Is your corporate website fit for the future?

Luminous’ Digital Director, James Croxford, explores the evolving role of corporate websites, from the impact of technological advancements to the power of hyper-personalisation in meeting audience expectations.

Here are the top three things you need to be aware of to make sure your website stays relevant and effective:

1. Developing role of the corporate website in an omni-channel landscape

The relevance of the corporate website in this omni-channel age is a hot debate, but while comms teams’ efforts are now spread across multiple channels, the website’s role remains as important as ever.

The corporate website serves as the central hub in a fragmented digital landscape rife with unreliable content. The Digital 2025 Global Overview Report by Datareportal found that 78% of respondents trust corporate websites for accurate business information. So, despite the proliferation of channels and technological advancements, we know audiences continue to rely on corporate websites for authoritative information, brand storytelling and company insights. 

But audience expectations are constantly changing based on their broader societal and digital experiences, such as media overload resulting in shorter attention spans, the expectation of instant information, and an increased emphasis on highly personalised experiences driven by AI.

For corporate comms teams, this presents a unique challenge.

Unlike B2C websites, the corporate website has a diverse range of audiences with different goals and behaviours:

• Investors – company performance, strategic developments and prospects for growth.
• Customers – products and services, and innovation developments.
• Existing and potential employees – company culture and news, company developments, and job and personal development opportunities.
• The general public – social and environmental impact, and company news.
• Partners and suppliers – collaboration opportunities, joint ventures, and standards.

Trying to accommodate all these audiences can sometimes lead to a bloated site architecture, duplicated, out-of-date content and confusing user experiences.

But all this might be set to change.

Advancements in AI are redefining everyone’s relationship with digital information, whether it’s how you search for it, receiving it through personalised, conversational results or how it’s tracked and marketed.

2. The impact of AI on content generation and discovery

 Are AI search tools and chatbots going to replace the website? No!

While they offer great opportunities to streamline content creation and delivery, many users still prefer to navigate websites for a more comprehensive understanding and context before they start asking specific questions. Websites provide a structured way to present information, which can be crucial for users who need to explore content in a more guided manner. 

But for corporate comms teams, integrating AI-enable tools can have immediate productivity gains. Generative AI tools like Copilot and Gemini can help speed up the content creation process, optimise it for SEO and create supporting channel content for email marketing and social posts.

Going a step further, AI is enabling the development of personalised, dynamic content and experiences that adapt to user preferences and actions in real time. Tools like Elastic allow the integration of AI in website searches, much like you see on Google’s search results page. They can understand natural language queries, predict user intent, and lead to more engaging and useful responses. The user may not even need to click through to the source content, like traditional search results pages.

Google Translate API and DeepL can create nuanced language translations automatically and can be trained to apply the brand tone of voice and use specific industry or regional terminology.

At Luminous, we’re working with clients right now to integrate AI into their website user experiences; enabling users to interrogate entire suites of documents across many years in only seconds. We’ve also recently discussed implementing ETL (extract, transform, learn) solutions to collate live content from across a business into a centralised repository that can enable a myriad of external and internal comms and training applications.

User behaviours and expectations are changing fast, and companies need to think differently about how they harness data in real time, and apply AI and machine learning (ML) to create highly individualised audience experiences across their digital channels.

We are at the beginning of a major evolution in technology, content architecture and website user experience – we’re in the age of hyper-personalisation.

3. Hyper-personalisation and corporate audiences

Unlike traditional personalisation, which generally uses user-defined preferences to organise pre-existing content, hyper-personalisation delves deeper into audience data to deliver tailored content and experiences that resonate on a personal level.

This allows businesses to connect with their audiences in more meaningful ways, leading to significant improvements in comms outcomes. For corporate audiences, this could include the following:

1. Customising the customer journey. AI-powered virtual assistants are well established but are becoming more effective in providing responses, covering a wide range of topics, from answering FAQs to guiding users to relevant products and services. With integrating AI-enabled CRMs, like Salesforce, customer interactions across channels and platforms can be combined to create tailored website content and calls to action.
2. Allowing potential job candidates to submit a CV or LinkedIn profile to provide highly relevant company information, culture insights and guidance for applications, based on their experience and capabilities, driving them towards a customised application process with pre-filled information to increase completion rates. This is an approach already used by LinkedIn and Indeed.
3. Providing investors with more granular insights. Many IR sections follow a similar, regulatory focused structure, but with the increasing influence of retail investors, company websites need to provide more contextual information for IR audiences. AI can analyse extensive content and financial data from many sources and file types. By allowing investors to ask questions directly through the website, they can gain deeper insights into the company’s activities and performance instantly.

To sum it up

Despite the proliferation of digital channels, technology advancements and evolving user behaviour, the corporate website remains a pivotal asset in a company’s digital strategy. It continues to serve as the central hub and trusted source of truth in an increasingly fragmented digital landscape.

Corporate websites have been a cornerstone of digital strategy for years, and it’s crucial that comms teams consider integrating AI into their digital strategy to help deliver more dynamic, responsive and tailored individual experiences, marking a significant shift from the traditional, linear website format.

Corporate websites aren’t going anywhere, but they are set to undergo their most significant evolution yet. If you want to maximise the impact of your corporate website and future-proof it, please get in touch.