Throughout 2016, Cerner’s marketing team was on a journey to relaunch cerner.com. Sarah Bond, Director of Brand & Digital Experience at Cerner, shared at the KC IABC October meeting the research, strategy and steps the team worked through to complete the launch.
According to the research Sarah shared, 94% of clients go to a company’s website for information before contacting the company one-on-one. The website is the company’s front door.
Over time a website can become cluttered, similar to a garage. When a home is new or when a family first moves into a house, the garage is clean. Then the family grows and with growth, the garage gets cluttered. To manage the clutter, the family organizes it with shelves and hooks and boxes, but nothing gets thrown out. The same thing happens with a website. We add new content, but do we take the time to analyze existing content and remove what is no longer important? Sometimes the clutter gets out of control and it is time to start over.
When you start over, you must have a vision. Cerner’s vision for a new website was to Excite, Validate and Educate. They also had to figure out their audience. “We want to get out of trying to be all things to all people.”
The team realized they hadn’t changed the user experience of their site since 2010. It was not mobile responsive, did not enhance their sales process, lacked personalization and had an outdated design. That sounds like plenty of reasons to me for a website redesign.
These are some steps they followed.
- Put the right team in place. Their team consisted of 4 groups – digital strategy, marketing content, agency partners and implementation.
- Understand your audience. The mobile audience is growing. Customers are 5 times more likely to abandon a website if it is not mobile optimized.
- Identify content. Where are the gaps? The user wants relevant, personalized content.
- Go fast, but a little at a time. Rather than trying to complete a large project on a short timeline, build it in phases. Start out simple and build on and up as you go.
- Dare to be different. What can you do to make yourself stand out?
You can visit Cerner’s new website redesign at www.cerner.com
