The Importance of Web Design

            A website design is one of the most important parts to marketing over the Internet. It is the first thing that a customer sees and is the first impression. The website provides all the information that a consumer might need in purchasing an item from you. Making it easily accessible, pleasing to the eye, and easy to navigate is crucial in your Internet marketing strategy. First however you must determine a few things so that you can please your customers. I would like to talk about a few things to remember when creating an effective website design. An effective website design must first establish objectives, you must know determine your target demographic, and lastly you must identify the navigation structure of your website design.

            First things first when designing a website, you must know what your objectives and vision are. Are you designing a website for the consumer to buy products? To find information on locations, times, and schedule for business hours? Do you want to create a social community for your consumers to discuss your products? All of these questions and many more are things you must think about when designing a website. You want it to meet the needs of your customers without being packed with useless information and filler that can cause them to leave the website without finding what they want. The whole point of a website is for them to become customers, to do this you must make it easy for them. You want to have roles and objectives for your website. Some objectives for a website may include providing cost savings in promotion and customer service, increase sales revenue, aid in brand development, generate sales leads, retain customers, and/or build an online community. (Roberts, 2008; Ch.10) Creating and making clear objectives and overall vision for your website is especially important. Next, you must know your customer’s needs and who they are.

            Web designs need to be laid out to fit the needs of the target market and be easy to navigate. “Ask yourself if the demographic you serve needs any particular tools—maybe it needs additional accessibility with larger font size options or multilingual translations, or maybe it needs to speak to a specific generation.” (Kearl, 2012; prg. 4) It is very hard when you come to a site and it doesn’t have your native language, or when you can’t find the link to contact information and end up going through a few pages just to find what you are looking for. The biggest advice that could be given to any marketer would be to do anything and everything to make things easy for a customer. If a customer has to take too long to find information or order an item, they will end up going somewhere else. In our day in age our most valuable possession is our time and we don’t have enough of it. Our time is valuable and we want to do everything we can to utilize it in the right way. That means marketers must make it easy for customers to utilize their time properly which makes it essential to know the needs of your customers. Identify these three things and you should be able to design to the needs of your customers. Clarify the demographics and lifestyles that your customers lead, motives for using your site, and tasks that they wish to complete. These three things will help give you an outline of what you need to include for your website design. Lastly, you must identify the navigational structure of your website.

            The first page of your website is the first impression you give to a customer and is what will either keep them looking or have them looking elsewhere. Questions you may ask yourself. Will the first page of your website have a slideshow of your products? Or maybe you will have testimonials from satisfied customers to grab the attention of your intended audience? Now that we know which demographic and lifestyle we are advertising to we can layout the content that your customer will be looking for. This includes everything from content, to navigation, color, font, minimal scrolling, and graphics that will be included on your website. You want to have easy access to links on the top or side of the first page.  “Your website needs to look professional and trustworthy in order to create buyer confidence.” (kooldesign1, 2010) Experts say that the most important thing is to make your layout clean, crisp, and not overcrowded. The theory that less is more fits to how your website should be designed. Personally my favorite way to have a website is to first have something visually grasp my attention, my favorite is then to see the things that are on sale or new products, then I like to see all the tabs easily viewed and dropdowns of the different information that would be subcategorized that I can go to for products, contact information, and reviews of the products. The number one factor is to make your website easy to navigate without going through ten pages just to find the one you are looking for.

            In the end, the most important thing is your web design. It is the part of your company that they can go and see whenever they want for information about your company and  to buy products. Establishing the objectives, making it fit the needs of your customers, and making it easy to navigate is essential to the success of your business. Many times a business, small or large, can fail due to their web design. Customers want easy access and the ability to obtain everything they want in a visually pleasing, comfortable, and clean web site. Doing this will bring in customer flow and increase profit, and it all begins with that one web design.

Sources

Kearl, J. (2012). Web design knowhow. Enterprise/ Salt Lake City, 41(40), 11.

kooldesign1. (2010, April 30). Youtube.com. [0]. Retrieved from                 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbKYptEgMrk&feature=related

Roberts, M. L. (2008). Internet Marketing. In M. L. Roberts, Internet Marketing (2nd Edition ed.). Mason, Ohio, United States of America: Thomson.

           

Social Networking: Making it Your Own

            Marketing is “the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling.” (“Dictionary.com”) Every business’s goal is to be successful and to identify the needs of their consumers.  The “stone-age” marketing, like I will call it, is how we used to market. That was going out and doing survey’s, questionnaires, putting out billboards, ads in the newspaper, and spreading the word anyway you could. It took lots of time and money to bring in only certain demographics and segments of the total potential consumers. Things have changed and have advanced to the ability to talk with customers in minutes, target the needs of the customers, learn of problems instantly, and business’s have adapted marketing techniques to target different segments all with the tool of social networking. Social Networking has provided marketers instant contact with consumers, helps brand building, and blogs have become a phenomenal tool for expanding business strategies and adapting to the needs of the customers.

            Never did we imagine ten years ago that we would be shopping, communicating, and marketing through the Internet. To think of all the advancements that the Internet has undergone is amazing and to see how much progress it has made in such a short amount of time is such a massive difference from where we used to be. With Facebook and Twitter, to just name two, social marketing has become a major part of how we communicate with one another and has started to gain massive popularity in marketing products. It is free to use, easily accessible through the Internet, and gives optimal speed to contact customers anytime of the day. “Social media has completely changed our work, and when executed well, it has positive implications for multiple divisions, from consumer insights to product development/innovation to marketing to corporate reputation,” says Hawks.” (Whalig, 2011) It has taken so much of the hassle out of marketing to such a wide range of consumers. Making it so much easier to market to different segments in such a short amount of time and on little to no money. There is a newly developed site called Pinterest that you can now share different blogs, products, recipes, or any link on the web that you desire to share. It has completely changed the way that I personally look for new ideas, recipes, products, and health advice. Many businesses have even gotten into it and created there own Pinterest to share products with them and it goes straight into a newsfeed that you can follow and get new products everyday to look at. All of these segments of social networking allows for communication as consumers and business owners/marketers to get in contact with one another in such a short amount of time and keep in contact on a daily basis. This provides the consumer their own way to customize their shopping experience. It has also given the way for brand building success.

            Brand building can spread so much faster on the Internet and when it gets out there it can seriously spread like wildfire. Through the social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and even Pinterest it can be as simple as hitting the “like” button for one, seeing a tweet, or repining a pin on your board that others are following. Brian Winterfeldt points out the “Use of a company’s trademarks and logos will create a much stronger association with the company than stating the employer’s name in a profile.” (Winterfeldt, 2012) If someone sees the logo or brand image on so many different social networks or blogs in the Internet they are bound to go and do their own research and find the main web page the company has for this product. They will want to know what the “buzz” is all about.  People all across the world use the Internet on a daily basis and it is the perfect way to get in contact with them on that daily basis. They are more prone to see a company’s logo through the Internet rather than a billboard or even a TV commercial because people now have the ability to screen what advertisements they are viewing. Another important aspect of social networking includes that of the blogosphere, like bloggers like to call it.

            Blogs have grown from the “journal” they were made to be into a way that anyone can express there opinions on products, share recipes, ideas, lifestyles, or just about anything of a persons life. People actually make careers out of blogging on the Internet. Businesses will actually send them products to review so they will get their products out there, which is quite effective. They also build branding and optimize their web search when they do this. Personally I have come across so many blogs that I have actually gone out to get products that they use because of their personal experience with the products. I trust personal experiences over a business’s review and idea of what a product should do. These people share their experiences, opinions and then others come and share their own, it really is a little community of people that share what they know and it is a perfect way to spread products and ideas through “word-of-mouth” which is the best and most effective way to share information with others without it being face-to-face.

            Social networking has created a way to communicate with friends and family, but also has given everyone a way to share products, ideas, and information that otherwise would take forever to find. It has given new meaning to the way marketing is done and the way customers can change the way they are marketed to. Customers now have a voice, they share the information and just how fast they can spread good reviews they can spread bad, they govern the way they are marketed to and what products they accept out there on the market. Instead of marketers choosing what we need and want, consumers now can show them and tell them what they want and need. Marketers can be active in communicating with customers, can get there branding out there, and learn from blogs all around the Internet and even offer those bloggers products to get more reviews and info out their to the consumers. Social networking has truly changed everything about the way we market, shop, and choose to communicate with one another.

 Sources

Dictionary.com. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/marketing?s=t

Roberts, M. L. (2008). Internet Marketing. In M. L. Roberts, Internet Marketing (2nd Edition ed.).         Mason, Ohio, United States of America: Thomson.

Whalig, H. (2011, May 12). Mashable. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2011/05/12/social-media-change-marketing/

Winterfeldt, B. J. (2012). Building your brand through social media. Computer and Internet Lawyer, 29(2), 22-31  http://search.proquest.com/docview/918827811?accountid=41205

Hierarchy of Interactive Strategies

Internet is evolving into something that is so advanced. It is continuing to evolve and change every single day in the way we are communicating with one another, to the way we shop, the way we educate ourselves, to the way we can view how the world is changing. The way we market online is also changing. The Internet is not only used to sell things now, but to communicate with its customers to find the needs of the people. That brings me to the interactive strategies used in Internet marketing. There are many ways that companies have used different interactive strategies to get to know their customers in a whole different way. Now lets go on to talk about this hierarchy of interactive strategies.

            This hierarchy of interactive strategies is laid out in a pyramid from the top down it includes customization, personalization, transaction, interaction, and information. Some use all of these strategies and some just use a few. Customization allows customers to design their own marketing experience and create something they would want to buy. Personalization is a little like customization, but allows it to be more personal to your specific needs rather than being general to the entire market segment. Transaction is how you buy things and your interactions with purchasing your items. Interaction is the feedback you get from the marketers themselves to enhance your buying process. Lastly, there is information, which you are able to receive from the buyer and those on the Internet. All of these strategies have enhanced the buying process allowing for overall customer satisfaction in all aspects. To go on to discuss a couple of these strategies. I have chose to discuss how Nike has used the customization strategy.

            NikeiD site has developed an interactive site where you can customize your own type of shoe with different options provided. This allows customers to choose what style they like best and also give them a product that is unique and designed to their own likes and dislikes. More places are offering this type of feature because it allows the customers to really design something for themselves. You aren’t hindered by what is offered to you, but are given the opportunity to make something specific to what appeals to you. To me this option allows me to make something that has everything I want in a product and not have to lower my expectations and standards of what I expect in a product. I always find something I don’t like in a product, but I get it anyways because there are no other options out there. This NikeiD site is the perfect example of customization in the hierarchy of interactive strategies.

            Another interactive strategy is that of a blog, just like this one. It allows customers and marketers alike to promote products to the public. You are allowed to review or share your own personal experiences with how the product works for you. Since everyone has their own experiences and likes and dislikes this allows you to weigh out the options that it might provide for you personally. Blogs, I have found, are a great way to find the things that I need and am looking for. I have found many wonderful blogs that promote healthy lifestyle and through that I have found food options that have helped me live a healthier life. If that person did not have the blog I probably wouldn’t have found the products that helped me in my own journey to live healthier. For instance, coconut oil has become very big in many blogs. There are blogs that describe the health benefits and ways that you can use it in your lifestyle. This is just one of the way that you can personalize your own marketing.

            The hierarchy of interactive strategies has completely changed Internet marketing. Marketers have the ability to be apart in every aspect of the buying process. They have the ability to design something specific to the customers needs and wants. By working together with the public they are allowing to get their name out there through blogs so that they get the personal reviews from people that have tired their products. They are able to communicate with their customers to make sure that they are pleased with their products and buying experience. I believe this has advanced the quality of products that is being provided for us. Not only are marketers given the opportunity to be in every aspect of the marketing process, but also customers are expected to take an active role in their buying process as well.

References:

Roberts, M. L. (2008). Internet Marketing. In M. L. Roberts, Internet Marketing (2nd Edition ed., pp.         30-52). Mason, Ohio, United States of America: Thomson.

Safko, L. (2010). The social media bible: Tactics, tools, and strategies for business             success. Hoboken, N.J: Wiley.