Part 5 Fundamentals of Digital Marketing: Email Marketing

June 7, 2020January 7, 2019 by marissawaite

marissawaite

Hey! I’m Marissa, a freelance web designer and digital marketer. I love working with clients to take the overwhelm out of getting their business online. Thanks for stopping by and taking a look at my blog!

Part 5 Fundamentals of Digital Marketing: Email Marketing

This blog is the final piece in a five-part series all about digital marketing. In this post, we’ll dive a bit further into Email Marketing.

In Part 1 of my series on the different aspects of digital marketing, we covered a brief overview of all of the elements that make up a well-rounded digital marketing plan. In the rest of this series we’ve been looking at each of these elements separately so that we can get a better understanding of each, and then use them to create our own digital marketing strategy.

Isn’t email marketing…boring?

Email marketing is probably the least exciting part of digital marketing and (I believe) gets a bit of a hard time. But it is so important; way more important than most people believe, and are therefore willing to spend time on. In comparison to social media, how exciting that is and how publicly people can see how popular you are with your followers, it seems pretty boring. You can’t really show off how many people you have on your email list, you know? On top of that, did you know your social media posts organically reach only around 6% of your followers? Email marketing gives you a much more direct and personal approach to your audience.

How often do you have someone that you love following on social media, you interact and engage with on a regular basis, and then you suddenly realise that you haven’t seen their posts for 2-3 weeks? So you head over to their profile, expecting them to have not posted for that amount of time, and see they’ve been posting away and you just haven’t been shown their posts in your feed because for whatever reason the algorithm decided not to show them to you. That happens to me all the time. On the other hand, how often do you go a day without checking your emails…? I’d be willing to bet it’s not very often.

I listened to an awesome podcast on Jenna Kutcher’s Goaldigger about this recently, and I would highly recommend you listen to it too! You can find out more about it here. The bottom line is, email subscribers are worth a lot more to your business than social media followers who are owned by whatever platform they found you on.

What do I do with my mailing list?

This will depend a bit on what industry you work in and what how you present your brand. If you’re a musician, you should definitely be making use of your mailing list. Your audience wants to hear from you! They want to come see your gigs, and buy your albums and other products. You could send out an email once or twice a month with upcoming gig dates, a link to your latest YouTube video, a link to your album that’s on sale, or a special coupon for gig tickets for being on your mailing list.

With your mailing list, you don’t want to constantly be selling yourself either; give your followers something of value for being on your list. Serve, serve, serve, and then sell. There are some amazing, easy to use platforms; my favourite is Mailchimp. It’s super easy to build nice looking emails, and a great way to build your list. Here’s a handy list of things to check when you’re sending out your emails too:

Okay, so how am I supposed to get people to subscribe in the first place?

There are lots of great ways to do this! First of all, make sure you have lots of obvious places on your website and across your social media channels where people can opt-in to your email list. An easy way to grow your list is also to offer people a discount on a product or a freebie for signing up to your list. So for example, you could give a 10% discount for one of your CDs or tunebooks, or a pdf checklist of the best ways to work on a certain technique for your instrument, or a free e-book you’ve written.

Using email marketing to connect with your audience

In the podcast I’ve recommended above, Jenna talks about how she sees social media as being your virtual ‘handshake’, a way to let people get to know you, and how your mailing list is where you can truly serve the people who want to connect with you. Ultimately, people are on social media to have fun and connect and aren’t always in the frame of mind that they want to be sold to. However, the people on your mailing list want to buy what you have! They most likely already know who you are and what you do, and actively want to stay connected with you. There’s another great article here about how email marketing can be more powerful than social media. I hope that this gives you the push you need to get started on building your mailing list, and to learn a little bit more about why it’s so important!

Up next: how to create your own digital marketing strategy

If you need to catch up, you can read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 or Part 4 (phew!) on my blog. Next time, we’re going to take everything we’ve learnt about digital marketing in this series and use it to help you build your own digital marketing strategy. It’s not as scary as it seems, I promise! Keep an eye out or sign up to my mailing list to get my blogs delivered right to your inbox. As always, I welcome your comments and questions below!

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Part 4 Fundamentals of Digital Marketing: Content Marketing

July 3, 2020December 18, 2018 by marissawaite

marissawaite

Part 4 Fundamentals of Digital Marketing: Content Marketing

This blog is the fourth in a five-part series all about digital marketing. In this post, we’ll dive a bit further into Content Marketing.

In Part 1 of my series on the different aspects of digital marketing, we covered a brief overview of all of the elements that make up a well-rounded digital marketing plan. In the rest of this series we’re going to look at each of these elements separately so that we can get a better understanding of each, and then use them to create our own digital marketing strategy.

What is content marketing?

As we covered in Part 1, content marketing is the creation and distribution of high quality content tailored for your users. It can encompass content in written, audio and visual form for your audience to consume across any channels you’re active on. I think the important part is that, no matter what part of digital marketing you want to make the most use of, content marketing is going to be an essential part of your strategy and process, not something separate. The Marketing Helpline has a great article here that outlines how content marketing is integral to every element of digital marketing. Neil Patel also has tons of great info and resources about content marketing on his site.

What type of content should I create?

Your content is anything in written, audio or video form that you create for your audience. Which of these you choose will depend on what you feel most comfortable with. Video is great, but if it makes you feel too awkward if will probably be obvious and not look too natural. Podcasts are great and becoming increasingly popular; people can listen to them while doing day-to-day tasks where they otherwise wouldn’t be learning or consuming anything, and as such you can get more of their focused attention (i.e. while they’re driving to work, going for a run, doing the dishes, etc).

Written content is also hugely valuable and easy to share on your website and social channels, and can take less time than writing a script for video and creating a good quality clip. Whichever form of content you choose to use in your content marketing (or whatever mix you’d like to do!), you need to think about what is more useful for your audience and what can give them the most value. Here are some ideas for types of content that people love to consume:

How do I use content marketing for my business?

The content you produce is integral to every part of your digital marketing strategy. You can create written blog posts on your website which you can then publish to your social channels as part of your social media marketing efforts and then send an excerpt to your mailing list as part of your email marketing strategy. You can create videos that you upload to YouTube or Vimeo and then share them across your website, to then go out to your social channels. Regular, high quality content will also greatly help your SEO efforts. Publishing new and relevant information on a blog page or news section of your website will help keep your website relevant and useful for your consumers, which will help you rank more highly on search engines. All of this combined will also help build your brand, which makes you more memorable and relatable to your followers while also strengthening your SEO.

Where do I start?!

Rather than try to cover all your bases and risk not doing a thorough job of each, you should choose one form of content to produce and start creating one piece of high quality, long form content on a weekly basis. Focus on content that will be useful for your followers, something that will help them solve any problems they might have. Ask them what they want to hear! Choose a form of content to create that you’ll be comfortable with, brainstorm a list of ideas, and set aside a block of time to start creating. Often, it can be easier and more productive to spend a whole day creating upcoming content, rather than dipping in and out a couple times a week.

Using content marketing to build your brand

Ultimately, content marketing will be a part of the process of your overall digital marketing strategy, rather than a separate factor that you can take or leave. Marketing can’t exist without content to market! There are so many great resources around to learn more about specific parts of content marketing, and you can learn so much with really in-depth tools provided by key industry leaders these days. Content marketing is a means of telling a story to your followers that helps them solve their problems while building your brand.

Up next: best practice and pointers for Email Marketing

If you need to catch up, you can read Part 1, Part 2 or Part 3 on my blog. Next up in this series is the final instalment, where we’ll take a look at social media marketing. As always, I welcome your comments and questions below!

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Part 3 Fundamentals of Digital Marketing: SMM

June 8, 2020December 2, 2018 by marissawaite

marissawaite

December 2, 2018

Part 3 Fundamentals of Digital Marketing: SMM

In Part 1 of my series on the different aspects of digital marketing, we covered a brief overview of all of the elements that make up a well-rounded digital marketing plan. In the rest of this series we’re going to go a bit further into each of these elements so that we can get a better understanding of each, and then use them to create our own digital marketing strategy.

What social networking channels are there?

SMM stands for ‘Social Media Marketing’, which refers to your online presence on various social media channels and the traffic your website receives from them. While a variety of social networks fall into this category, they are all different to one another and as such all require a different approach. Each social media channel has its own properties and qualities that make it unique. Let’s look at a few of the most well-known channels that are out there:

– Facebook is perhaps the most iconic social media network and allows lengthy status updates, photos, sharing, commenting, messaging, games…there are so many things you can do here! Facebook began mainly as a way for people to connect to others they knew and to make friends in the online world but has become very popular with businesses and companies as well, and is now full of pages that you can ‘like’ if you want to see updates from them.

– Instagram is similar to (and owned by) Facebook in a sense, but is primarily an image sharing platform. Hashtags are much more widely used here, and instead of becoming friends with someone like you do on Facebook, you simply follow them. Instagram is a very visual platform, and similar to most other social networks is now filled with many businesses as well as personal accounts.

– Twitter is a social sharing site where you can post short (up to 280 character) tweets, or messages. You can follow others, create lists, trawl through hashtags, take part in q&a’s and tweeting hours. Twitter feeds can move pretty quickly, due to the shorter messages on this platform.

– Pinterest is known as a social media network but is unique in that it is also a search engine. Essentially, it is an online pin-board where users can ‘pin’ images which are linked to sites that they group into different boards. Pinterest is also regarded as a social network in that users can follow one another, comment on pins and re-pin content form other users. This platform is still a bit under-looked with its huge search engine capability, and can drive large amounts of traffic to your site if used correctly.

– LinkedIn is a social network that is designed more specifically for business networking. Users can request a connection to someone they know, post content, follow company pages and join groups, comment and like other users content. Many companies also post job openings or recruit potential employees on LinkedIn.

– YouTube is a social network based on sharing videos. Users can follow each other and comment on videos and subscribe to channels. With video quickly growing as one of the most captivating and effective forms of content around, this channel is one that has an incredible amount of usage. Here’s a pretty impressive list of stats to take a look at!

This is simply a short run down of some of the main players of the many social channels that exist online today. This infographic by Leverage is a great visual to describe some more about the main social channels:

How do I choose which social channels I should use for my business?

There are many different approaches that can be taken here, and I don’t believe there is one hard and fast rule that will work for everyone. All too often though, I speak with someone who thinks they immediately need to jump in and be active on four or five social networks and then say they want to send out one post a week. I’m of the mindset that it is far better to choose a couple of channels (at least to start with) and do them well. So then, how do you choose where to start?

You could make a reasonable guess based on which industry you’re in about where would be a good place to be active, but the more important question you should ask yourself is, where are your followers? That’s where you want to be active on social media. You should take some time to research your customers and your competitors, and then look at demographics of the main social media networks that you are considering being active on. Here’s a good place to start researching the demographics of the main social networks you might be considering.

For example, if I were to launch an online music course aimed at 30–50 year olds who are interested in folk music, I would probably want to start with Facebook and YouTube; my followers will be most active on these channels and I can serve them useful content in the best way possible on these platforms. Twitter and LinkedIn are probably a bit too business-based for this example.

How do I start marketing on social media?

The best way to start is to create an on-brand presence on your chosen channels and then start posting valuable, high quality content that links to your website. You should also really invest in time to build up your brand and engage with your followers on those channels. What’s the point in putting together fluffy content, posting it out across 6 or 7 channels and never answering any comments or questions on your posts? Your followers will be able to tell very quickly that you don’t really care about them, and then your social media presence will be swallowed up in a very noisy online world where it is becoming increasingly difficult to stand out. If you want to build your brand on social media, set yourself apart and be more memorable, you need to be authentic and create quality content that serves your followers well. After all, social media is all about being social and connecting with others!

Most large social media networks also have their own ad networks. Try to learn a bit about each and start with some small ad campaigns if possible. Compared to traditional marketing methods such as tv, radio and newspapers, ads on social media are pretty underpriced and can have huge ROI for how many people see your ads and how specifically you can target them. If you haven’t yet come across Gary Vaynerchuk, he talks a lot about this so make sure you check him out. You can also do a bit of reading here, here or here to get started with Facebook ads. Many people think you can throw money at social media ads and not be active or post organic content, but I really believe these go hand in hand. Making sure you have a good organic presence and then supplementing this with paid ads will give the best results.

My tips to help you start your social media marketing

Now that we’ve covered just the basics of social media marketing, I hope you’ll put some of this information to good use. These are some of my tips to help you get started with social media marketing, and I hope that makes it a little less daunting for you.

As always, there are many different aspects on the go here to effectively complete your social media marketing yourself. If this is something you would rather outsource to free up your time, please get in touch with me to learn more about the digital marketing services I provide.

Up next: best practice and pointers for Content Marketing

If you want to catch up, you can read Part 1 or Part 2 in this series. Next up in this series is Part 4, where we take a look at content marketing. As always, I welcome your comments and questions below!

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Part 2 Fundamentals of Digital Marketing: SEO, SEM and Display Advertising

June 8, 2020November 21, 2018 by marissawaite

marissawaite

November 21, 2018

Part 2 Fundamentals of Digital Marketing: SEO, SEM and Display Advertising

This blog is the second in a five-part series all about digital marketing. In this post, we’ll dive a bit further into Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Marketing and display advertising.

In Part 1 of my series on the different aspects of digital marketing, we covered a brief overview of all of the elements that make up a well-rounded digital marketing plan. In the rest of this series we’re going to go a bit further into each of these elements so that we can get a better understanding of each, and then use them to create our own digital marketing strategy.

How can I improve my SEO?

SEO is the fine art of optimising your website so that it organically appears higher up in search engine rankings. There are many different ways you can improve your SEO, and therefore lots of things to take into consideration. Many website designers will do an initial SEO optimisation when building your site, or may outsource this to an SEO specialist. When building your site with SEO in mind, there are some important factors to work on such as:

– Heading tags

– Keywords included in written copy

– Image optimisation

– Alt tags

– Meta tags

– Link optimisation (internal and external)

I really like this visual representation from Moz about the many different parts that make up a website’s SEO strategy:

SEO can also be divided up into two separate camps: on page SEO or off page SEO. On page SEO relates to the items listed above, and consists of the parts of your website that can be optimised for better SEO results. Off page SEO is built on other web pages linking to or driving traffic to your website. For example, posting your content on other sites such as Medium, Facebook or Twitter and then linking these to your site.

As you can see, SEO (similar to all aspects of digital marketing) is made up of many moving parts. You can optimise initially to include many of these factors, but ideally you will have someone working on your SEO on an ongoing basis. This could include working on improving keywords, page titles and headlines, tweaking blog titles, publishing good quality content, building links and tracking progress of your results. SEO is a long-term game though, and can take a while to see good results. Many people don’t have the patience to invest in this on a long term basis, but if you want to gain traffic online from your organic search results, good SEO is a must.

One of my favourite go-to SEO resources is Neil Patel. He puts out so much high quality, long form, and useful written content and videos; there is always a ton to learn from him. He also has a great podcast with Eric Siu called ‘Digital Marketing School’, with a short episode every day that’s packed with tips from their many years of marketing experience. I would definitely recommend following Neil and subscribing to their podcast for lots of great, actionable info about SEO and many other aspects of digital marketing.

A good working knowledge of SEO is important for your digital marketing strategy, but there are many people who specialise in this field. If you have the income and are willing to invest, you can find a number of freelancers or agencies who offer a variety of SEO services that will be of great benefit to your organic results. In practice, your SEO efforts should create a website experience that is easy and effective for search engines to understand, but also creates a good experience for your users.

Do I need to do SEM too?

As we covered in Part 1 of this series, you don’t have to do every single aspect of the elements that make up digital marketing. However, an effective digital marketing strategy will involve a well-rounded and omnipresent approach. Search engine marketing can be a very effective way to get more traffic to your site. The cost of this will depend on your industry and what keywords you want to use.

Again, this is an entirely bigger subject on its own to delve into, and you will find many people specialising in aspects of SEM, such as Google Ads experts. Google itself has great free resources to work through all the parts of their platform and get started with their ads. This requires the initial work of setting up your ads, and then also requires ongoing tweaking for optimised results and to keep an eye on results and ad spend. Utilising their platform, you will be able to research keywords and the traffic generated by each, set up a variety of ads, track your results, and continually optimise each aspect of your ads. To properly track your results and search traffic you’ll also want to have Google Analytics set up (best practice and minimal analytics for any site!). There’s a great article here that walks through tips to run an effective search campaign.

How does display advertising factor into things?

Display advertising is different than search engine marketing, and has a lower conversion rate (less than one percent across all industries). You can see here the difference between search engine advertising conversion rates and display advertising conversion rates:

The simple reason for this is that search engine ads are displayed when people are searching for a service or product with intent (i.e, being served an ad for Nike running shoes when searching for ‘best running shoes for women’), and users being served display ads are typically browsing websites and not in the intentional search phase of looking for a new product or service. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try display advertising, but to help you be conscious of your target customer’s mindset and how you will grab their attention with your adverts. Neil Patel has a great article here that dives into exactly how and why this difference really matters, and how it can affect your approach to display advertising.

SEO, SEM and Display Advertising work best hand in hand

Ultimately, you would ideally work on each of these aspects as part of your wider digital marketing strategy. SEM and display advertising have the advantage of quicker results, but can be expensive and require ongoing optimisation to see a good ROI. SEO is a longer term game, but essential if you want your website to rank well within search engine results and therefore, for your audience to find your site.

Up next: best practice and pointers for SMM

Next we’ll move on to Part 3 in this series, where we’ll take a look at social media marketing. As always, I welcome your comments and questions below!

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Part 1: Fundamentals of Digital Marketing

June 8, 2020November 10, 2018 by marissawaite

marissawaite

Part 1: Fundamentals of Digital Marketing

This blog is the first in a five-part series all about digital marketing. In this post, we’ll look at the main elements that make up all of the pieces of a well-rounded approach to digital marketing

Digital marketing is an ever-changing landscape that requires a lot of time and attention. There are so many moving parts, it can become really easy to quickly feel totally overwhelmed and at odds with the whole process. Having a strong online presence and therefore a good digital marketing strategy is crucial to any business these days. We’ll look at how to create your own digital marketing strategy in another post, but for now let’s look at what exactly digital marketing includes.

Do I need to do digital marketing?

Now more than ever, the vast majority of the population is online. Currently in the UK, 75% of people access the internet every single day. Can you afford to let those connections and marketing opportunities pass you by? Since your customers are online, you should be too if you want your brand to be front of mind, and to do this you want to be online engaging with them. Chances are that most of your competitors are online too, and if you want to measure up against them you’ll need to have a strong online presence yourself.

How much digital marketing you do is completely up to you, but a strong strategy will include a little bit of all of the elements we’re about to look at. Effective digital marketing isn’t so much about putting all of your eggs in one basket (like spending all of your budget boosting posts on social media), but rather about being consistent, engaging with your audience, and building awareness over time. So ideally you’ll spend time growing your channels organically, as well as allocating some budget to paid ads. Some aspects of these elements will show quick and high engagement rates and ROI, while others will pay off in the longer term. I’ll go into each of these elements in more depth in separate posts, but for now let’s take a look at each aspect of digital marketing and what they mean.

What does digital marketing include?

1) SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Your website’s rankings within search engines such as Google. Everyone wants to be on page 1! And there are lots of ways you can work on your SEO. You can make a good effort when your site is being built to make sure your whole site is optimised for SEO, and you can also work on this on an ongoing basis as well. I really like this article for explaining some of the main SEO terms you’ll come across such as keywords, meta descriptions and alt text. People are realising more and more that, to show up close to the top of Google’s results, you need to invest in some good SEO work to make this happen. You should invest in a solution at least as a one-off to optimise your website, and ideally also on an ongoing basis if you want to keep improving with your rankings.

2) SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

This element of digital marketing consist of paid ads on search engines. These are the paid/sponsored ads you’ll see at the very top of search engine result pages. The most common of these is Google AdWords, which allows you to set up paid campaigns based on certain keywords people are searching for. SEM can sometimes give quicker results than more long term SEO work, but isn’t always better. They require a lot of work to set up and to tweak on an ongoing basis, and depending on your niche your CPC (cost per click) can be high. There is much debate about how many people actually click through on paid results vs organic, and I like this article as well as this one to consider a few different views.

3) SMM (Social Media Marketing)

Put simply, social media marketing is increasing your brand awareness, spreading your reach and gaining new customers through social media channels. The most popular social media channels include:

– Facebook

– Instagram

– Twitter

– Pinterest

– LinkedIn

– Snapchat

Each of these social channels are unique, and they all have their own uses. As with all of these elements, social media can take up a lot of time. Not only do you need to create worthwhile content to post on a regular basis, there are now also many ‘live’ elements that are very popular within these social channels such as Facebook Live and Instagram Stories. Ideally, you’ll not only be posting out content but also spending time at least once a day engaging with your followers.

Social media isn’t only about conversions, it’s about creating an online community with your consumers to engage with them and help increase your brand awareness.

Of course, one of your goals in marketing on social media channels may be to increase conversions, but I don’t believe this should be the end goal of the entire reason you are active on your social media channels. There is so much content and information out there for people to consume these days; you should want to connect with your followers and provide solutions to problems they have, not just post out fluffy content and never look in on your social streams or engage with people.

4) Display advertising

Display advertising is the use of visual display ads which are mostly banners and images. These are placed across webpages, and are based on the demographics you want your ads to be served to. Users click on your ad and are taken through to your landing page, which then hopefully results into a conversion. Check this out to get a more thorough understanding of the various kinds of display advertising, and look at its different aspects in more depth such as retargeting and the importance of a good landing page for your ads.

5) Content marketing

A popular saying in the digital world right now sums this one up well: ‘Content is king’. Essentially, content marketing is the creation of content to be used across your online channels. Pieces of content you can produce include:

– Blogs

– Videos

– Infographics

– Ebooks

– Podcasts

Content marketing is essential to digital marketing as it goes hand in hand with so many other aspects such as social media marketing and SEO. Without content, brands wouldn’t have many useful or interesting posts to share on social media or in email newsletters. Also, having ongoing and consistent content creation is essential to good SEO practices. Stop and think about how many articles, videos, lists, how-to’s and podcasts you consume in a day, never mind a whole week. Content is king because it’s everywhere, and with 84% of people in the UK accessing the internet on a regular basis, it’s really no surprise that it’s so important.

6) Email Marketing

Last but certainly not least, we have email marketing. Email marketing is used by brands to communicate with their audience. There has been more emphasis in the digital world as of late about just how important building your email list is. Think about it for a minute; how often do you quickly sift through your email inbox throughout the day? Do you check your emails more consistently than your social media, or maybe even take a social media break here or there for a day or two? With all of the social media algorithms, it’s easy to miss posts by brands that you maybe even love and engage with; do you ever sometimes go days or weeks without seeing any of their posts as they slip further and further from your mind?

Put in perspective, emails are the easiest way to directly reach your audience. The people on your mailing list have actually taken the time to type in their email address for you and say ‘yes! I want you to contact me!’, which means they’re most likely already interested in your service or product and think you have something of value to offer them. I’m not saying you should take advantage of your audience by sending tons of emails filled with coupon codes hoping for sales; you need to respect them and understand that they’ve trusted you with their email address. Send something of value! Give them a reason to look for your emails; exclusive free whitepapers, first dibs on any new offers you launch, or easy access to free ebooks. For the purpose of this post, it simply bears thinking about that emails have a click through rate of 3.57%, while with Facebook you can expect a click through rate of about 0.07%. If you’re not building your email list, chances are you’re missing out!

So where do I start?

Looking at all of these different elements of digital marketing can be intimidating, if not totally overwhelming. For now, I suggest even doing a bit of research and reading into what might be the best for your own brand or business, and deciding where might be a good place to start. You certainly don’t need to do all of these from the outset, but it has to be said that the best marketing approach is a well-rounded one. You won’t build an authentic and fan-filled social media following by simply putting money behind ads without taking the time to engage regularly on your channels, and you won’t keep your audience on your mailing list by sending an email every single day with content that isn’t that valuable to them.

You can do as many aspects of digital marketing yourself as you want or have time to do, but the truth is that digital marketing, if done well, is very time consuming. There are many ways you can manage digital marketing on your own, but if you need help with your digital marketing strategy and execution then drop me a line! We can have a chat and see what you’re interested in, what problems you face regularly with your online presence, and how I can help take some (or all of) your workload off your hands so that you don’t need to worry about your online marketing for your business.

Up next: best practice and pointers for SEO, SEM and display advertising

Keep an eye out or sign up to my mailing list to get the next part in this series delivered straight to your inbox, where we’ll delve further into all things search engine optimisation, search engine marketing and display advertising. As always, I welcome your comments and questions in the field below!

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7 Essentials To Discuss Before Your Website Build

June 8, 2020October 30, 2018 by marissawaite

marissawaite

7 Essentials To Discuss Before Your Website Build

Getting a website built can feel a bit daunting at the beginning, especially if you don’t know much about what the process with entail. Who do you hire to build your website? How much will it cost? What will you need to provide, and will it be a lot of work for you? Having a clear expectation from the beginning about exactly what is required from both web designer and client can make or break your experience during your website build.

If clients don’t really know what to expect during a website build, it can result in a lot of stalling, builds never really getting off the ground and projects taking ages to complete. Frustrating for both client and designer, to say the least!

After all this, the client is most likely left with a website that isn’t a true representation of them or their brand, and one that won’t be very effective for them. If it is really clear from the outset what is required, you’ll enjoy the process of your website build much more, and end up with a website that is going to work for you, make a difference to your brand and help convert your users into paying customers and raving fans.

Here are the top items you would ideally have (or at least know you’ll need to look work on) before starting your website build or redesign:

1) Website domain name

Your domain name is the URL of your website (i.e. marissawaitecreative.com). You can purchase this with companies such as 123 Reg, Go Daddy or Namecheap. You simply enter the domain name you’d like to buy and you can see different options of prices depending on the suffix (i.e. .com, .co.uk, .org etc). All you need to do is purchase your domain name here and keep a note of your login details with whichever company you’ve bought the domain with.

2) Website hosting

This is where your website and its content lives online. Every website needs to be hosted somewhere! There are several different types of hosting, which you can learn more about here. If you decide to try and build your own site with a sitebuilder such as Wix or Squarespace, your hosting will be included in your monthly plan with them. There are many good hosting providers I’ve used, and would be happy to recommend some for you to investigate. Many web designers also have their own hosting packages where you can also host your site.

3) Logo/branding

If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll hopefully have a logo! Some businesses may be more likely not to have a logo, such as freelancers or musicians operating under their own name. However, having a good logo and branding to use no matter what industry you work in is really important; strong and consistent branding will help you stand out as well as convey familiarity and consistency to your consumers. You’ll be more recognisable and they’ll know what to expect from you. It will help you stand out! Your branding includes different aspects such as your logo, colour palette, personality, tone of voice, style and typography. When working on your branding, it’s also helpful for your website design to discuss some of your unique selling points so that you can make sure these are highlighted for your consumers. If you want to learn a bit more about branding and why it’s so important, you should check out this great article.

4) High quality images

The images you use can make or break your website. Poorly lit, blurry images taken on a mobile phone aren’t going to cut it for your website, or be anywhere near the resolution and size they need to be. Using stock photos is a good alternative, and there are plenty of different sites where you can find lots of great photos, such as Unsplash or Adobe Stock. The best thing you can do though, is to have professionally taken photos ready for your site build. Having photos taken specifically to portray your own work, product or service will make a huge difference in properly portraying your business, and this is also another strong aspect of your branding. People can usually tell if your site is built solely with stock images, or if you have your own photos that show exactly what you do.

5) Written content

Written content is a huge part of your website that will take a lot of thought and probably be the most time consuming. You can do this yourself or hire a copywriter to do it for you. There will be pros and cons to each! If you have the time and are comfortable, you are the best person for the job. No one will know your ideal consumer as well as you do, so you will know more than others exactly what to say to them and how to speak to them. When writing, it’s important to keep in mind some SEO optimisation points as well as who your ideal consumer is. This can feel like a really daunting task! A copywriter will be more of an investment, but can also be really worth it. With a copywriter, you’ll pay them a fee to take care of all of your written content for you. If you look around, you’ll be able to find someone who is well-experienced in your industry which will go a long way in making your copy perfect for your website.

6) Your goals

Knowing your goals for your website is really important. Do you want people to sign up to your mailing list? Book you to play a gig? Buy a service or product you offer? Choosing one main goal for your site is most effective, and this will help dictate what your calls to action, user experience, and website design should portray. If your email list is most important to you, you’ll want to have this on every page and also look at some different sing-up options across your site. When you know what your goals for your website are, it becomes a lot easier to create a website that will help you reach them.

7) Analytics

There is a wide array of different analytics you can plug into the back end of your website so you can measure and track your consumers and see how effective your site is. Analytics are really important so that you can see what does and doesn’t work on your site, and use this to continuously improve your online presence. Google Analytics is usually the first tool people start with. It’s easy to set up and plug into your site, and in your dashboard you’ll be able to see tons of useful stats such as how many visitors are on your site, bounce rate, which pages are most popular, what percentage of your visitors are on mobile or desktop, etc. You can check out another great article here about some different analytical tools available that you can use for your site.

In conclusion

Sometimes people don’t realise that even if you hire a web designer/developer to build your site for you, the best sites will be made when you take the time and effort to be involved in (and enjoy!) the whole process. Knowing ahead of time what you’ll need to have ready for your build will help give you a head start on the process and set you up for a more enjoyable experience.

Get in touch with me if you’d like to talk about working on your website together!

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5 Reasons A Professional Website Is Important For Musicians

June 8, 2020October 16, 2018 by marissawaite

marissawaite

October 16, 2018

5 Reasons A Professional Website Is Important For Musicians

Being a self-employed musician means you can have so many plates in the air at any given moment. You need to be amazing at your craft and continue to grow and practice (which takes tons of hours, if not years!), be able to market yourself properly to get more work, be active on social media, be out networking and making new connections, book and organise gigs and teaching, keep track of your accounting…the list is endless. You get what I mean though, and I think this line of work is often much more difficult than musicians get credit for.

In recent years, having a notable online presence and being active on social media have become increasingly necessary for booking gigs, wether at festivals and venues or with your ideal clients for their wedding. Bands who don’t have a website and social media channels (or badly built ones) are simply harder to sell. If you’re not online in a big way, you’re missing out on a huge part of your potential audience; you’re missing out on being front of mind with both people who would be paying to come and see your gigs as well as the people who are going to be booking you for those gigs.

Having a social media presence is equally as important (and I’ll get to that in a different post!), but to reach your audience and market yourself properly, you need to have a well built website. A one-page site with a list of (hopefully not outdated) gig dates, a couple of nice pictures, and a link to bandcamp doesn’t really cut it anymore if you want to command attention, show people who you really are and what your music is all about.

Any easy website builder (the likes of Wix or Squarespace) will absolutely do in the first instance if you need somewhere to start and can’t afford to spend any money on your website. But for a small investment in yourself and your brand, there are many reasons why a professionally built website can be infinitely better. Here’s my top reasons why you should make the jump and invest in yourself:

1. You won’t have as many technical glitches.

With this I don’t mean only having techy issues while building your site, but free website builders can come with an array of technical issues such as being extremely slow (they are often all hosted on the same servers), having unprofessional domain addresses (and then asking you to pay a more premium price for a different domain name), and irrelevant adverts popping up across your site. All of these can affect how professional your site looks, how well it works for you, and other factors like your SEO rankings.

2. Your websites will rank higher for SEO.

SEO is essentially how Google and other search engines rank you in their search results. SEO is a huge field in its own right, but there are a several reasons using website builders can be bad for your site’s SEO. Speed is a huge factor; having a slow website is largely penalised by Google (and also makes people a lot less likely to stay on your site). Having a good website structure is also essential for good SEO rankings, and lots of website builders create one-page scrolling sites. Search engines love when your website is well organised with good data and site hierarchy! Depending on your web designer, you should also get some good initial SEO optimisation with your website build that you wouldn’t get otherwise should you try to use a free website builder.

3. It will be easier for your brand to stand out.

If you’re a musician, you’d better believe your brand is important! When you hire a professional web designer, they should discuss your brand with you before they build your site. This includes important aspects such as your tone of voice, photos, and colour palette. Your website should be your online home where you’re able to get these important aspects of your brand across to potential agents and your audience. You want people to visit it and feel like they know you! Using a template on a website builder that everyone else is using won’t be as effective a way to get this across.

4. You’ll be able to have all the extras and extensions that you could really use to your advantage on your site.

Ideally you’d have social channel integrations, mailing list signups, social sharing and a shop on your site. Many musicians these days use Bandcamp, which is an easy way to set up and sell your products online. However, Bandcamp charge 15% for digital sales and 10% for merch. As someone who is self-employed, wouldn’t you rather avoid that if you could? If you use a web designer who can build you an e-commerce shop, you’ll be able to manage your whole shop directly in your website’s CMS and the only percentage you’ll pay is a small amount to a company such as Stripe, which allows you to take payments online.

5. You won’t need to spend your time figuring out how to build a website.

These days it’s possible for almost anyone to spend a few days or weeks learning how to put up a quick one-page site to get their info out there and have something to link to from social media. When you’re self-employed, you most likely always have a huge to-do list. Why not let someone qualified take care of your site building for you? As the saying goes, time is money, and you should be spending your time practicing, planning the logistics of getting to gigs, and working on new music rather than sitting at your computer for hours on end trying to piece together a passable website.

To sum it all up…

I understand that even at a low price, paying for a website can seem a bit much for a one man band. There are certainly reasons why piecing together a quick site is appealing, and there will be pros to doing that as well. However, if you want to be taken seriously by others you shouldn’t worry about taking yourself seriously, and making a small investment in yourself and your work. If you want to get ahead of the game and have a notable online presence, a well designed website will help you standout both to agents and audiences alike.

Get in touch with me here to have a no-obligation chat or get a free quote for your site. I’d love to hear from you!