The amount of small businesses which are now actively marketing via social media outputs is rapidly on the increase. From Facebook, Twitter to LinkedIn it seems that businesses are optimising every form of social media: but to what success? (more…)
First TV Paid Product Placement
Monday, February 28th, 2011Today marks the first ever paid product placement on UK television according to Marketing Week with Nestle’s Dolce Gusto coffee appearing on ITV’s show This Morning.
Here at Zabisco, everything we do is focused on the end user and, for me, this development in advertising brings up some interesting user experience ‘musings’.
Job Vacancy: Online Marketing Executive
Thursday, February 3rd, 2011This role has now been filled
Zabisco is a digital agency with a difference – we focus our full service capability around a user-centric philosophy and are part of the pioneering movement of next generation agencies. We’re looking for an online marketing executive to join our small and focused team to help us grow and deliver our potential.
Zabisco's Online Marketing Guide (Part 1): Why do you need a website and what are your goals?
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009Before you start any design or marketing it is important to clearly understand why you’re building the site and what you hope to achieve. It may seem obvious but knowing your goals will help focus your ideas and give you the best opportunity to make the new site a success.
Get out your paper and start answering the following questions:
10 questions to ask yourself before setting up a website
- Who is your target audience and what is the demand for your products/services?
- Is there a lot of competition?
- Have you got a design, need inspiration or require the services of a professional graphic designer?
- Are you planning to sell products, promote services or non-profit?
- What is your advertising budget?
- If you are selling products, what ecommerce software package will you use?
- Do you want visitors to email you? Call you? Subscribe to a newsletter?
- Will you advertise other businesses on your website?
- How will you promote your site? (paid for advertising, search engine optimisation, social media)
- Have you set goals?
Setting your primary goal
You will need to ask yourself what is the main purpose of building my website. Here are a few primary goal ideas you may want to set:
- Sell products or subscriptions
- Become an information resource
- Create a community
- Become a leader in your industry
It’s easy to say “The goal of my site is to sell more subscriptions” or “We want to increase sales of our flagship product.” But how will you know when you have achieved your goal? The short answer is you will never know.
Set goals you can measure
Try to come up with some specific, measurable objectives related to your primary goal. For example, “We expect the new web site to increase sales of subscriptions by 30% in the first 6 months”. This is important for at least two reasons:
- It gives you a specific target to aim for. If everyone working on the project keeps this target in mind, it will focus their efforts on the tasks that need to be done to achieve it.
- It gives you something to measure results against. If after 6 months sales have only increased by 10%, what went wrong? Were your objectives realistic? What could you have done differently? Of course if sales increase by 60%, you can give yourself a well-earned pat on the back!
It won’t take a long time to come up with answers to these questions. Doing this preliminary groundwork will help you understand the reasons to why you need a new website. And while this approach doesn’t guarantee success, it will greatly improve your chances of building a web site that works.
