Corporate website: what are the criteria for a successful website?
It’s indisputable: nurturing your company’s image is a must. It isn’t always easy, but it is an essential step. Establishing your online presence through a corporate website is an excellent initiative. It gives you the opportunity to showcase your brand image, values, projects, and teams.
What is a corporate website?
A corporate website is a type of showcase site. A showcase site is used to officially represent a brand on the internet and often serves as a landing page for advertising content.
Ideally, the site is optimized to be a real communication tool with customers and other visitors.
The latter should be able to find the information they are looking for regarding products or services, as well as high-quality content about news or special offers.
What is the difference between a showcase site and a corporate site?
A distinction must be made between a product or service showcase site and a corporate showcase site; these two types of sites have different objectives.
Take a look at Nutella, for example. You’ve certainly heard of the brand and perhaps even tasted one of its products. Here is what Nutella’s website looks like:
Is it a showcase site? Clearly. Nutella is a billion-dollar brand with a high-quality designed site. This clearly serves a commercial purpose.
However, is it a corporate site? No. The corporate site for Nutella, as well as Kinder, Ferrero Rocher, and Raffaello, is that of Ferrero.
Ferrero is the parent company of a whole series of brands, and you can easily see that its corporate site has a completely different objective.
Ultimately, a product or service showcase site promotes a single product. A corporate site, on the other hand, is a type of showcase site dedicated to the brand itself.
Its main goal is to highlight the company’s values, although product promotion is not entirely excluded.
What is the point of a corporate site?
As understood, product showcase sites focus on a particular product, and their primary goal is to increase sales.
But when a company associates its name with more than one brand, product, service, or activity, it must differentiate its business areas and focus on attracting investors and reporting to shareholders.
A single promotional website cannot handle this alone. This is where a corporate site comes in. It must:
- Reflect scalability: it must be clear at first glance that your business is significant and thriving.
- Build a reputation: your site should reflect high ethical standards and present an impeccable image of your company.
- Inspire trust: your site must be able to show why it is good to work for or with you.
- Communicate and inform about your subsidiaries: it’s not about putting them in the spotlight, but mentioning them. Generally, each branch has its own site.
Who is a corporate site for?
As previously mentioned, a corporate site focuses on the company itself, not on products or services.
This is why you rarely find advertising content, customer reviews, or online points of sale there.
Contrary to what one might think, corporate sites are not intended for consumers. So, who are they for?
- Shareholders, investors, and partners: these individuals aren’t primarily interested in your products or brands. They want their share of your financial results. Publishing annual reports and indices on your site provides this information.
- Media and the press: you must closely monitor your publicity and potential media coverage. The media publishes news, and they will inevitably publish news about your company. If you don’t provide them with the material, they will look elsewhere. It’s better to take the lead.
- Your teams: employees feel a need to belong. A page dedicated to your collaborators on your corporate site shows that you value their efforts and contribution to the common goal.
- Potential employees: if your company offers internships and career opportunities for young talents, there is no better place to manage these opportunities than your corporate site.
- Public authorities: successful companies often attract the attention of public powers. Therefore, a business site should contain the information these authorities might look for.
- Your competitors: your site should leave no doubt about the scale and ambition of your company. Your rivals should understand this at first glance. If your site surpasses theirs, it becomes a competitive lever.
Criteria for a successful corporate site
Now that you know the likely visitors to your corporate site, you need to know how to offer them an attractive experience.
To determine the main components of a corporate site, we must put ourselves in our audience’s shoes and understand what they expect.
Your brands and activities
This is certainly the most important criterion of a corporate site. Presenting the company as the owner of multiple brands is very common and is usually the first information presented.
You will present the subsidiaries, keeping the promotional aspect limited. Here, the primary audience consists of all the previously mentioned targets, and this section is a high priority.
Your branches and site locations
With this part of the site, you are primarily targeting the press, authorities, and potential corporate clients.
Today, it is not enough to just provide the exact address of your premises. It must be easy for everyone to get there and contact your nearest offices in just a few clicks.
Public relations and investor relations
Now, your target is investors and shareholders.
If you are listed on the stock exchange or if your company is a joint-stock company, investors in your activities must be able to access your results.
Your corporate site must provide this access easily and quickly. Accessibility and the organization of financial performance reports will be the main criteria for this section.
Your teams and employees
Revealing the faces of the people behind your company’s story, strategies, and decisions helps humanize the business. It counters the image of large corporations as endless, faceless production chains.
In addition to meeting your employees’ need to feel they belong to a family, you provide a more human image to the general public.
Finally, presenting your workforce on your company site can also help open new business avenues.
Careers and internships
While the team page highlights skills and professionalism, the careers section is intended to attract new talent to join your future teams.
Your sourcing strategy should be fully deployed in this section to encourage the people you need to get in touch with you.
Trademark rights and intellectual property
The list of trademark rights and intellectual property of your company or its subsidiaries is another interesting section for your corporate site.
Commonly, a corporate site acts as a legitimate medium to inform interested parties and the public about your intellectual property rights.
Missions and corporate social responsibility
Large companies care about the impact of their activities on public opinion. This also emphasizes that these activities comply with current laws and regulations.
By doing so, the company publicly associates itself with business ethics and social contributions, rather than just revenue and profits.
Examples of successful corporate sites
Now that we have determined the criteria for a complete corporate website, we can share a few successful examples.
In the following, different fields of activity are represented. While we cannot claim to know their true internal objectives, their international dimension, long history, and commercial performance are indisputable.
Meta
A web giant, Meta is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, among others.
BMW Group
A German automotive group, BMW Group owns the BMW brand, as well as Mini and Rolls-Royce…
Crédit Agricole
Crédit Agricole, holding multiple subsidiaries such as LCL and BforBank, is the largest network of mutual and cooperative banks in the world.
Nestlé
The Swiss multinational is one of the largest food industrial groups in the world. You surely know Nestlé, Crunch, Nescafé, or Nespresso, some of the group’s many subsidiaries.
TotalEnergies
A global energy production and supply company, TotalEnergies, formerly Total, has hundreds of subsidiaries in over 130 countries.
Creation or redesign of your corporate site
The teams at Aventique, a mobile and web agency, put all their expertise at the service of your business.
Whatever your field of activity and whatever your project, our teams will support you until the very end.
Benefit from personalized follow-up, carried out by experienced professionals who listen to your needs. We are accustomed to complex, visually attractive sites with multiple targets.
So, for the creation of your site or the redesign of an existing one, don’t hesitate to leave us a message ⬇️
