Your brand is the sum of all the experiences your customers and employees have with your organization. Your web site is often the first experience a customer or potential employee has with your brand. Therefore, your web site is more than just a marketing vehicle, it is a brand delivery vehicle (or critical customer touch point if you prefer). These are the top five things you should know when it comes to ensuring your web site delivers your desired brand experience.

1. Know your brand.
While this may seem obvious, it is actually something many companies forget when developing their web sites. They start with what they want to say or how they want the customer to act on their web site, but forget to think about what the customer values and wants from them. If you have a research-based understanding of not only what you do well, but what your constituents value about you, you will be able to develop a web site that delivers this more thoughtfully and consistently through its content, architecture and design.

2. Know your landscape.
If you know how other’s in your industry are using their web sites to deliver on their brand, you can determine how best to use your web site to position your organization for differentiation–through the types of content you offer, the way users can interact with you online, and the overall experience your site provides.

3. Know your user.
This means that you know not only who they are (demographics), but what their needs, motivations and online behaviors are so that you can develop a web site that delivers on those. Your users may be your customers, your internal stakeholders, the media, partners or others. Profile each of your audiences in a way that allows brand managers and web site managers to implicitly understand users’ needs and what the site should do as a result.

4. Know the possibilities and your limits.
The web has become a magic and wondrous thing. It can inform, engage and build community. There is an online application for just about anything you want to do. And, it is easy to get carried away with technology. The key is in knowing what is possible and then carefully selecting only those applications that help you deliver your brand experience for your users. For instance, if you know your users are less web savvy and have 56K modems, you may not want to build your site in Flash or have video or other large files on your site that keep your users from being able to get what they need due to long download periods.

5. Know what to measure.
Web analytics these days are also very rich. You can drill down on nearly every aspect of each user’s visit. However, that often requires full time employees to do so. If you use your brand and business goals as criteria for what to measure, you can more easily tie your measurements to business and brand strategy implications. Because, for every online action, there is a corresponding offline reaction that must be carefully managed to make sure you are delivering on the expectations of your brand.

–Jen Travis