It’s understandable – you might be starting your business, money is tight and you want to make sure you are spending money on things that will develop your business.  And actually that is the most compelling reason to spend money on your website ……

Why do you want a website?

You have started your business and you are going through your check-list of things you will need; business cards ✔, job title ✔, stapler ✔, desk tidy ✔ and of course a website.  Because if you have a website people will be able to find you… and when they find you they will become your customers, won’t they?

If all you want a website for is so people can find you and confirm that you are a business you may as well just get a free listing on Google Places, Yahoo and Bing.  But if you want a website that has a clear objective to generate leads and customers for your business, reflect your brand and be the hub of your marketing activity then read on.

Why you should pay more than £500 for a website?

• A website is an investment, it should last you 3-5 years – so the costs need to be considered in that context.
• Often when you start up in business how you think about and describe your business subtly changes and therefore you need to change your website.  When you bought your website for £500 what was the arrangement to make updates and changes?  Is this where the real costs kick in?
• It’s a myth that just because you have a website people will visit it.  You have to spend money to get people there, whether that is by including the URL on all your printed materials, such as brochures, business cards and print ads; or by investing in search engine optimisation and on-line ads.  Given that the website sits at the heart of all your marketing, it is often the first impression anyone gets of your business it needs to reflect the professionalism and personality of your business.
• And while we are in the area of other marketing activity – you can spend several hundred pounds on a print ad that just appears for a day, a week or a month – depending on the publication you place it in.  So the relative cost of a website that is available 365/24/7 becomes very affordable.
• It’s a big risk – you can buy a low cost, out-of-the-box website but it might not work.  And you have a white elephant on your hands.  So you have to spend more money having another website built.

So what goes into creating a good website – that is worth more than £500?

• An agency spending time with you and understanding what the key objectives are for your business and how your website will support that;
• Understanding the personality and culture you want for your business and how that can be reflected in the website.
• Who your target customers are and what needs your products and services fulfil so the website content and messages appeal to them.
• An agency with experience and professionalism that understands the wider picture of digital marketing to drive traffic to your website and help them convert into customers.
• The creation of great content – whether that is well written copy that appeals equally to site visitors as well as search engines, good images, graphics and videos.
• A good design, that is easy to navigate and has all the right information in all the right places so that your potential customers can easily find it.
• And then there is all of the technical stuff, like building the site, testing it, hosting it and making sure it is configured to work easily with search engines.
• But you also want your website partner to be there for the long term, who will help you with updates and changes, and develop your site as your business grows; not just someone that is going to take your money and run.

So if you want an agency with all the right experience, contact us at example and we will work with you to develop a website that is right for your business.

13 Reasons to use Video

• 64% of people are more likely to purchase after watching a product video [Comscore]
• When the word ‘video’ is used in an email subject line, open rates are 7% to 13% higher [Experian 2012]
• Video used in email marketing has been shown to increase conversion rates by 96% [Implix]
• 4 in 10 shoppers visited a store online or in person as a direct result of watching a video [ReelSEO August 2012]
• Blog posts incorporating video attract 3 times as many inbound links as blog posts without [SEOmoz]
• Mobile and tablet shoppers are 3 times more likely to view a video as those using a laptop or desktop [Invodo]
• Video results appear in about 70% of the top 100 listings on Google [Marketing Week 2011]
• People prefer watching to reading – it saves them time, and you can grab their attention with engaging content
• Instructional and how-to videos encourage visitor to stay on a site twice as long and visit twice as many pages as those who don’t see them
• Video boost SEO – after all Google owns YouTube. You can add key words and tags to videos on YouTube and if you also use closed captioning the content of your video is available in words which helps the search engines
• 52% of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in their on-line purchase decisions [Internet Retailer 2012]
• 49% of smartphone users watched as least one product video during a 3 month period
• Once you’ve created a video it can have multiple uses across your marketing and promotional mix – not just on your website

Tips for creating videos

Hire a professional local company to shoot your product videos – take a look at their show reels so that you can see the quality and range of their work. While you can create your own videos Comscore have demonstrated that professionally produced video outperform user-generated video by 30%.

Show products from several angles… Try and involve your brand or product evangelists – whether that is your best sales person or a satisfied customer.

Planning and preparation is key, have a clear brief. This will save time and therefore money and ensure you get what you need.

At example have over 30 years combined film production and animation experience. Please contact us to see how we can meet your video production needs.

Augment – to make something greater, better, more valuable than it already is.

So does augmented reality deliver on that promise?

Augmented reality experiences and content have been available from 2008. So the technology is still in its infancy. There have been some great demonstrations of augmented reality – the work by Holition for luxury watch and jewelry brands and the work by Appshaker for National Geographic and Planet Earth for example.  But there have also been some frightful examples – just because you can doesn’t mean you should!

Because augmented reality is still a novelty it has so far got away with being an experience in and of itself – the payoff.  But going forward, in order to avoid being dismissed as a gimmick it needs to demonstrate value – value to the user, not just to the agency or brand promoting it.  And it needs to be worth the effort and time of taking out your phone, opening the app, waiting for the content to load and then waiting for the camera to recognize the tracker (or else find another way to demonstrate it).

So what is it good for… ?

• Print, marketing and promotional experiences that enable you to take the next step directly from the augmented reality – buy, data capture, link to web or social media.  Never a cul-de-sac, but a conversion tool.
• If you were going to make a 3D model whether – physical or digital – why not also make it in augmented reality instead.  It is highly portable.  It is highly differentiating, especially if you are pitching concepts against competitors using more conventional means, and it allows you to demonstrate much greater context.
• To convey experiences and information that the printed page alone cannot convey – the sights and sounds of a Caribbean beach, the exhilaration of a car driven well and at speed.
• Deeper and richer experiences people will want to treasure.  Simple as they are the Moonpig cards are a great example.
• Bringing books to life for children.  Whether that it is seeing characters emerge out of the page or demonstrating a complexity scientific structure in 3D.
• Deeply engaging, large impact augmented reality experiences that enable you to directly interact with the content and can create buzz, social conversation and PR.
• Enabling new creative ideas and expressions using augmented reality’s ability to layer content in multiple dimensions.
• Overlaying historical context – sights and sounds – on a modern day scene.
• Presenting detailed specification and usage information on a product that can never be detached and lost like a printed page of instructions can.

The key element of all these examples is that augmented reality provides value only as part of a wider experience.  Augmented reality isn’t the objective.  The objective is achieved through using augmented reality.  It’s an enabler and enhancer.  Hence, back to the original definition – to augment is to make something better, more valuable than it already is.

Marketing is about identifying a problem or need someone might have and offering a solution to it. So your website is probably targeted at people who know they have a problem and are looking to see whether your products and services can solve it for them.

But what if they don’t know that you might be able to solve their problem?
And what if they don’t even know they have a problem that needs solving.
Where do they go? What do they do? What do they search for on Google?

Ben Hunt structured these questions into an Awareness Ladder in his book “Convert! Designing Web Sites to Increase Traffic and Conversion”. To summarise the market is made up of people at different awareness levels for your products and services.

These are the steps in the ladder:

• Step 0: People not aware of the need
• Step 1: People aware of a need but not aware that any solutions exist
• Step 2: Aware of some solutions, but not your specific one.
• Step 3: Aware of your specific solution but not aware of the benefits
• Step 4: Aware of the benefits but not yet convinced to commit
• Step 5: Convinced and ready to buy.

Typically people that reach your website are at Step 3 – they are aware of your specific solution – either because they already know you, and have directly typed in your url, or they have found you via a Google search or by clicking on a PPC ad or web banner. The job of your website is to reassure them that they have arrived in the right place and take them through the steps so that they are ready to buy. This requires that the home page quickly signals the next step and encourages them to take it through very clear and focused calls to action.

Other pages on the site should move them through Step 4 – product and services pages describing features and benefits, FAQ pages, warranties and customer service guarantees helping them overcome fears and doubts they may have. And testimonials and professional accreditations reinforcing credibility. So they finally are convinced to take Step 5 and convert – whether that is to buy from the site, sign up for further communications, call your or walk into your office or shop.

If your site has been designed and developed with these steps in mind then it should be performing all those roles effectively. So how do you get to people in Steps 0, 1 and 2?

Well unfortunately the harder task is finding people at Step 0 that aren’t aware of a need. These are typical of highly innovative products or services, and require very specific marketing techniques – so we will put them to one side just for now.

But to attract people at Steps 1 and 2 you create web pages that are relevant to the types of searches they are making.

So at Awareness Level 1 people tend use search terms beginning “How do I …” and “How to ….”.

And at Awareness Level 2 when people are aware that solutions exist but are not really sure which is the right one for them they tend to search for “Best ….”
“Top 5 ….”

So the trick is to create pages that have content and key words specifically focused on these types of phrases. These can be landing pages – single pages specifically focused on providing insight, guidance and authority with one clear call to action – to take that person to the next step on the ladder. And it probably hasn’t escaped your noticed that this blog article is also titled “How to …”. These pages might be pages on your website but they could equally sit above your website with a unique and specific url with the specific intention of directing people to your website.

So if you want to develop web pages with content and conversion techniques specifically focused on getting to your target market at Steps 1 and 2 talk to the team at example

Spending money on digital marketing to direct people to the site only to fail to convert them is a waste. At the same time good conversion rates from a limited pool of visitors is missing the opportunity. So successful websites attract the right number of the right people to their site and then convert them efficiently.

With average conversion rates in the UK hovering around 2% increasing the conversion ratio to just 3% would increase revenues on an ecommerce site by 50% – and how many businesses would say no to that?

So what are the steps to achieving the right balance of traffic and conversion?

1. The starting point is to have clear objectives for the website – and they should align with your business objectives – to generate sales or leads
2. Getting good analytics and reporting on the website is then essential – so that you know exactly where people are coming from and what they are doing on the site. Google Analytics is a very competent free to use tool so there is no excuse for not using it. And the old adage applies to website as anything else – you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
3. The analytics should provide insights into appropriate digital marketing focus and strategies – but that in itself is a whole subject in it self, and will be covered in a separate blog article. But suffice it to say you should employ a number of different approaches to attracting consumers – some of them techniques and some paid marketing.
4. Another consideration is working out what stage of awareness the majority of your target market is. Most websites cater for people who know about your product or service but may not necessarily know the particular benefits of your offering. The role of your website is to convince them. These visitors are likely to be a fraction of your potential market. What about all the people who do not know about you? Who have a problem and don’t know that you could solve it… what do they search for on Google or Yahoo? They are likely to use search phrases such as “How do I ….” or “How to ….”. These people are unlikely to find their way to your site unless you provide specific content and pages relevant to them.
5. Conversion optimisation techniques employ the best techniques of marketing communications and retail practices to websites. Visitors won’t buy things from you or give you contact information if they don’t trust you. And on a website the time for someone to decide whether they trust you is remarkably short – 50% of website visitors leave a website in less than 5 seconds if they sense they are in the right place. So there are various techniques and pieces of content necessary to build trust, including:
   • Continuity – a relevance and connection to any digital marketing ads that got them to your site in the first place – so that they quickly know they have arrived in the right place.
   • A clear statement – your value proposition – clearly shown on your website which states what your company does and what distinguishes it
   • Social proof and reputation – case studies, testimonials and professional organisations
   • Design aspects – including a professional appealing visual impression, simple to use navigation and easy to understand labels
   • Reassurance – though easily noticed ‘contact us’, customer service details, warranties and privacy policies
6. Each page of a website should be treated as an advert for the next step you wish a visitor to take – the message and the action you wish them to take must be very clear.

If your website doesn’t follow these basic principles there is no need to despair and rush to change your whole website. Achieving conversion optimisation on a website is an iterative process. Putting an action plan with a programme of improvement in place to achieve improvement is key.