Marketing Strategy

Online Marketing

There are many ways to market online, but from my research I found that the best methods are using the mainstream services that people use everyday, as this also allows me to track their success a lot easier. The three stand out ways from my research would be to use YouTube video ads at the beginning of the video for people in the area of Yorkshire, Facebook advertising and iAds on the iPhone which targets mobile users. in the area

Offline Marketing

It is vital to remember that once this marketing has been produced and published, I would need to analyze the effects it has had on the sales on the website. Obviously within the analytics tracking on the website, I would be able to see where the users are coming from, so if it is from a form of my online marketing I woulds have no trouble being able to determine that. The problem arises in the fact I also have offline marketing set up, so the best way to track the offline sales is to ask the user how thy heard about the exhibition when they are purchasing the tickets.

The timing of the marketing is specific to target the audience at the right time. You can see the breakdown below;

The website should be prepared 5 months before the exhibition is due to go live, this means by the time the 3 months benchmark comes around, the site should be at the top of google for the relevant museum. Bookmarks and lighters are shown here;

should be used to get people talking, they are two items that would distribute themselves in the community and gain free marketing. The next stages would be the facebook advertising, newspaper ads and billboards because they take effect as of immediately. You can see examples of these here;

Apple iAds on the iPhone are a great way to reach the user in an interactive manner, you can see this below;

which are shown on the device like so;

The style of the tickets are very important, based on an authentic look of real money, they give an impression of luxury and sell the experience overall;

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SEO for Marketing

Part off SEO is making sure that your site is found when searched for, therefore it is vital that it can be found easily. Google Keywords Planner is a great service that tells you how many times a word is searched for, and which are the best keywords to use. I have found entered the sites details into the keyword planner, and have made two discoveries.

Firstly, people only search for a specific type of exhibition if at all, therefore they must know the name through the marketing for them to search it, otherwise there are no keywords that can help get the site seen, you can see this here with really vague keyword suggestions like “museum exhibits”;

Secondly, the most popular museum related searched are the names themselves, this means that the best way to create a successful exhibition, is to make it travel between really popular museums, and make the website appear at the top of the search for these museums. You can see this would be really successful by the following information;

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

Understanding how meta data was something I made an effort to learn, since I had changed my design based upon the fact it is not SEO appropriate. I found that meta data is the content that is not visible by the browser but only search engines only. I needed to apply the basic searching techniques from Google into my design.

Search engines like google use “crawlers”, a web bot that follow links on the internet for the specific aim of creating an index of all the sites on the web worldwide.

I learnt that having multiple internal and external links to the site helps the website get a higher ranking, but this is along with the other parts of the how the search engine makes sure your page is most relevant to what the user is looking for.

Making sure that the hierarchy of content is obvious to search engines is essential as it means you get the relevant pages listed, you can do this by creating a sitemap. A sitemap lists all the pages connected to a webpage so that the crawler can easily list them. You also need to have a robots.txt, to make sure that the crawler knows it has access to the page and is meant to list this page.

Scrapping Pageless Design – A new start

I started creating a pageless design due to reasons that can be found here (https://akbrodie.wordpress.com/2014/10/02/the-future-of-web-design/)having looked at the future of the web and the potential it has. As I was going along the process of creating it | realised that there were actually quite a few negatives. First, the amount of people that reach the bottom of the page after visiting the page is very minimal. You can easily understand the need for less text by reading this except from “The Psychology of Public Speaking” (http://www.mrmediatraining.com/2012/08/23/how-many-minutes-is-the-audiences-attention-span/)

“A website that contains less than 111 words the user will read 49% of the text on average, this is a moderately small amount of text in comparison to the average webpage that contains about 600 words on average, the user usually only then read about 28% of the text and then spend a further 4 seconds for 100 words on a page”

When all the data is on one index file, the file sizes end up being much larger than the average webpage, this means loading times will be longer, this isn’t good for two reasons. One, the user might just get bored of waiting and leave the site to the next one they can find and secondly, Google’s rules;

“Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users.         Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site         responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user         experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs.         Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site         speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the         speed of a site relative to other sites”

now specify that speed is considered when ranking your website, therefore a pageless design would get a lower rank because it takes longer to load.

Another reason having no pages effects the seo results is the fact there is only one title tag within the index file. An ideal title tag is under 65 characters and is a sentence consisting of keywords. Having multiple pages means you can have more title tags, therefore capturing a larger audience. Google also loves content, the more content you have the better the ranking you will get.

Given what I have just discussed, I have scrapped the scrolling page and begin research into SEO to implement into my new, multi-page website.

References:

http://firstresponsive.com/pageless-design-future-web-design/
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
(upload pageless design to FTP) run speed test.