I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about a blog post last year from Jeremiah Owyang.  Jeremiah runs a popular Web Strategy blog and has some great thoughts on social computing and other web strategy topics.

In his blog post “How To Evolve Your Irrelevant Corporate Website” Jeremiah observes that:

[The corporate website is an unbelievable collection of hyperbole, artificial branding, and pro-corporate content. As a result, trusted decisions are being made on other locations on the internet]

Jeremiah goes on to describe why he believes the corporate website is becoming irrelevant and he closes with some recommendations on how to avoid it.

I whole-heartedly agree with Jeremiah. I use social networking tools like Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook to get recommendations from people I trust the most- other users like me.  By the time I get to the corporate website, I’ve already made my decision and I expect the site to recognize this and help me quickly accomplish the specific task I’m trying to complete.

I’d like to expand upon Jeremiah’s recommendations. Here are three things I think Web Marketers can do to better engage site visitors who make decisions off the corporate website:

Understand the site visitor’s intent

Customers visit a site for many reasons. Some visit to do research factual information, some visit to be persuaded, and some visit to purchase. When a customer visits your site, you can often infer their intent by examining the information you have about the site visitor. You can often learn a lot about a site visitor by looking at the traffic source, time of day, and geographic location of the site visitor. Chances are if the site visitor came to your site directly from a social network, they have a different set of needs than a visitor who came to your site from a search engine query or email campaign. For example, a site visitor coming to Hilton.com directly from TripAdvisor has likely done the necessary research and wants a site experience tailored towards completing a booking. Of course there are some cases where it’s not feasible to infer intent. If you can’t infer the intent of the visitor, you can always explicitly ask the site visitor up front what they’d like to achieve on your site. Once you understand the inferred (or stated) intent of a site visitor, its important to deliver relevant, meaningful content to help the user accomplish their specific goal.

Use microsites and communities

The corporate website can be overwhelming and as we heard from Jeremiah, it’s often full of hyperbole, artificial branding, and pro-corporate content.   Microsites often provide more value to the site visitor as Marketers can tailor the content of a microsite to the needs of specific customer segments to provide a more focused, authentic experience. For example Tesco, the largest retailer in the UK, created a topical microsite for their customers interested in leaning about how to live a more planet-friendly lifestyle. In addition to providing topical content, Tesco added a message board and networking feature to the microsite to allow customers to discuss green living topics and products. Unlike the traditional corporate site, microsites can often become another source of trusted information on par with social networks.

Optimize the site experience

Assuming site visitors come to your corporate website after they’ve made a decision by leveraging their communities like Twitter and Facebook, then the role of the website becomes to quickly move the user through the conversion funnel. This requires a streamlined user experience that provides the right messaging and layout and eliminates unnecessary steps. The best way to deliver a user centric site experience is to use multivariable testing to continuously test landing pages; registration forms; shopping carts; and other page types for the right combination of content, copy, and layout.

The role of the website is inevitably going to change and Web Marketers will need to embrace this change in order to engage customers who use social networking tools to make decisions.