Digital
Technologies For Marketing (Week 4)
Implementing successful site design aims to demonstrate
the following objectives;
- A good understanding of the wide range of technologies available in the 21st century
- A detailed understanding of the elements that contribute to successful website design (including usability, graphic design, copywriting, analytics, data management, content management systems, cookies, RSS and personalisation.
- Develop an understanding of how to design and develop marketing programmes and campaigns using digital marketing technology. Specific marketing programmes/needs include demand for the creation, customer conversion, achieve customer retention and development and analyse ROI.
- Develop the online learning skills to develop and grow and personal knowledge base for the digital marketing sector.
The 5 S’s
Chaffey and Smith (2001) suggest that these objectives
can be achieved by implementing the emarketing theory of :
The 5 S’s – Sell,
Serve, Speak, Save & Sizzle.
- Sell refers to providing ways to buy products and services and generating leads.
- Serve refers to quick and easy access to up to date data and anything that adds value for customers.
- Speak refers to personalised content and social media engagement to enhance brand relations with customers via two-way communication.
- Save refers to access to online applications and internet services and how saving on costs can help both parties (the business and the consumer)
- Sizzle refers to sites seeking to differentiate themselves, building the brand and delivering quality customer service/experience.
Key Design Objectives
- Companies can encourage repeat website visitors by providing high quality content and context, ease of use (easy navigation, the “three click rule”), quick download process and frequent updates.
- Integrated design (blending online and offline activity) can also be implemented for maximum impact and results. For example, video content, graphics, external social media links etc.
AIDA
- Attention; To ensure customers visit the website and content attracts the user’s eye.
- Interest; Give users detailed information about product content, explain the advantages and why the consumer should buy from the website.
- Desire; Show that the business can solve the customers problem and meets their demands/wants/needs. This can be done by implementing incentives (such as discounts and special offers that cannot be obtained anywhere else) to encourage customers to purchase.
- Action; Get the customer to take action (regularly come back to visit the website, register as a website user and eventually buy the company’s products.
Online Value
Proposition
- A clear and strong reason why visitors find a site compelling, unique, worthy of multiple visits and adding to favourites or bookmarks & Segmented OVPs
Online Value Proposition (OVP) is essential
for website content. It is closely tied to brand positioning which answers
questions like:
- What is the business?
- What does the business have to offer?
- Who is the businesses target audience? How can they reach them & communicate effectively?
- What makes the business different from its competitors?
All of these aspects are extremely important to the
consumer so the business needs to ensure they get it right. However, OVP is
more than just selling products/services via an online website and showing
content about what the business offers. It is crucial to engage with online
customers, “identify the reasons why the customers will click on, return,
register and/or buy from the site ideally feel motivated enough to share their
experience” (word-of-mouth) (smartinsights.com).
OVP should take advantage of some of the unique benefits
that online retailers have to offer e.g. depth of content, interactivity and
immediacy (newsletters, fast help & contact responses, social media
platforms etc.), quick and easy purchase methods etc.
Overall, the main aims for online value proposition
should be to offer new experiences, resources, information and help to
customers that they could not gain anywhere else (instore for example).
Effective OVP can help a business deliver, review and improve
effective content across all aspects of an online website.
Customer
Orientation
- Provide rich and meaningful content for the various users of the site, focused at customers
- Meet customers’ needs and different levels of familiarity with the brand, company, products etc. Undertake research can then be undertaken to:
- Identify different audiences
- Rank importance of each to the business
- List the three most important information needs of the audience
- Ask representatives of each audience type to develop their own wish lists
Page Design
The overall page design of an online website is extremely
important for businesses to take into consideration.
First impressions are critically important. Therefore, a
consistent and effectively designed layout should be used throughout all
aspects of the website. This helps to ensure the most significant information
is placed on the homepage, promotions are advertised effectively, the company
logo is always present, other important features of the website are easily
accessed etc. The page design could make all the difference when encourage
users to explore the website in more depth, make a purchase from the business
etc.
BrandInsightBlog (2012) explains that “Poor design leads
to confusion, and nothing drives people away faster than confusion. If the
immediate, split-second impression is that you don’t know what the site’s about
or what to do next, you’re outta there”.
Page design is not just about the aesthetic elements, but
also the site planning, navigation and structure, messaging and usability. By
improving this, the business can drive enormous traffic to the website and gain
more customers. Overall, a great page design can together produce great
results.
Navigation & Structure
The navigation & structure of an online
website is extremely important to be simple and consistent.
Navigation is defined as how people move around the
website through tools such as links and menus. The structure is how these links
and menus are placed within the website and how different pages can relate to
others.
The navigation and structure of websites are essentially
where users can access content; it is the site’s overall “brain” and a
fundamental aspect of website design. It must be easily accessed and appeal to the
user. “Content that can’t be found can’t be read” (oneextrapixel, 2009). If
content can’t be found and read, results will be poor.
Navigating through one screen at a time can be very
disorientating. It’s very easy for some users to get confused and lost. “A
reader who gets lost or confused in this attention-deficit age is likely to hit
the “Back” button” (oneextrapixel, 2009).
Therefore, creating a simple and clear structure can help
the visitor feel comfortable and allow them to find the content they want
quickly and easily. This is critical to the overall success of any website. Navigation design and structure should always be “simple,
direct, unadorned, with the overriding objective of helping the user get to
where they want to go”.
Dynamic Design & Personalisation
Next, the dynamic design & personalisation of an
online website is about different and unique content to target potential
customers. It is also essential to ensure website content is greatly detailed
and “promotions are customised with every page to view the specifics of each
individual visitor” (customerinsightgroup, 2012).
A classic example of this is ASOS. When you shop online
at ASOS you would see “we recommend X, Y and Z” after you click on a product
link. This shows the similar items available to the first product that was
originally searched for. “Recommendation systems are used to predict items that
the user may be interested in, given some information about their profile”,
(customerinsightgroup, 2012). This can also be known as “collaborative
filtering”.
Another example of dynamic personalisation is New Look
and ASOS users are greeted with a message specifically for them when they are
logged in - e.g. “Hi (Name). Welcome to your account”. “Personalisation” essentially means aspects that can
easily be customized e.g. information, service product etc. All customers have
their own unique wants/needs/demands but they all have one thing in common;
they do not want to waste time and pay attention to content they are not
interested in. Therefore, personalisation is crucial for all websites. It is
used to assign appropriate content to each customer according to their
intentions.
In conclusion, the use of dynamic design and
personalisation via website design can help give the brand an idea of what is
popular and relevant amongst the target audience at a given time. Overall, it
helps the owner to know its consumers.
Aesthetics
= Graphics + Colour + Style + Layout + Typography
There are two aspects to the aesthetics of a website.
These are: Form and Function.
- Form: The visual design and layout of the website.
- Function: The interaction, navigation and overall structure and ease of use of the websites.
Interactivity
- Engaging site visitors through two-way communication
- Simple interactions: mouse events, rollovers, flash, drop-down boxes, site search etc.
- Now impact significantly by user generated content and social networking, web 2.0 elements e.g. blogs, forums, profiles, groups, events, photos, videos, ratings, tags etc.
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