Let me paint a picture of the world today as a company sees it and then again as a customer experiences it.
Company View:
A company, say yours, has a “home page” where they organize the user experience so users can learn more about the company, its products, its vertical solutions and so on. The idea is based on going from the highest “levels” of content to deeper and deeper levels based on specificity.
And the Customer View:
The customer, instead, goes to Google, types in a search of key words or needs, and clicks through to find the specific data that they were seeking. Sometimes. Sometimes they go elsewhere not even knowing your company offers the just-right thing for them. But I digress. In doing the search, Google is effectively the UI for creating the customer experience of your site and content.
That’s not necessarily what the web marketing team let alone the CMO of any company is planning on, is it?
We marketers expect users to come to our site, but we don’t support creating an experience. Instead we share information. We need to turn our websites into places where we play, learn, engage, build communities, exchange information and ultimately motivate the user to be passionately interested in knowing more and being more.
That’s a big task.
But without it, Having Google as your UI is an acceptable outcome.
