Do you have a career section on your website? Have you put a little blurb about benefits and workplace environments? Great. Do you have an Investors section on your website as well? Some news releases, latest financial reports? Great. How many prospective employees do you think visited the Investors section to see how a potential employer is doing, and how you manage your money? How many investors check out the employment section to see if you’re hiring in what they think are the right areas?

There’s a good chance that both these key audiences are doing just that. If a potential employee has arrived at the Careers section of your website as a result of an ad in an online recruiting site, it is most likely they will then visit the products section followed by any financial sections. Then they’ll hit the blogosphere to see if anyone is talking about your company. Investors will likely spend the majority of their time in the financial sections of your website, followed by products and news coverage. They will then likely visit stock newsgroups and also search blogs.

The point here is that your website goes far beyond just marketing. If a potential employee finds you’ve been losing money for the last couple of quarters, they may not apply. You’ve just lost a valuable recruit. If an investor finds negative blog postings or better competitive information at another site, you can bet it will be posted in a forum somewhere. Very quickly. And your stocks may take a little bump. Down or up.

In terms of Best Practices and Usability of a website, these audiences and they’re behaviour need to be taken into consideration in a re-design or when managing site content and online reputation management. It is another reason that an organization should involve Finance and HR in major decisions around website projects. For product promotions and launches, microsites can be leveraged to tie in integrated campaigns, thus ensuring a primary marketing thrust and mitigating consideration of additional audiences.