Can I set website goals if our brand messaging isn’t finalized yet?

Absolutely. While having finalized brand messaging makes the process smoother, you can still set meaningful website goals before your messaging is complete. In fact, establishing clear goals early can actually help inform and shape your brand messaging development.

Your website goals should focus on measurable business outcomes, like increasing qualified leads, improving conversion rates, or boosting brand awareness within your target demographic. These performance-based objectives can be defined independently of your exact messaging, as they’re tied to what you want your website to accomplish rather than how you’ll communicate it.

Goals Guide Your Messaging Strategy

Setting goals first can actually provide valuable direction for your brand messaging work. When you understand what you need your website to achieve, whether that’s generating 20 new sales leads per month or increasing engagement by maintaining three pages per visitor session, you gain clarity about what messages will resonate most with your audience.

Through a robust discovery process, you can identify critical business context, user personas, and content strategy needs. This groundwork helps establish where your website fits into your overall business strategy and what role it should play in your sales funnel, insights that will prove invaluable when you do develop your messaging.

The Ideal Sequence

That said, if you have the opportunity to finalize your brand messaging before diving into website design and development, you’ll set yourself up for even greater success. A clear brand messaging framework ensures consistency across all touchpoints and helps teams communicate more effectively throughout the project. When your core messages, value propositions, and tone are already defined, your content strategy aligns more seamlessly with your goals.

At Clear Digital, we often work with clients through our Velocity Workshop™ to align stakeholders on goals, identify gaps in brand positioning, and determine whether brand messaging work should happen before or alongside website development. This collaborative approach helps you make the smartest decisions for your timeline and budget while ensuring nothing critical gets overlooked.