Trust the agency’s expertise, but share all of yours

It seems terribly self-serving to start with this point, but it’s true. The reason a client comes to an agency should not be solely about knowledge in implementation, but about our expertise in delivering a sound strategy too. We can’t stress this point enough. No matter whether you were a digital marketing expert 6 months ago or whether you’ve never run a digital campaign in your life – trust the experts with the strategy, but have blind faith in their tactics.
The online marketing scenario changes daily, and a good digital marketing agency reads up about the industry obsessively. If you want to be ahead of the curve, then trust their knowledge, but make sure you brief them well. We might know a hell of a lot about online marketing, but you need to teach us all there is to know about your industry, your audience and your objectives.

Always “start with why”

Simon Sinek coined the term globally, but we’ve been saying it (in a slightly different context) before we heard of him (yeah, we’re hipsters that way). Hubspot have a great article about applying “Start with why” to marketing but we also like to apply starting with why to our briefing process.
So ask yourself (and tell us): Why do I want to run this campaign? What is it that is driving you to come to an agency to run a digital campaign? This is different to defining the campaign goals – we’re not after whether you want more leads or more impressions, we’re after the reason that drove you to start working on a brief and put money behind the campaign, specifically online.
Also ask yourself why you’re going to an agency, and what you hope to achieve by working with one.

Define goals

Once you’ve understood why you’re going to start an online project, be it a campaign or a solution, then it’s time to start defining your goals. Painting a clear picture of what you hope to achieve from the exercise will help the agency understand better what you will be judging their performance on.
Goals can vary greatly based on the type of job you’ll be giving your agency, but make sure you take the time to sit down and discuss whether your targets are realistic and whether they make business sense at the end of the day. It might be very fancy to say I want to reach 1,000 Facebook likes by the end of the month – but if you’re marketing a product that is bought by enterprise-level CEOs, then that might not be the right goal to be aiming for at this point in time.

Define audience

Which brings us to the audience. As I stated earlier, we know our stuff, but you know your stuff better. So tell us who your ideal target audience is, and we’ll go after them like a heat-seeking missile.
Be very clear when communicating this though, and let us know whether this audience is the one that will naturally be attracted to your product or service, or whether it is a new market that you would like to tap into. Both goals can be achieved, but they need very different approaches.

Be clear about budgets

“Online marketing is free, though, right?” Erm. No. “But I know how to boost posts on Facebook, so I can handle it myself, right?” Erm. No. We usually point our customers in the direction of my micro introduction to online advertising (and part 2) at this Online marketing, when managed correctly, offers a phenomenal return on investment, but it’s far from free.
So next time you’re looking for a digital marketing provider, set a budget for your campaigns. If you’re lost, get in touch with one and you can get a list of suggestions. Don’t make one mistake, however. Don’t come to an agency like ours and define the amount of “airtime” spend vs agency fees (we’ve had this happen to us, really). Any self-respecting agency will show you the door. If you’re used to spending 10% of your “airtime” on production fees for something like TV or print, then think again.
A TV ad is filmed once and shown repeatedly, so whether you show it once or a 100 times, there is only one contract to be negotiated and signed. You’re done in a few hours and you see the commission rolling in every time the ad is shown.
Digital ad campaigns are very different. They take constant monitoring and tweaking and need to be reported on regularly. And that’s just advertising. If you want to see your ROI shoot up you should be working on an inbound marketing strategy – ratios there would usually be closer to 80:20 (fees:ad spend), but your return on investment will usually go up by about 60%. Remember, it’s not who you spend your money with that counts, it’s what you get out of it.

Tell us what you love

Okay, so I already said you should not dictate strategy, but hey, this does not mean I don’t want to hear your side of the story. Digital marketing is human after all, and we need to communicate your story in a way that reflects your (and your brand’s) personality.
If you’re after a development project, then it is far more important for you to tell us what other sites you like using and what the market leaders in your field are doing. If you can, also tell us why you love what you love – tell us why you think a particular site is working.

Tell us what you hate

This is just as important. We don’t want to offend anyone with our efforts, and we sure as hell don’t want to have an irate customer on our hands because we designed a site in a way that does not work for them.
Just as crucially, you should be in a perfect position to tell us what your customers hate. So tell us, and tell us at this not after we’ve spent three weeks coming up with a creative concept. Remember, at this stage marketing transcends political correctness. So if you have an audience that would go better with a particular minority or would have a great problem with another one, let us know now and we’ll keep it in mind.

Tell us what to keep in mind

Sometimes clients also have wild-cards. They have agreements with personalities, they have brands they can’t compete with or others they have to compete with, suppliers they have to use (or avoid) etc. Let us know about these as early as possible.
This can change the way a campaign or project goes drastically, so it is imperative that we know before we work on it. So if your e-commerce site needs to plug into your cash register – give us the brand at brief stage so we can look into the technology that will join them together now, not a week before we launch the site.

Finally

Remember: “If you fail to communicate, you’re communicating failure”, goes the oft-quoted mantra. Which is why there is no surer road to creative failure than a miscommunicated and subsequently misunderstood job.
Take your time to come up with the best brief possible and you will be sure to reap the rewards at the end of the campaign. You’ll also have a happier agency – and hey, we’re human too 🙂

The post Your Guide to Writing a Digital Brief – The Intro Series appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

• I could build a landing page with the advantages of buying fruit and veg in bulk from my store for chefs – indicating how my prices are competitive for business to business sales.
• My next landing page would target people who are after a healthier lifestyle. I could extoll the virtues of eating fresh produce. This page will also highlight the fact that I’m sourcing greens from local farmers.
• My final landing page would be aimed at party-goers who are looking for the only source of fresh lime in the area. This would be a page giving various Mojito recipes and promising a free sprig of fresh mint with every lime bought, only as long as you mentioned that you were buying the lime for mojitos.

So now that we’ve understood why we need landing pages, we need to try understanding what helps make ones that work better.

Set your marketing goal

Before you can even start planning what you want your landing page to look and feel like, you need to have a marketing goal set in your mind. It is imperative that you stick to one particular aim and resist the temptation to try solving more than one issue at once.
Remember, the whole point of going down the landing page route is to gain an advantage over the rest of your site by being specific, so don’t try to cram more than one goal. You can’t build a landing page that will gather data, sell, go viral and clean your dog’s droppings.

Choose an action

Once you have a marketing goal in mind, you need to translate it into an action that visitors can take once they arrive on your landing page. Copyblogger quotes Seth Godin’s five courses of action that can be offered to people who arrive at your marketing materials online:

1. Get a visitor to click to go to another page
2. Get a visitor to buy
3. Get a visitor to give permission for you to follow up by email, phone, etc.
4. Get a visitor to tell a friend
5. Get a visitor to comment or give you some sort of feedback

Identify the benefits for your visitors

Most traditional marketing focuses on features. It is quite understandable – the go-to source of knowledge usually lies within product development, so it’s natural for them to flaunt their feature-set.
Buyers, however, only really delve into features when they’re in a far more advanced stage of the purchase life-cycle – essentially when they’re choosing between a small set of products they’ve identified as potential choices.
Before then, all they’re really interested in is how the product or service is going to make their life better, ideally in a tangible way. Sometimes your list of benefits needs to sell the need of the product itself – so our friendly green grocer might want to show the advantages of living a healthy lifestyle in order to drive more traffic into his store.
If, on the other hand, the fruit and veg man was operating in an area where people are generally health conscious, then he’s probably competing with quite a few other similar businesses, so the benefits he has to highlight are specific to his place and the produce he’s selling.

Stick to the message

The big difference between a landing page and a regular website is that you are allowed to be far more specific on landing pages. If you have a hundred products or services, this is not the place to be shouting about them.
People came to this landing page for one specific reason. If you’re doing your job well enough, people came to this landing page from one specific source. So make sure that all you do is make it clear that you’re there to help them solve that specific need. Landing pages are not the place for cross-sell (unless cross-selling is your only aim for the landing page).
If we built a landing page for party-goers, convincing them that we’re the best source for lime and mint to base their Mojitos on, then there is absolutely no value in extolling the virtues of living a healthier lifestyle or losing weight. They’re not here for that, so don’t distract them from their main aim. Make the best of the few seconds you manage to get their attention for and get them to order their mint and lime.

Write clear and concise copy

People are busy. People are very easily distracted.
Keep your paragraphs short and your sentences even shorter. If you can get away with one sentence instead of two, do so. If you can get away without any body copy at all, then by all means go for it.
This will obviously depend on what you’re selling. Some products or services demand longer explanations and punters will demand reassurance, but always go through your copy and ensure that you’ve removed all the extra fluff.
Before you start, read The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White (first edition available for free here and the second here (PDF)) – you’ll get a lot out of it, but it is worth the read if only for this paragraph:

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

Reassure people that they’re making the right decision

Visitors to your landing page need to be reassured that they are in a place they can trust. And what better way to confirm this than by adding real-world testimonials, either from peers or from professionals.
If you can pull some words from a well-known and instantly recognisable review site, then definitely do so. We did this with the landing page for Corinthia Hotels recently, taking reviews from TripAdvisor and showing their (Excellent) rating amongst one of the first things on the page. This has a much higher impact on visitors than simply stating great things about your product yourself.
If you can use social proof, then do so too. There are many ways of inserting live information in your landing pages, maybe simply by showing how many people are actually on the page, how many people have used the service recently or just the number of followers you have on Facebook or Twitter. A Facebook Page Like box is great because it even shows which of your friends have already liked the page (and therefore your brand by extension).

Make it easy for people to take the right action

So now you have your goals set up and all your content written perfectly. People who get to your landing page are more likely to believe in your product or service because you’ve given them good reason to.
So what do they do next?
Their next step should be immediately clear. It should be very easy for them to take it, it must feel natural, and it should leave no doubt in their mind as to how the action should be taken.
You should have chosen your goal in the beginning, now’s the time to achieve it. If you want email subscriptions, then don’t put buttons all over the page asking people to buy your products (just in case they want to buy after all). You’ll confuse visitors and waste money on the traffic you generated to the landing page.
Keep any forms you place on the page short and to the point. Only gather the information you absolutely need from your clients – this is not the time to profile your visitors, this is the time to open a line of communication.
Test the page on people who have no idea what’s going on, see if they find it as obvious as you do what their next action is. Try asking people you know who are close to your target demographic – no use asking your tech-savvy colleagues to test a page if you’re aiming it at retirees.

Test, Measure, Tweak, Repeat

So now you have a landing page that’s done – time to go out and celebrate? Nope, I’m afraid not. This is when your hard work starts. Now you have to create multiple variants of your landing pages and start using them to slowly but steadily improve your numbers.
We’re back to our starting point – tweaking content. This, however, is where we change our content subtly depending on the source of our traffic. It has been proven that conversion rates improve if you use the same verbiage as people’s searches. Using the right keywords in landing pages also improves your relevance, and therefore gives you more brownie points with paid search traffic.
So test variations, measure their impact, teak your tests and repeat the process until you’re running a well oiled conversion machine. Good luck!
The screenshots below shows two examples of landing pages we did for APS Bank and Corinthia Hotel London.

 
Other examples:


Do you think that your business could benefit from better landing pages? Why not drop us a line at espresso@switch.com.mt to see how we can help you increase your online presence and ROI?

The post Creating the ideal landing page appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Does this mean there’s no room for creativity and skill? On the contrary, driving online sales and leads is pretty far from marketing by numbers.

Each campaign needs new creative, new copy, new design and new coding. Every time you wish to test, you need to come up with two (or more) variants of one of the elements and test it accordingly, and you’d have to go through thousands of iterations before you arrived where you need to.

The different iterations are usually slight tweaks to a great and well-thought out campaign: change the colour of a button here, add a word there or remove a field in this form here. Then test, measure, change and move on to the next element.

Any decent online marketer should be obsessed with one thing: conversions. How many people out there can we convert into relationships? How many relationships can we convert into leads? How many leads are we converting into sales?

So what goes into the perfect online campaign? What are the elements top web designers look out for when building a campaign that will convert?

Stunning visuals

First impressions count wherever you are, but online they make or break campaigns. It is so easy to dismiss a mailer that you don’t like that unless the design is immediately captivating, there is a very high chance that it will be closed away and forgotten in seconds.

With online designs, you can’t rely on the physical aspect of your design – there is no expensive paper to woo prospects, no fancy cutter to intrigue them, it all boils down to the quality of the artwork you (or your agency) can come up with.

Clear message

Beautiful design is nothing without strong copy. You can’t afford to have copy that is not aimed at converting with such a short attention span at your disposal. The only way to convert is to have a message that is clear, concise and to the point.

Show your product or service’s benefits. Make it seem like an obvious choice for punters. Do not lose them in long and winding descriptions and long words. This is not a literary competition – if you like long and complicated words, keep them for when you play scrabble with your friends.

Fewer calls to action

Even if you nail the copy, things can still go awry. Keep it simple, do not try to sell all your products and services at once. It is good to show people that you have variety, but you have to make their next step a no-brainer, and in order to achieve this you should minimise the number of calls to action you have in any online campaign.

This should be a direct consequence of your campaign planning process, during which you should have decided what it is you want your online effort to achieve. If you set out to increase the sales of tablets, don’t confuse your customers by telling them that you also sell computers, laptops, keyboards, mice, printers, consumables, oh – and we also sell mice mats.

Ease of use

You have a perfect campaign, people like it as soon as they land on the page or open the email. They read the copy and seem interested in your product. They click through the strong call to action to buy your product but then boom, they are faced with a form that has 30 fields in it.

You’re asking them to give you their ID card number. You want to know what their grandmother earned in 1936. Once you’ve convinced people to take action you have to make it as easy as possible, so keep forms and steps needed to an absolute minimum. You can always gather more data after you’ve converted the client.

At the end of the day, the perfect online marketing campaign boils down to one thing – how compelling you make it for people out there to take the action you want them to. Put yourself in their shoes and see what they’d want, not what you’d like to flaunt. Online marketing campaigns can be scary at first, but get in there, aim at converting well and you will see your return on investment soar.

The post Designing the ultimate online marketing campaign appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.