You can make your teams love guidelines!

All companies need guidelines. Guidelines help teams align behind the company’s vision, strategy, and operational model and are critical to the success of your business. Without clear guidelines, your brand image, strategy, resources, costs, and security are at risk. Guidelines aren’t meant to “annoy” teams; they are established to support a healthy business and all teams should follow them. So why is it that teams tend to not like guidelines and often try to get around them? Teams may believe that their business needs justify not following existing guidelines because Read more…

Web centralization vs. localization – where to place the cursor

Most international companies face the same dilemma: should we set up and manage our online presence centrally? Or should we let our local teams take responsibility? The answer is probably somewhere in the middle. It makes a lot of sense to design your end-to-end online user experience centrally, including navigation, information structure, page design, etc. Setting up centrally, then deploying locally certainly drives savings vs. starting from scratch in each country. Another great benefit is ensuring a consistent brand experience across countries. The next logical question then is, what is Read more…

5 keys to a strong online experience with your brand

Customers are encountering an ever-increasing number of brands, communication supports and communication messages wherever they turn. So more than ever, your company must make it easy for customers to find you, engage with you and do business with you. A unified and consolidated online brand experience is a must-have. Follow these 5 steps to ensure a unified online customer experience. 1) Understand your current situation. You need to have a holistic view of your company’s digital presence across your websites, mobile applications, social media pages, etc. 2) Provide a simple Read more…

Don’t let microsites get out of control

You probably hear many justifications for creating microsites: “I want to have a website that I can fully control.” “If I send my audience to the master company website, they may go somewhere else on the website, and they get away from the product lines I’m in charge of.” “The experience, design, and page templates of the master website don’t meet my needs.” “It’s easier and faster to create a new website than to get content published on the master company website.” “Leads from my area of the master website Read more…