Digital Marketing – Our Approach

Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents P**s Poor Performance!

…. so says the army, and their outcomes are a lot more risky than yours or mine!

If you don’t plan your Website and Digital Marketing properly it will likely disappoint you with the returns it produces. Your site is probably one of your key sales drivers, so it makes sense to invest enough time deciding what you want it to do for you, planning how to get to that point and working out how to measure if you are succeeding.

In addition to providing you with a website that produces a tangible return, the time spent in the planning phase will likely decrease the time required to implement the project, so this can also provide you with a cost benefit.

We like to involve you in the planning stage as much as possible so neither of us get any nasty surprises further down the road – we recently had a client for instance who was adamant that they did not require a product page for their e-commerce website. We therefore started the build with this in mind. We then discovered that they actually wanted to have various options available for various products … this meant that they had to have a product page … in this case, it didn’t add significantly to the build time but this a good little example of how proper planning and discovery of your requirements can lead to a smoother build process …

Implementation

Once all the planning has been sorted out, we will both know the direction the project will follow. Target markets will have been defined, the content said markets require will have been listed and organised and navigation structures and page layouts will have been decided.

The project then moves into implementation – creatives are designed and agreed, systems are built and integrated with the designs and the site is optimised for the search engines. All of these stages will move forward according to an agreed timetable – it is important that this timetable is realistic! If you are responsible for generating the content for the site this needs to be planned for – having spent way more days than I envisaged writing the content for this site, I can assure you that it is not a quick and easy process – it is however vital, so needs to be done properly!

Testing

Once the site is built it will go through a testing phase. This will include internal testing by programmers not involved with the build, possibly the use of user groups depending on the size of the project and also testing by you – does it work as you envisaged etc.

Post Production

Your website should be viewed as a continual work in progress!

• The search optimisation needs to monitored and tweaked on an ongoing basis in response to your competitor’s activities.
• Your content needs to evolve and expand.
• Your online profile in the social networking space needs to be built and enhanced on an ongoing basis.
• Your retention activities such as email marketing need to be regular and worthwhile.
• Your site analytics need to be analysed and conclusions drawn

… and so it goes on!

We like to be viewed as your online partners and feel that part of our job is to suggest enhancements and improvements on an ongoing basis … by definition you will be concentrating on your business and on your areas of expertise – we concentrate on staying up to date with online developments and suggesting how they can be of benefit to you.

We try to be as proactive as possible, or we can of course take more of a back seat – how the relationship progresses will of course be defined by you, but if the site stays static post launch it will never fulfill it’s potential!

If you like the idea of following a structured approach, please call us on 01743 244204 and let’s see how we can help you!