Web strategy & Web development blog

Posts Tagged ‘website strategy’

Understand your customers first. We can design website for you faster

Saturday, February 4th, 2012
If you ever inquired about a website designing service from us, you would have heard us asking you, “Who are your customers? Who is your target audience?” followed by a bunch of questions like that. Even before we talk with you about design and price. Many people think- What the hell these people are talking about??

80% of time we do not hear a clear answer. Once I was asked, “Why is it so important for you to know?”

Our answer is: We make websites for your target audiences (i.e. your clients). They are the one who will give you money. Am I correct? Stop me if I’m wrong. (Even better you can tell the world we are wrong.) If we create a site just for anyone or just for your satisfaction then, people will see your site, your products or services, may like the website for the design or information, but will not purchase. The reason is clear and simple: he/she doesn’t have a need of it.

Understanding your customer is very important for us as your consultant. We need to look for solutions to make them opt for your business (products or services).

Therefore go and find out who is your customer first. It’s very important for your online as well as your offline marketing. Give us a perfect example, not a general view. Let me explain it to you with following two examples

  1. Example 1: Our customer is anybody who need a body massage.
  2. Example 2: Our customer is a businessman, stressed out, too busy and thus suffer from severe body-ache frequently.

Now you have correctly imagined we would prefer the narrowed down Example 2 as it clearly tells us about your customer, his pain and how your solution is going to help him. Now the person in Example 2 is the man who will definitely go for your massage if you are talking to him directly in a direct tone on your website. Got our point?

If you got your examples ready, contact us using our contact form. We will reply you by the very next day, be it a Saturday or Sunday.

If you do not want customers from your website, then excuse us

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

  1. We are not a usual website design company. We are a website strategy firm.
  2. However affording us may not be a problem for small businesses. But you should want to have more businesses from your website.
  3. We hate flashy designs if it has no positive effect on converting your website visitors to be your customer. There are plenty of other designing firms who can get you that. Just search in Google.
  4. If a website is not giving you profit then what is the requirement to have one and worst is spending money on it? We understand every website require time and effort to get business. But if you do not have a clear goal on how to convert more visitors from the day one, then better you should not have a website.
  5. Every month we take only few website design or website strategy project. So that we can give a good attention span to each project. Therefore if you do not want customers from your website, then excuse us. We may help somebody in need.
  6. At last we have faced the situation when everyone who visited our site liked it. We got thousands of visits. But nobody turned to do business with us. We don’t want anybody else to face the same frustration.

“Design shouldn’t dominate people. It should help them doing stuffs” — Dieter Rams

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011
According to Dieter Rams, one of the great Industrial and Product Designer who designed your Oral-B Indicator Tooth Brush to Universal Shelving System (which is being sold even today without change for 50 years from now) and the man who inspired the design of Apple’s IPhone, “Good design makes a product useful”.

A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasises the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

The same thing applies to website design as well. The design should bring the things a user wants to see and at a place where it wants to see it. User should not be distracted by other things or designs which make user feel bored after a while without doing the thing he wanted to do in your web page.

Jim Turner, Beth Heyden and Bethany Siegler on Blogging for Your Business

Friday, September 10th, 2010
Is blogging really a necessity for my company? How do I get the most out of blogging? How can WordPress help to market our products or services? How can we make sure it actually reaches our target clients? What should we write about and/or how can we find content to include? What should we not write about or include on a business blog? Find it out here.

Online TV station for your firm inputs more power to your marketing

Thursday, September 9th, 2010
Developing an online TV station is a good idea (both video gallery and the Live TV streaming). Here we will discuss some of the quick facts about how important it is for you and how you can excel in this.

8itv

Most of the times it excites an startup owner to have their own video gallery or online TV station. We get a lot of questions on how we developed our own TV station called “8iTV”. But as a small firm owner it often costs a lot to host your videos on your own server. Also you need to spend quite a few laborious hours of work to be devoted to this which kills your effectiveness in business. Also hosting on your own server causes problems in proper bandwidth and else. So our kind suggestions instead will be to host them on free video hosting providers like YouTube or Blip or Vimeo and embed them back to your website. This way you will be safe from spending money on unnecessary infrastructure for video streaming and can focus on Video making and pulling audience.

Why a TV station? Is it necessary?

You are doing great work always, how small may be it is but it creates respect for you guys in the world. So why not sharing it. We often share our videos on our blog and 8iTV, we work from small offices not well furnished but it creates a lot of impact when we share it. We share our plans, our story and also give advice on how to develop a good website that can work as a marketing executive. That’s why people love us and trust on our abilities. We all didn’t have a good knowledge on marketing while starting our firm. But after launching our blog and then 8iTV we are getting a lot of inquiries. We learnt that videos make your audiences to trust you.

So having all your videos at one place helps a visitor to find the one that thrills him/her. He can know a lot of way to use your products and get informed about your services in mean time.

What kind of videos to put:

While consulting some of the businesses and NGOs on online TV Stations we got few key information about the successful videos. Videos of following kind builds great attention and sharing:

  1. How-tos: The videos which shows how to solve some of the problems of your target audiences are often become great success. People just go mad when the find some solutions and tips and they share it more and more.
  2. Case studies and Interviews: People often admire real examples. They trust you when they see how your solutions helped another guy same as them. People do not share these kinds of videos much, but they get converted more and more. So it is often a great strategy to turn leads/prospects into clients, if you are having a good traffic which do not get converted. People share interviews of the people they admire.
  3. Funny Ads and viral videos: These are often great tools to make your brand more visible on social media. People often love good concept and script. You can make your employees as actors and directors and can shoot with only a Handy-cam. Don’t forget to put your website address at the end of the video otherwise you will loose a great traffic.
  4. Your own story and Employee  birthdays or picnics: If you are a B2B company then a lot of people respect your stories and want to be inspired by your company culture. So why loose time. Inspire them. Be funny and true to your stories. This creates great trust. Initially we were very hesitant to tell about our offices (which are tiny and often a home like place). But after sharing the photos and videos of it, we got lot of admiration. Even corporate biggies do not hesitate to spend quite a few hours with us in our office.

Now it’s time to pitch my company (you know business needs these. ha ha lol.)

How can 8i Creations help you:

  1. We are developing online TV stations for a while and developed such one for our own firm at “8iTV“.
  2. We work on YouTube APIs and Blip.tv or Vimeo APIs. This makes it very easy to add videos to your gallery. You just need to upload your videos to your account in any one of these sites and it will automatically come to your video gallery.
  3. We design custom players and video gallery that suits the design of your website.
  4. We know how to integrate social media tools to the TV station.
  5. We also enables YouTube Group uploading features so that your customers can upload their videos. Even they can upload to YouTube from your site.

Market each product page independently Part- II : Web strategy of the week

Monday, September 6th, 2010

Hello friends, this is the second and final part of my previous post on Web Strategy. Please follow the post to get other tips.

d) Videos: I think I do not need to say you about videos, you know the conversion capabilities of your videos. This also let your visitor know, there are real people on the other end. (Please see our videos at 8iTV). There are a few bunch of sites where you can upload your videos to. But I would suggest that at least upload your videos to YouTube or sites that share your videos with YouTube like Blip.tv. This gives you a lot of SEO advantage:

  • Google index it rapidly & shows it on search
  • YouTube has a large audience especially Indians. If you want international/USA audiences more then you may prefer Vimeo over it.
  • Youtube is fast and light short video.

Special Notes: Don’t host your videos on your own website. This can’t give you the multiple marketing channels you need. The simple science is, the audience of YouTube can see it and come to your site, also you can embed the same video to your site, so a direct visitor can also see it. If you do not want to play related videos, please un-check the box “Include related videos” in embed code.They also can share it on their blog from where you can get some additional audience/leads. Don’t forget to embed them to your blog posts and your product page.

Kicking Points: A video can take their 5minutes easily while they don’t feel easy to sit before their computer to read for 2minutes.

e) Add your slides to your page & upload to SlideShare:

As I told you before slides on slideshare has very vast potential to give you quality visitors & leads. So make your marketing slides available on Slideshare.net and you can embed the same to your page or blog posts. Often Slideshare embedding takes a lot of time to load. So if you are targeting a country like India, where bandwidth is still very low for majority of areas, it’s better embed them to your blog post rather than on page. Instead you can put a link to other page which contains only that slide embedded.

What do you think? Did all these work for you? Let us know. Comment below

Redesigning our website: Agility and Preparedness

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Recently we changed a little bit in our website. So here we are telling you what is the motivation behind the change and how we are preparing ourselves to serve you better. Please watch this video:

We are gradually ranking higher for “Website Strategy”

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

Hi Folks,

As we are observing, we are gradually moving up for search term “Website Strategy” on Google.co.in Now we are at 13th position almost close to the first page. It has been a quite some time we are trying to be on the first page for this particular search term. Website Strategy market in India is picking up gradually and more companies are coming up to take the advantages of it. We really appreciate the move.

website-strategy

Web Strategy

That suggests we are positioning ourselves better against other industry giants in web development. Our clients are feeling the effect. In following few weeks we will share you some of their experiences with us. If you are one of our client and want to share your experience, we will glad to have an interview with you. Our executive team will soon contact you.

For new visitors: 8i Creations is providing “Website Strategy” consultancy integrated with its most of the Website Development services. But in case if you already have a good web development team, lacking in providing strategies, we would love to assist them in building a great website for you. For more details about our web strategy solutions, please visit: http://www1.8icreations.com/web-strategy/

Our price starts from Rs. 20,000/-

What a Non-Profit website should have?

Saturday, May 1st, 2010

As we had been at National Seminar on ” Role of NGOs in Empowerment of Women Towards Sustainable Development on 13th March 2010″ held at SSIMS, Tumkur we came in contact with  a lot of NGOs and again our vision to empower the NGOs with web technologies got few more oxygen.

So here we want to share you a microsite we created for NGOs called as “Non-profit Corner” which consists of suggestions on Website Strategy for Non-profits. Here is a screenshot of the site. Please go through it and reply us with some suggestion or share your problems.

NPC

Social Metrics are Important: Infosys

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

smA month back I was talking to R. N. Prasad, Associate Vice-President of Infosys Technologies Limited at Conference on “Leveraging Innovation for Knowledge Economy” held at J.N. Tata Auditorium, National Science Seminar Complex, IISc, Bengaluru.

He was talking about “Business Intelligence Framework”. On discussion he revealed how Infosys is using social media data. He called it as “sentiment analysis”. They extract data from forums where people are discussing about Infosys. They use the data to analyse their supply chain management and the investor relation management. He clearly explained it helps them to be a better company for their stakeholders (i.e. investors, clients etc.) So you can take a lesson from Infosys and hear the free voice of the people, which will help you to understand what your users are saying about you.

Internet (social media, forums and blogs) gives a freedom to people to express anything their mind say which you can’t get by survey and offline talks. It is a metrics that could break the ice moulded mind set of your company and you can serve your stakeholders better.

We admire Infosys as a company and closely following its online strategy and can say its one of the early adopters of social media and blogs in corporate India with its Think Flat and other blogs. You can checkout this blog post what they have to say about Social Media & Risk Management. Also you can expect the quickest reply from @infosys in twitter (my experience)

Website Strategy Equation:
Social Media + Blog + Forums + your website = Better Risk Management + Better Supplier + Customer + Investor relation = A better shock resistant company.

What do you think about the role of social media in your organization?