The Long Tail of Web Campaigns
Written by Nuri Djavit
Like it or not, your website is a living breathing entity that courts many visitors (hopefully) and much opinion. It lives out there for many months and even years and often sits there festering by not responding to moving trends and user behavior.
OK, this maybe stating the obvious but we are still a little surprised that many of our clients’ briefs do not include on-going maintenance and support. We endeavor to empower our clients with robust content management systems and most often opt for externally supported technology so that our clients’ are not encumbered by a dependance on us based on proprietary/legacy systems. Great! Of course we’re happy to continue to develop our relationships by providing valuable support in terms of design and technology resource but more importantly, these extended relationships should be based on research, analytics and strategic response.
It’s a blessing and a curse in many ways, that we have the opportunity to constantly fine tune a website or web-based campaign and it’s important to understand that for most ‘projects’ the goal posts are constantly moving: company information/portfolio/people, user behavior in terms of site interaction and in how people use search engines, competition, technology etc. etc. etc. All of which should be monitored and responded to in order to be as effective and as relevant as possible and to achieve constantly ascending success.
Beyond the website, it is also important to understand the greater conversation about your brand. Run a search for a recent campaign and you might be surprised by the number of results. We recently completed a site as part of a broader campaign by a large electronics manufacturer, with no-little follow up. For our own purposes we constantly ran reports and discovered that almost all the top search results were not controlled or influenced by the brand and a few were extremely negative responses. Your website must have tentacles!!
So, make sure that any design work you undertake is underpinned by a sound digital strategy targeting success criteria that will make your campaign or project pay for itself. And be sure to not let your site collect dust on some shared hosting environment. For many, it’s the first part of your brand that is seen and for customers, prospects, employees and potential employees it will leave an impression.
