Brand Extension: Big Brother in the Web Marketing Family

Web presence is pretty much business standard nowadays, regardless of the size a company. From “Mom & Pop” boutiques to large Corporations, public information about your company and it’s products/services should be readily accessible via the internet. As this is common knowledge, most businesses establish some type of web presence, but tend to get lost in the competitive internet marketplace. How do you stand out amongst the rest in addition to building “the perfect” website? How well are you marketing your brand? In order to wrap your head around the various combinations of internet marketing, let’s take a basic look at the Web Marketing Family.

The basic family tree of Web Marketing comprises of these members: Corporate Domain, Search Marketing, Syndicated Web Marketing, Brand Extension, Community and Social Media Marketing, Virtual Worlds, Related Mediums, and lastly, Experimental Methods. These internet marketing strategies are all equally important and should be used to compliment your current online efforts. One of the “family members” that I tend to focus on is Brand Extension. The Brand Extension strategy is simple; wherever your market is, you should have brand placement. I’m sure this marketing strategy has been applied to your business in other physical forms, but it is also strongly applicable to your online presence. The basic forms of brand extension consists of the following: Web Advertising, Contextual Advertising, Sponsorship/Cross Branding, Social Advertisements, Widget Advertising and Affiliate Marketing. Check out the detailed info on these forms of brand extension below.

Web Advertising
I’m sure you’re all familiar with the banner, tile, or skyscraper advertising (IAB) model on websites. This age old strategy simply suggests that if there are eyeballs your brand should ‘impress’ upon the users. Click through rates are typically in the 1% or lower rate, sometimes success is measured by brand impressions, (visitation by traffic). These ads are static and do not change even if the content on the webpage changes.

Contextual Advertising
These targeted ads will be served up on the webpage depending on the content that’s on the page. This is a more ‘intelligent’ and therefore more relevant than Web Advertising, which may not be targeted at specific content. This form of advertising can be text, images, media or other form and are common on websites, blogs, and are now appearing on web based emails sites. (Submitted by David Berkowitz: Feb 13th. 2007)

Sponsorship and /Cross Branding
This is a method of promoting your brand with the right audience in which the property is rewarded for integrating your brand. This can occur on content sites, shows, media properties, blogs, podcasts, and just about everything else. This is expected to increase in 2007.

Social Advertisements
Having just appeared this year from Facebook, it uses contextual information from users who have become “Fans” of a brand, then ads are severed to their network, in an endorsement. This has been highly controversial, and the return on investment is not yet known.

Widget Advertising
Having just appeared this year from on containers like Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, and Friendster, widgets have proliferated at an amazing growth rate. Expect advertising networks to form over the next year, where a brand can purchase space on any number of widgets across different social networks and communities, groups such as: RockYou, Slide, Widgetbox, and Watercooler to start with. See all posts tagged Widget Strategy.

Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing programs compensate partners and alliances that bring referrals, leads, or sales. While it overlaps with other forms of web marketing, the goal is to provide the right content or products to the target demographic. Examples of this include placement on comparison shopping sites, loyalty sites, and product review sites.

As you can see, Brand Extension plays a very important role in the Web Marketing Family. These forms should be used in conjunction w/ the other Web Marketing family members to make a successful campaign for your business. Stay tuned for more information on the other web marketing “siblings”.

Damon R. Howard

Marketing Operations Consultant

Executionists, Inc.

Recently Launched!

We’re proud to announce some of our recently launched projects!

Studio DNA Salon
www.studiodnasalon.com
November, 2007

 

 

The Million Lights Project
www.millionlightsproject.org
November, 2007

 

The Festival of New American Musicals
www.lafestival.org
November, 2007

 

 

Discrimination Attorney
www.discriminationattorney.com
October, 2007

 

The Safe Sippy
www.thesafesippy.com
September, 2007

Everything but the Kitchen Sink

Illustration: Dave Abston (www.graphicsbydave.com)

Scope Creep (also called requirement creep, feature creep, and sometimes kitchen sink syndrome) in project management refers to uncontrolled changes in a project’s scope. This phenomenon can occur when the scope of a project is not properly defined, documented, or controlled. It is generally considered a negative occurrence to be avoided.

Typically, the scope increase consists of either new products or new features of already approved product designs, without corresponding increases in resources, schedule, or budget. As a result, the project team risks drifting away from its original purpose and scope on unplanned additions. As the scope of a project grows, more tasks must be completed within the budget and schedule originally designed for a smaller set of tasks. Thus Scope Creep can also result in a project team overrunning its original budget and schedule. If budget or schedule are increased along with scope, the change is usually considered an acceptable addition to the project, and the term ‘Scope Creep’ not used.

Scope Creep can also be thought of as a process of trial and error for clients to discover what they really want…

Symptoms
• Projects that have been going on for a long time
• Clients who are picky and tend to change their minds often
• Scattered content and pieces for the website

Scope Creep Example
We took on a OS Commerce shopping cart project about a year ago. In my opinion, the client is one of the sweetest clients I’ve ever dealt with. The initial projections looked profitable; the budget and scope were optimistic. We all thought it was going to be a great addition to our portfolio. However as the project progressed, things started to change, and before you know it, we were over budget! What happened?

She found her own graphic designer, so our initial comps went to the graveyard…
A new photo shoot came around, we waited for a month…
The simple “portfolio” became a Flash portfolio with it’s own Scope Creep issues…
Content edits kept changing due to time sensitive information/press pieces…

Just when we thought we could wrap things up, the client became frustrated with the look and feel of the shopping cart. The graphic designer came back with a complete redesign of the cart including new headers, styles, color palettes and additional images that required detailed cropping and instructions. Mega Scope Creep alert! We became very aware that the project was slowly draining our resources.

When faced with this scenario, we can ask ourselves 2 questions: 1) What could we have done to prevent this from happening? 2) How can we make this a win-win situation? We informed the client of the issue and tried to wrap up the website with one final round of changes. The client understood that we were trying our best to deliver the shopping cart that she had envisioned. As of this writing the project still isn’t complete but we remain optimistic that it will launch soon.

The reality is that in this industry, some amount of scope creep is inevitable. It’s not only a process of trial and error for clients to discover what they really want, it’s also a process of learning how we as designers/developers can mitigate similar situations in the future. As a project manager, I definitely learned a valuable lesson: always be aware of the budget, set client expectations and clearly define the scope ahead of time!

-Temy Gu
Project Manager

2007 WebAward Winner!

We are proud to announce that we are the recipient of a 2007 WebAward for
Outstanding Achievement in Website Development
presented by the Web Marketing Association!

Our award was presented in recognition of our work on the Christopher Laue Productions site.

 

Christopher Laue
Executionists, Inc.
Events Standard of Excellence

Creative Director: Richard Parr
Senior Designer: Kaoru Wood
Flash Designer: Conrad Julian
Project Manager: Temy Gu

 

 

Our overall scores:

 

We are thrilled and grateful to be recognized!

Designing for Architectural Construction Firms

Starting in 1997 with a whimsical Felderman and Keating website, Executionists kicked off a successful decade of designing for architectural construction firms. We’ve won several design awards for these projects, including a Realcomm Digital Media Award for Best Website and Macromedia Shocked Site of the Day.

Since then we’ve launched more sites, with the numbers constantly growing. Here are a couple of our most recent projects…

Felderman Keatinge + Associates
(www.fkadesign.com)
Launched 2007

 

Pinnacle Contracting Corporation
(www.pincon.com)
Launched 2007

 

SAA
Currently in progress
Launch TBA

Thinking your print designer can design your site? Think again.

We love print designers! I designed print for 10 years myself and have great respect for those talented and brave enough to make it their profession.

BUT… though it may seem convenient to have your print designer design your new website, be forewarned here are some of the inherent differences between print and web designers that we’ve experienced.

1) Print designers typically don’t understand efficient navigation and website usability issues.

An key goal of online design is moving prospective visitors through the site in the most efficient and intuitive manner possible. In print design there is little need to move visitors through multiple pages except in a linear, one-dimensional way.

A print designer may be good at capturing and presenting site navigation in a design but the real usability of that navigation may not reflect best-practices developed from experience designing for the online environment.

2) Print designers tend to create graphics that can only be updated through hands-on Photoshop work, not through a combination of more expedient HTML and graphic elements.

Print designers tend to develop collaged images that are well designed, but because they are unified image and text they are basically one graphic. These page graphics are often slow to download. Utilizing a combination of system text and judicious graphics is a more web-friendly approach because they are easier to update and better for search engine results.

3) Many print designers design for an 8.5 x 11″ printed page which often does not translate well to browser specifications.

The majority of browsers use the current screen resolution standard of at least 1024 x 768. In non-web design speak, 14.2 x 10.67″.. a completely different format than 8.5 x 11″. Getting graphics in 8.5 x 11 format from a client is a sure indication that they were developed by a print designer.

What this means is that your developer will have to redo the page layout to make it optimal for web-browsing and the screen resolution.

The bottom line is… if you hire your print designer for your new website design, the potential is that you’ll end up spending more money and more time when your web designer has to redo it. If you love your print designer and want to use them for your website, call your web developer and introduce them early on. This way you can combine their experience and get a better end result.

Get Aggressive on the Web.

If you’re a traditional retail business, you can often open a shop selling widgets with little local competition. Other than your signage and the occasional mailer to remind people that you’re there, there’s little need for aggressive marketing.

But, open a business on the web, and suddenly you’re competing with local, national and even international competitors. Unless you have a niche, local service business or exclusive product, you have no choice but to get aggressive on the web.

So what can you do?

A quick Google search shows us:

• 22,056 books on web marketing at Amazon
• 185,000,000 related sites on internet marketing companies
• 109,000,000 related sites for website marketing tips

With all these resources, how do you determine what makes the most sense for your business?

Here’s our top 3 ways to get aggressive with your web marketing:

1) Design.

Make sure your site is designed well. Is it visually appealing, or does it look like someone threw up random text and images? Does the text captivate and motivate visitors to learn about your business?

2) SEM (Search Engine Marketing) & SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

This has become a huge industry over the last five years. If I look at web stats for our website, I can see that over 50% of our traffic comes from search engines such as Google. There’s a strategy to getting a high position in the search engines, and knowing how to develop that strategy and implement it is critical to the success of a web business.

3) Affiliate Marketing.

Are you a member of any professional business organizations? Chamber of Commerce, Trade Organizations, etc. Chances are these organizations will have websites and member directories. Maximize your exposure on these affiliated websites because links from them to you (and vice versa) will boost your website traffic.

Let’s not forget about email and print marketing. But I’ve got to get back to work, so I’ll get to that next week.

If there’s a topic you’d like us to blog about, let us know. And if you want to get aggressive on the web with your business, give us a call for a free consultation.

Professional Approach to Web Development

DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGY

Step 1 | Client Needs Assessment

By meeting with you, we define the primary goals and project schedule, identify the
target audience, and tailor the design solution to your industry.

• Understand who will use the Web site (Target Audience)
• Understand what Web technologies you will require
• Identify content
• Produce project schedule

Step 2 | Research and Discovery

We gather all available data content from you, such as company profiles, product descriptions, or in-house publications and brochures. Thereafter, we research the Internet and all other relevant information sources to familiarize ourselves with your
industry and your competition. We also spend time researching the competition, both online and offline.

• Identify the tasks users need to complete
• Consider the processes required to support Web site features and functions
• Develop technical scope and sitemap

Step 3 | Design Concept

During this stage, we begin the process of developing the site’s look and feel, the flow of content throughout the site, the logical organization of the site’s information, and its functionality. These concepts are presented to you for your evaluation and approval.

• Prototype Delivered
• Web Site Organization
• Color Schemes and Menu

Step 4 | Development

With your approval of the Design Concept, we develop the site in full using approved graphics, content, navigation, database design, etc. Of course, one of the questions asked by new clients is “how long will it take to create my site?” The answer is, “it depends.” Specifically, each client’s needs are different, and many needs present unique challenges that may require more time than anticipated.

• Client staging site and status
• Web server is setup and configured
• Databases modeled and pre-populated
• Domains are transferred and email accounts are setup

Step 5 | Testing & Launch

We test your web site to ensure it is cross-browser compatible and to evaluate its performance. This is the time when we may modify the site for performance gains. Thereafter, we transfer the web site to a web server for the public’s access.

• Web sites are tested at various stages of the development process
• Review of Web page content, functionality and graphic consistency
• Usability testing – measure how well the Web page allows a user to accomplish goals

Step 6 | Promotion

Your development plan may include forms of pre-production, offline promotion to generate interest in the launch of your site. Online promotion takes place after the site has been placed on the web server.

• Content optimization
• Code and meta tag optimization
• Search engine submissions and registrations
• Web statistics analysis
• Email Broadcasting

Step 7 | Post Production

After the web site is fully functional, we provide complete support to our clients, including evaluation, training for site management, upgrades with the latest technologies, and any required updates.

• Determine who is responsible for updates to the Web page
• Limit the ability of certain users to update the Web page
• Re-evaluate goals based upon business objectives