but remember they are not your customers, so unless your website is for internal use only, don’t stop there.
• Review the marketing materials you gathered earlier – this may help identify some niches.
• Talk to the front line, some of which have been provided by your stakeholders. For our clients that means the parts guy at the counter, the seed salesman, the veterinarian, the agronomist, etc.
• Review your current website analytics. If you use Google Analytics, you can apply filters to learn who is visiting your website. Depending on your industry, this can be a gold mine of information.

Once you have identified these audiences, you can move on to understanding their needs.

What are their goals?

Five to seven interviews per audience will provide valuable insight into their expectations. Questions should revolve around existing interactions with your company, general expectations, comfort with website functionalities, use of mobile, use of social media, examples of websites they like and use frequently, and open-ended wish list thoughts.

What are their behaviors?

An even more effective method of determining audience’s needs is to perform usability testing on your own website and competitor’s websites. This testing will close the gap between what users say and what they actually do.

Done well, usability testing is a science unto itself, so hire a professional if possible. Make sure that the testing revolves around the goals set from the interviews. Five to seven audience members tested per website is the rule of thumb. From this research, you should be able to confirm the usefulness of existing functionalities and solidify where opportunities lie. Summarize your findings for the goal identification session.

4. Goal Identification Session

Time to put all of your preparation to use and bring your stakeholders together for a working session. Bring your research summaries and functionality checklist along with an agenda to keep the meeting on task. All summarized documentation should be presented at the beginning of the meeting. If any audiences or competitors have been missed, they should be identified at this time. Glean what you can from the stakeholders and assess if there is a need to perform more research later.

A sample agenda would include:

• Introduction
• Review possible audiences from research findings to approve and prioritize audiences
• Identify goals: For each audience that makes the cut, determine appropriate goals. Use the summarized interviews to help your team understand why user goals are different from internal business goals. For example, user goals might include the ability to view their transactions history, customize the content on their homepage or save a wish list of items. Business goals might be to increase sales or build customer relationships.
• Align goals: User goals must be supported in three ways.
• Content strategy
• Content strategy is critical because your website is primarily content. Content architecture, concise communication, branding consistency, search engine optimization and social media optimization all stem from this strategy. Consider carefully the sources of your content, not just for the launch of the website, but for its long-term life and health.
• Set expectations within the stakeholder group that any user goals must be supported by the right content.
• Technical functionalities
• Once your goals are set and content strategy is mapped, you are ready to refine the list of functionality that will support those decisions. Provide a comprehensive list of functionality options to prompt the team, but remember that any functionality must match up with the above goals and strategies. Pay special attention to functionality your competitors provide that passed the usability test. That’s where the bar is set from your user’s viewpoint.
• If you determine your website includes any business-class integrations, discuss this at length with stakeholders and consider a separate task force.
• With the increase of mobile technology and smartphone usage, include discussions for mobile development. Progressive companies design for mobile first and include technologies that can determine the user’s device and serve up the proper version of your website.
• Success metrics
• Determine how the success of the website will be measured. The easiest metrics may not be the most meaningful. Google Analytics is a very powerful tool, but requires experience to learn much beyond general traffic numbers. Metrics must reinforce the primary goals of the website.
• Establishing the goal oriented metrics early allows your website to evolve strategically.

At the end of the session, you should have a clear picture of how your website will serve each of your audiences:

• Audience One
• Goal One
• Content strategy tactics
• Functionalities
• Success metrics
• Goal Two
• Content strategy tactics
• Functionalities
• Success metrics
• Etc.
• Audience Two, etc.

This outline will serve as a touchstone during other phases of website development that will ensure the project stays on track.

Summary

While this article only covers the user’s optic, it is important to consider broader business goals as well as the internal or political goals of an organization. You can learn more about the types of goals that successful websites address in the article, “Five Steps to Smarter Website RFPs.”

Like the rest of us, users don’t know what they don’t know, so they cannot be the only perspective that drives the development of the website. However, their insight is invaluable, and overlooking it will cost you the success of the website.

¹Successful Farming, 2011 Mobile Phone Study

An online media kit should be an important element in your branding effort. We can help you maximize your brand messaging by developing an online media kit for your corporate website.

When implementing an online media section, take the following tips into consideration:

• Make it easy to update and always keep it up-to-date
• Push for interactive: Add video selections and demonstrations where applicable or possibly a question and answer section that is always in play
• Contact information should be clickable for quick response

The goal is simple: have a central source for media and other audiences where they can learn about your goals, history and the people who make your company great.

Click to find out what categories every corporate online media kit should have, and see some examples.

There are three types of goals to identify for your website: Primary business/organization goals, user goals and internal/political goals.

• Primary business/organization goals should fit within broad initiatives but be related to how a website can help you reach them. The team should work to identify a primary goal for the site, although secondary goals may also be supported. For example, the primary business goal of revenue generation via the website may be expressed by providing content to paid subscribers. A secondary goal may be a strong branding presence that might communicate the perceived value or cache of the membership.
• User goals should be developed from the research already performed. These types of goals can help identify and refine functionality offerings that help support your primary goals. The use of personas can help your team understand why user goals are different from broader business goals. In our above example, the user goals might include the ability to control outbound communication or customize the content on their homepage.
• Political or internal goals may not have specific numbers tied to them, but may still be important to communications. For example, green initiatives, sustainability programs or charitable giving may be important for supporting and generating good will within your community. In addition, strong historic or cultural aspects of the company may be important for hiring new associates.

Goals are just the beginning to the process. To understand all steps to writing a successful RFP, read our newest article, “Five Steps to Smarter Website RFPs.”

While there are only five steps to this process, some are handled best by an experienced team. When we build websites for existing clients at Paulsen, we follow these steps because they guarantee a clear picture of what the website should be and they are necessary for understanding the true cost of proper website development. We are always available to help you write your RFP!

1. Gather Materials

Locate all of the marketing, educational and research materials your company has produced over the last couple of years. You will need them eventually for content development, branding references and stakeholder review.

2. Identify Stakeholders

The best mix of ideas is representative of all viewpoints across the company, but it in order to manage your group, try to keep the number of stakeholders to a minimum—seven or fewer is ideal. Marketing, sales, product or division managers, IT and C-level staff are typical, but the group depends on the size and management of your company. If you have a lot of stakeholders, break them into manageable groups, keeping in mind group dynamics and personalities. As author, one of your jobs is to act as facilitator and keep bullies in check while bringing out the best in everyone. Before you meet as a group(s), streamline the process by gathering information and summarizing findings to present in a stakeholder session.

3. Internal Assessment

The final RFP will contain statements and requests that your company stakeholders must agree on first.

Is your company branding in order? Your website may be many things, not the least of which is a communication vehicle. The RFP must communicate brand expectations to your vendors, typically through a style guide or other documentation. If that does not exist, plan on hiring a solid marketing firm that can guide you through the process of defining and expressing your brand. Plan to include the style guide with your RFP.

Who are your audiences? Unless your website is for internal use only, take into account that some of your audiences are not present at the stakeholder meeting for input. Consider your various customers’ needs and expectations. Once you have identified these audiences, you can move on to understanding their differences.

What are their goals? Five to seven interviews per audience will provide valuable insight into their expectations. Questions should revolve around existing interactions with your company, general expectations, comfort with website functionalities, use of mobile, use of social media, examples of websites they like and use frequently and open-ended wish list thoughts.

An even more effective method of determining audience’s needs is to perform usability testing on your own website and competitors’ websites. This testing will close the gap between what users say and what they actually do, and provide insight into the usefulness of the investment your competitors have made in their websites.

Done well, usability testing is a science unto itself, so hire a professional if possible. Five to seven audience members tested per website is the rule of thumb. From this research, you should be able to develop personas that will help you understand user goals. Summarize your findings for the stakeholder session.

Where do you fit among your competitive set? Identify your competition, considering companies that compete for the same wallet share even if they are not in the same segment. Perform a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) and assess their website for functionality, design, brand positioning, global navigation and search engine optimization. Bring this information before your stakeholder group.

In what condition is your current website? Perform the same style of analysis as the competitive set on your own website.

4. Stakeholder Session

Bring your research summaries and functionality checklist along with an agenda to keep the meeting on task. A sample agenda would include:

• Introduction
• Review research findings
• A working session to determine:
• Goals
• Select functionalities
• Set content strategy
• Determine security levels
• Plan for website maintenance
• Accommodate external marketing integration
• Set deadlines
• Set budget

Review research

All summarized documentation should be presented at the beginning of the meeting. If any audiences or competitors have been missed, they should be identified at this time. Glean what you can from the stakeholders and assess if there is a need to perform more research at a later date.

Determine goals for the website

There are three types of goals to identify for your website: Primary business/organization goals, user goals and internal/political goals.

• Primary business/organization goals should fit within broad initiatives but be related to how a website can help you reach them. The team should work to identify a primary goal for the site, although secondary goals may also be supported. For example, the primary business goal of revenue generation via the website may be expressed by providing content to paid subscribers. A secondary goal may be a strong branding presence that might communicate the perceived value or cache of the membership.
• User goals should be developed from the research already performed. These types of goals can help identify and refine functionality offerings that help support your primary goals. The use of personas can help your team understand why user goals are different from broader business goals. In our above example, the user goals might include the ability to control outbound communication or customize the content on their homepage.
• Political or internal goals may not have specific numbers tied to them, but may still be important to communications. For example, green initiatives, sustainability programs or charitable giving may be important for supporting and generating good will within your community. In addition, strong historic or cultural aspects of the company may be important for hiring new associates.

Establish success metrics

Determine how the success of the website will be measured. The easiest metrics may not be the most meaningful. Google Analytics is a very powerful tool, but requires experience to learn much beyond general traffic numbers. Metrics must reinforce the primary goals of the website – in our example above, data about subscriber behaviors and interactions would be more meaningful if the demographics allowed segmentation and analysis.

Establishing the goal oriented metrics early on allows your website to evolve strategically.

Set content strategy

Content strategy is critical because your website is primarily content. Content architecture, concise communication, branding consistency, search engine optimization and social media optimization all stem from this strategy, so consider carefully the sources of your content, not just for the launch of the website, but for its long-term life and health.

In her article titled, The Discipline of Content Strategy, Kristina Halvorson lists the primary areas of content strategy.

• Editorial strategy
• Web writing
• Metadata strategy
• Search engine optimization
• Content management strategy
• Content channel distribution strategy

This is a tall order for anyone not trained in these disciplines, which is where your agency comes in. Setting expectations and budgets within your stakeholder group for these services will provide a website with a much longer shelf life. Consideration should also be given to ongoing content generation.

If content is to be generated internally, provide training resources to writers, photographers, videographers and graphic designers to understand search engine optimization, website architecture, social media optimization, writing for the Web and communicating your brand. However, it is much less important that your writers understand technology or social media than how to communicate clearly and intelligently.

Select website functionalities

Once your goals are set, and content strategy is mapped, you are ready to refine the list of functionality that will support those decisions. Provide a comprehensive list of functionality options to prompt the team, but remember that any functionality must match up with the above goals and strategies. Pay special attention to functionality your competitors provide that passed the usability test. That’s where the bar is set from your user’s viewpoint.

If your RFP includes any business-class integrations, discuss this at length with stakeholders. A separate task force may be required to finalize the details of this type of investment.

With the increase of mobile technology and smartphone usage, include discussions for mobile development. Progressive vendors will request to design for mobile first and will include technologies that can determine the device and serve up the proper version of your website. If your website needs a shelf life longer than 12 months, you must consider mobile in your RFP.

Determine security levels

It is critical your IT or IS department is included in this process. If you do not have an IT department or if your website is not hosted in-house, then security recommendations should come from your vendor and be based on the level of functionality chosen. E-commerce, job applications, customer account information or any other online access to sensitive information requires secure transmission and data storage. At a minimum, use a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) for transmission, and do not store Social Security or credit card numbers in an online database. Host your website with a reputable provider.

Prepare to include IT documentation and questions within the RFP.

Website maintenance

Determine if you have the resources to maintain the website over time. A good Content Management System will allow you to add, edit and delete content, but you may still need or wish to have the ability to change functionality over time. If you are going to leave this to your vendor, include specifics in the RFP.

External marketing integration

Your website is the core of all your in- and out-bound communications. Ensure all your marketing is aligned with the functionality of the proposed website. While some of this might be identified from the functionality checklist, plan to include details in the RFP for search engine optimization, social media optimization, pay-per-click marketing, direct marketing landing pages, e-mail and mobile marketing.

Deadlines

Provide realistic deadlines to agencies for submission of the interest to participate, final proposal or presentation and the launch date of the website. Include any other milestones for your group’s participation such as the date when a vendor will be chosen, but let your vendor set their own internal milestones for completing work.

Significant websites take an average of four to six months to develop. Complex business integrations can take six months to a year. This is also the area to specify how you wish to receive your proposals, electronically or in person. You will be working closely with this team for months or years, so consider an in-person meeting at some point.

Budget

There is always a great debate about presenting budget parameters within an RFP. Most RFPs do not contain a budget, but unfortunately that increases the chances of receiving proposals that are not apples to apples and often wildly different in price. Think of it as building a house: are you expecting a 3-bedroom rambler, or a 3-bedroom executive home with granite countertops and a view of the Rockies?

If you cannot provide a budget, instead provide detailed functionality statements to ensure proposals are comparable. Conversely, if you are unsure of how to provide enough detail, providing a budget will set expectations allowing more productivity and recommendations from your vendors. It will also save time by narrowing the field of candidates.

Stakeholder session deliverables

The research performed and decisions made during the stakeholder session(s) are the preparation for the real work of writing the RFP. To recap, you should have:

• Business/corporate goals
• User goals
• Political/internal goals
• Competitive SWOT and website analysis
• Company website analysis
• Usability testing results
• User interview results
• Functionality list
• External marketing efforts integration
• Timeline
• Budget

Provide as much of the findings in the RFP as possible to give context to the requirements.

5. Writing the RFP

In broad terms, the top-level contents of the RFP are as follows. An RFP is both informational and contractual. Remember that if your questions are vague and open-ended, it will be difficult to compare proposals. Another way to think of it is the more open-ended information you request, the more varying information you have to digest to make a decision. Conversely, the more detail you provide, the easier it will be to compare proposals and make the right choice.

Introduction

• Company overview
• Team roles and responsibilities
• Goals
• Research findings

Vendor information

• Qualifications and history
• Staff bios and experience
• Process: it should include frequent approval checkpoints
• Examples
• References

Requirements: Use the research and stakeholder session information to fill out the details. Pay special attention to functionality.

• Branding: Attach your style guide and a list of websites you like and why.
• Content: Provide stakeholder session requirements.
• Functionality: Prioritize needs over wants. Ask for wants to be a la carte with separate pricing. See example below for level of detail that will get the best results.
• Hosting
• Security

Selection criteria: Provide a weight of importance for each criterion. If budget is most important, it should be reflected here.

• Industry expertise
• Branding expertise
• Technical expertise
• Pricing

Timelines: Allow your vendor to provide detailed milestones within the development process for your approval.

Project proposal and pricing: If budget was not already included.

• Base price for functionality listed
• A la carte items
• Hosting
• Domain registration
• SSL (Secure Socket Layer)
• Additional hardware or software as per your IT department

Functionality detail example: Take the list from the stakeholder session and provide enough detail for the vendor to estimate. The more detail you put into this area, the easier it will be to compare the responses.

For example, don’t just request a blog for the website, but provide details:

• How many bloggers it will support?
• Will your bloggers need different types of access?
• Do you need workflows to support different blogger access levels?
• Do you want readers to comment or post content?
• Do those comments need to be moderated?
• Would you prefer full or limited registration users?
• How complex is the moderation workflow?
• Can users subscribe via e-mail or RSS?
• Will blog posts support multi-media like video or audio files?
• Will blog posts need to be fed into various areas of the website depending on the context of the other content within the website?
• Are pingbacks, trackbacks and blogrolls important to you?

The more your RFP resembles a true scope of work, the more accurate your proposal responses and the easier to compare.

In Summary

The most effective website RFPs are written by experienced teams that understand the processes and terminology a vendor needs. Through careful planning and detailed writing, you can craft an RFP that will make your selection process easier and your choice clear.

Special consideration should be given to contracting for the service of writing your website RFP. It is time-consuming and important work that must be done by someone during the course of the process. Having the process professionally done will save staff resources and provide you a successful website that you can build on for years. Contact Sara Steever, VP, digital services at Paulsen Marketing to learn more.

Adding to this challenge is the fact that many of these important purchase decisions are made by more than one person, such as a father and son(s) or father and daughter(s). This unique decision-making dynamic has many agri-marketers asking, “How do multi-generational farming operations make major purchase decisions?”

To answer this question, Paulsen Marketing conducted 14 different interviews with farm families across the Midwest. We spoke with two different farming demographics: older row crop producers, ages 46 to 70, and younger row crop producers, ages 25 to 45. These demographics represent a typical father-son(s) or father-daughter(s) farming operation. The purpose of these interviews was to gain insight into the purchase patterns of multi-generational farm families and identify ways agri-marketers can effectively reach this important audience.

This is what we learned: The consideration cycle leading up to a purchase can last well over a year.

The need to increase production is a continuous cycle. This is why farmers seem to be in a constant state of consideration. Further examination of this observation reveals two important findings:

Major purchase decisions require several different perspectives.

Traditional ag media is still highly valued between both demographics, especially when it comes to creating awareness and identifying a purchase need. Online channels are becoming more important for comparing and evaluating possible purchases. Peer recommendations and positive word-of-mouth are some of the most significant influencers when it comes to actually making a decision.

Younger producers may be willing to take more risks…to a degree.

The most noticeable difference in purchase philosophy between older and younger producers is this: younger producers are more comfortable making a purchase decision based on maximizing return or profitability; older producers seem to be more comfortable making purchase decisions based on minimizing costs. As a result, younger producers seem to be more willing to adopt a new piece of technology or try a different planting strategy.

With such a prolonged consideration cycle, agrimarketers have several opportunities to reach older and younger producers with different messages along a multitude of touchpoints. This is just one of the many observations discussed in Paulsen Marketing’s latest thought paper.

Read the complete paper, watch the interviews and discover the key marketing take-aways.

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