All businesses big and small need advertising to reach out to customers, consumers, business partners, and anyone else. A lot of money and time is spent every year to figure out the best marketing methods to use, and many trends show that both traditional and modern marketing strategies are effective. The Internet and social media are no doubt very powerful messaging tools, but they have not made paper and signs obsolete. Rather, most companies today take both routes, so that each can cover the deficiencies of the other. Signs can’t advertise across the nation like the Internet can, but American sometimes suffer Internet burnout and would rather look at signs. A company that uses both methods may expect some good results.
Signs and papers are their own subject, though. Today’s businesses often hire creative agencies that offer internet marketing professionals. These creative agencies, such as digital marketing companies and website design companies, offer professionals who know the business side of the Internet quite well. When a client business hires creative agencies, they may expect solid website design, SEO prowess, social media profiles, and more. How can these creative agencies get the job done right?
Search Engines and Business
The Internet is a truly vast place, home to countless websites for business, entertainment, news, forums, and more. But finding the right website can be quite daunting, unless a search engine is involved. A number of brand name search engines are popular today, and any user can type in relevant brand names, keywords, and more to find a particular sort of website. This can be done for research, shopping, finding Internet forums, and much more. Search engines are designed so that up-to-date websites with relevant content will appear much sooner in a results page, and are thus more likely to be viewed. Obsolete, abandoned, or irrelevant websites will appear much later in the results page where they are unlikely to be seen or visited.
Creative agencies may offer SEO services, or “search engine optimization.” This means that specialized professionals will create text based content dense in relevant keywords for a website. This marks a webpage as highly relevant for a particular industry or topic, giving it a competitive edge in search engines. The same is true for the titles and captions of videos and photos, too. And SEO is not limited to text; it also helps if a web page has large, crisp, appealing images to go with the content to grab a web user’s eye. Finally, SEO work means having a lot of links to other relevant pages in the website, or having many links that connect to trustworthy websites of a similar topic (and those other websites may reciprocate). After all, search engines care not only about keywords, but quantity of links that go to and from reliable and relevant websites. SEO workers at these creative agencies will make good use of links going to and from all over the place.
Website Design
While good SEO practices will help draw in organic traffic to a website, it is good website design that will keep guests there. This is best left to web engineers, who will create a website with an appealing visual design and an intuitive layout for easy navigation. After all, guests may get annoyed if the website is difficult to navigate or if it simply looks ugly or has a confusing layout. Not only that, but proper web design also means technical expertise. Videos and images should load quickly so that guests may view them. Studies show that website guests tend to be impatient, and they will leave a web page or even the entire site if content (or the page itself) takes too long to load. A wait time of 10 seconds may be all it takes to drive away customers.
What about social media? This is a recent phenomenon, but a significant one. Many creative agencies offer social media experts who will create and maintain profiles for the client company. In this way, the company may easily, and at any time, send messages to all customers, such as for recent sales or new products. These platforms also make it fast and easy for the company to post polls and answer consumer questions (which consumers will certainly appreciate).