What do corporate audiences want from your website?

The best corporate sites today challenge peoples’ perceptions and actively seek to influence stakeholders. To do so successfully, a thorough understanding of your audiences’ requirements is critical.

Addison Group recently carried out a user-focused review of FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 sites. We interviewed groups of corporate stakeholders to better understand their requirements and then reviewed the sites to see which companies were leading the way.

Investors

Unsurprisingly, our panel look for a logical site layout that allows them to quickly find annual reports and results presentations. Additionally, they value tools that make their lives easier, including the ability to download key dates into calendars and find transcripts of earnings announcements that they can search, instead of having to listen to or watch the whole presentation.

Investors’ needs were the best met out of the four stakeholder groups. However, areas of improvement include:

  • 100% include the latest results and reports, although they aren’t always easy to locate
  • 36% provide a transcript of the latest results presentation
  • 42% include an investment case

Journalists

Our panel said they want to easily get a snapshot of what a company does, including financial highlights, operations and employee figures, as well as the ability to access downloadable images, media team contact details and thought leadership, and sign up to news alerts.

Our analysis revealed that journalists’ needs were the least well met, despite being one of the most time-poor and influential stakeholders. For example:

  • 50% allow users to subscribe to news alerts
  • 32% provide blogs or Q&As which give personal views from management

Potential employees

As potential employees make snap decisions about a company, sites need to quickly convey the culture and opportunities available. Our panel said job vacancies must be easy to find, the recruitment process should be clear and they want the ability to sign up for job alerts.

While 82% of the sites made it easy to find vacancies, areas of improvement include:

  • 38% provide the tools to sign up to job alerts
  • 44% include recruitment process information
  • 40% have benefits information

Sustainability professionals

While this is a diverse audience group with different interests, common requirements included information on sustainability performance data, updates on sustainability activity, policies on key topics and a reports archive. The panel expected to see sustainability content across the entire site to demonstrate that it permeates the whole company story.

Our analysis showed that most companies have a dedicated approach to sustainability communications. Areas of improvement include:

  • 14% provide sustainability contact details
  • 26% clearly feature performance targets on the site, not just in the report

If you would like to learn which websites performed well and why, you can download the full report here.


Addison Group is a communications and creative agency specialising in digital and social, corporate branding, employee engagement, B2B marketing, sustainability communications and corporate reporting. If you have any questions about our research or would like to discuss how we could potentially work together please contact: Rachael Stackhouse ([email protected] or +44 (0)20 7815 2147).

 

 

Rowena Crowley

Rowena Crowley is a senior consultant at Superunion. Since joining Superunion in 2015, Rowena has worked for a number of cross-sector clients advising on digital and social media strategy, corporate branding and content development. She previously managed Westminster City Council’s government website and spent three years at Google working in online marketing and communications.