Custom vs. Template Websites: A Complete Comparison
If there’s one thing the recent shift in commerce has proven, it’s that a good website is necessary for businesses to survive.
And much like the age-old question about trees falling in the forest, the same point can be made about a business. If your business doesn’t have a website, does it really exist?
We won’t spend much time convincing you that you need a website (spoiler: you do). Instead, we’ll tackle a tough question that faces many businesses in need of a website: Should I partner with a company for a custom-built website or should I use an online service where I can build my own?
We live in a world that values convenience and simplicity. But our grab-and-go mindset doesn’t stop at our lunchtime decisions. We expect accessibility and ease in our daily lives, and many online services today offer to meet our expectations when it comes to building a website, too.
Dozens of services online, such as Squarespace and Wix, present users with the opportunity to build a beautiful website by themselves with little hassle. They tout best-in-class website templates, simple customization, and seamless functionality on desktop and mobile devices—not to mention all of these benefits are available at a low monthly cost.
But as the saying goes, if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is. Certainly, these out-of-the-box websites have value. Plenty of individuals and organizations can benefit from a website that is easy to set up and customize. However, businesses that have specific goals and requirements for their website may discover that the constraints of a template website outweigh the benefits of simplicity and convenience.
Let’s see how custom websites stack up against template websites in some of the most important criteria that our clients seek.
Cost and Timeline
For people or businesses in immediate need for a website, using a service like Squarespace can get their site up and running in an afternoon. The process is fairly simple and the most difficult decision one has to make is choosing which template they will use. After the site is complete, the owner will only have to pay somewhere between $12–$50 per month to keep the site up, with the higher monthly costs required for more features and functionality.
Compared to a custom website, template sites are much cheaper and require much less time to launch. Depending on who you partner with and the scale of your site, a custom site can take anywhere from 3–12 months and the price can range from $5,000–$20,000 for simple sites, with large or complicated sites increasing the cost.
Businesses have a lot of factors to consider when selecting a web-building solution, but if cost and timeline are paramount, a template site might be the best option.
Maintenance and Upkeep
The thought of building a website might seem daunting enough, but once the site is done, someone still has to do the work in keeping the site up-to-date.
A common concern among our new clients is that they aren’t confident that they will be able to maintain their site once our work is done. While it doesn’t exactly take a tech wiz to publish or edit new pages on a website, it’s still reasonable for clients to be concerned about this aspect of their website.
The ease of setting up a website with a template service usually extends to maintaining the site as well. Most users, even novices, should find it fairly easy to add new pages or edit existing ones on their site. The existing page templates on an out-of-the-box site also make it difficult for an inexperienced webmaster to make any irreparable or destructive changes to the site. The downside, however, is that these existing page templates don’t allow for much customization or versatility.
When working with a firm or agency to build a bespoke website, they will consult with key decision-makers of a business and determine the best page templates to build for them. A good web design agency will also work to make all page templates as versatile and customizable as possible.
And for anybody nervous about having to work in the back end of a custom-built site, rest assured. Many web designers make it as easy as possible for you to edit pages or add new ones. At Happy Medium, we create a content management system (CMS) manual that walks users through a step-by-step process to update and maintain their new site. We even take the time to set up a training session with new clients to show them the ins and outs of their shiny new site.
Another added benefit of working with an agency to build a custom site is having an expert on hand in case of emergency maintenance. The more complex your site (e-commerce, scheduling plugins, APIs, etc.), the more chances for something to malfunction. And if you worked with an agency to build your site, you already have a group of experts on hand to resolve the issue.
While many template web services offer tech support remotely, it still leaves much of the work up to the site’s owner when something goes wrong.
So in the case of maintaining and updating a website, it’s certainly possible to do so on your own with a template service, but a custom-built site provides more support and versatility.
User Experience
When talking to new clients about their old website, one of the most frequent complaints we hear is they think their site is disorganized or difficult to navigate. Complaints like this speak to the importance of having a site that is simple for all users. A website acts as a digital stand-in for a business, so a website that is unfriendly to users reflects poorly on the business itself.
The discipline of designing a website to make it logical and easy to navigate is called user experience (UX) design. It involves organizing content in a way that is easy to understand and creating paths through a website that eliminate frustration for new users.
Template website services leave most of the UX work up to the individual building the site. Fundamental decisions, like how to organize content or how to layout navigation, make a huge difference in a user’s experience. Template websites don’t provide much guidance in this regard, leaving first-time web builders on their own to make crucial decisions.
This can result in a website that looks fresh and clean but is actually a maze to some users. A new website that is difficult to navigate is no better than an outdated website.
At Happy Medium, our web development process begins with UX. Our UX team works with our clients to understand the content on their site so we recognize the needs of current and future users. We use this information to build the skeleton of the website that is well-organized and logical.
Another added benefit of working with a web design agency is improved accessibility. Our UX experts are trained to consider users of all abilities when designing a site. Those attractive templates from an out-of-the-box web service may look nice but could be difficult to read for users with visual impairments or differently abled users.
Want to read more about Happy Medium’s own efforts in making the web a more accessible place? Click here to read how our UX designer uses empathy to make our websites more inclusive.
In short, there’s no substitute for a skilled UX designer and an experienced web development team in creating a site that is easy for all users to navigate.
Functionality
Functionality can mean a lot of things, and exactly what kind of functionality is required on a website varies depending on the business. The most common functionality requirements among our clients are eCommerce, online scheduling, or newsletter and donation subscriptions.
There was once a time when a business would expect to pay top dollar for highly functional eCommerce or other website abilities, but in the modern age of the internet, most functionality is widely available at a low cost. Even the most advanced Squarespace pricing plan is only $46/month and includes capabilities such as abandoned cart recovery and the ability to let customers create accounts. This certainly makes a template website an attractive option for many businesses.
However, much like maintenance and upkeep, while template service makes it easy to integrate a variety of functionality into a site, the responsibility of operating the moving pieces ends up on the person creating the site. Further, template web services only offer specific functionality options, such as offering one eCommerce provider or one option for CRM management.
Web agencies have experience with many different functionality tools. At Happy Medium, we work with our clients to find the best functionality options for them, or we can work with the existing tools that our clients use and integrate them into their site.
This means that if a business has an existing eCommerce system or CRM tool, a web design agency can easily integrate their tools into the new site, which may not be possible on a template site.
Layout, Content & Design
Even as builders of the web, we can’t argue with the convenience and ease of a web template. These templates make all of the tough design decisions for you, which lets you focus on what content to fill your website with.
However, templates do have downsides. When you work from a template, it all but eliminates the individuality and personality of a brand. It only takes 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for a user to make a judgment on a website. That means for your website to make a lasting first impression, it needs to be immediately distinctive and impactful. The templates available on out-of-the-box web services might be impactful, but they certainly are not distinctive.
Another downside of a template website is that all of the content of the site is up to you. For some people, this is not a problem at all. But for others who aren’t confident writers, it can be daunting to write all of the content for their website.
But effective design and content go far beyond first impressions. The best websites strike a balance between giving a user all of the information they need without overloading them—and this balance can be hard to achieve for a first-time web builder.
The layout, content, and design are really where web design agencies soar. A web partner will have specific experts in web design and copywriting that have experience extending existing brands to digital platforms. Our designers know the best practices for accessible web design, and we know how to write web content that is accessible, too.
At Happy Medium, we work to understand the core attributes of your brand, such as your brand colors, typefaces, and even your brand tone and voice. Then we incorporate these tenets into a bespoke website that becomes another cohesive piece of your marketing mix. Template websites won’t allow you the same level of customization and brand adherence.
If you’re seeking a truly custom website that can stay faithful to your brand and make a strong impact on your users, a web design agency is the way to go.
What’s the Verdict?
By now it should be clear that neither template websites or web design agencies provide a one-size-fits-all solution. Any business deciding on a new website has a lot to consider, and their decision to work with a web partner to go rogue will depend on the criteria that are most important to them.
But for a business that values its brand and wants a website built just for their needs, it’s tough to beat the expertise and experience of a full-service web development agency. So if your company has a website that needs a refresh, we’d love to hear from you.
Marketing Strategy Explained
I had an identity crisis in college. And unlike most college identity crises, mine wasn’t an odd goth phase. My crisis was that I was earning a degree in a major that I didn’t know how to explain.
My degree is in something called strategic communications, which is my alma mater’s version of an advertising and public relations degree. The problem that plagued me was having to explain what made my degree different from a standard communications major. The more work I do to help brands improve their own marketing has made it clear that many other people also struggle to understand what makes strategy so important.
Strategy is the basis of business. Without a strategy for what a company will sell and to whom they will sell it, no business would exist. That makes strategic communications the basis of business communication. It requires deciding what a business will say, to whom they will say it, and what goals they are trying to achieve in the process.
While it’s easy to shove “strategic” in the junk drawer along with other business buzzwords, I wouldn’t recommend doing that just yet. For any marketing efforts to work, there needs to be a strategy. Every tweet, every email, and every ad should leave a breadcrumb trail that leads back to a bigger marketing goal.
Without a sound strategy you are either destined for failure or you’ll luck into success with no understanding as to how you got there or how to do it again. That’s why Happy Medium spends so much effort into building a client’s strategy before we get to work. It’s easy to get lost on the road to impressions and page views, but a sound marketing strategy will prevent clients from ending up with an identity crisis of their own.
The Strategy Behind the Strategy
Let’s start at the beginning: Why do I need a marketing strategy in the first place?
A marketing strategy provides direction for all of your marketing efforts. Like bumpers on a bowling lane, a marketing strategy should form an easy-to-follow path that leads marketers to success, while acting as a guiding force that nudges marketers back on track if they start to stray.
Marketing without strategy is just talking. Without a marketing strategy, a business is better off sending someone to stand on a stump and shout about their products over actually producing a TV ad. You wouldn’t use a shotgun to kill a spider, and you shouldn’t try to reach customers without a sound strategy either.
Building Blocks of Strategy
A sound marketing strategy should answer all of the high-level questions that marketers need to be successful. At a minimum, your strategy should address these topics:
- Situational Analysis
- Target Audiences
- Value Propositions
- Key Brand Messages
- Brand Positioning
Each of these elements forms a separate stepping stone on the path to effective marketing, but without thoughtful consideration into each of these topics, your strategy will fall apart. Put good into your strategy, and you will get good out. Here’s where to start.
Research
There is no shorter path to failure than that of ignorance. You can write quippy tweets until doomsday, but you won’t get the cash register to ring unless you have a deep understanding of your audience and competitors first.
Start by learning about your audience. You should already have a pretty good idea of who your current customers are and which demographic characteristics describe them. While thinking about your current customers, also consider which audiences you think could become customers with the right messaging.
Once you identify your target audiences, start to uncover more about their behavior as consumers. You can find a lot of consumer behavior information online for free through your own social media platforms and other digital publications, or you can pay for a service like Brandwatch.
Competitive Intelligence and Brand Positioning
Despite what the name may imply, learning about your competitors does not have to be a covert operation. Take a look at all of the messaging your competitors produce and analyze how they chose to position themselves. Are they selling a value product? Attempting to position itself as a lifestyle brand?
Another efficient path to failure is trying to occupy the same space in the market as your competition. We’re playing chess here—not checkers. Only one brand can fit in each space. Identify where your competitors position themselves in the market, find an empty space where you can fit, and build your marketing strategy in that position.
Messaging and Value Proposition
Audience research, competitive intelligence, and brand positioning are the potatoes of your marketing strategy—the dirty work that nobody sees. Your value proposition and key messaging are the french fries—the final product for public consumption.
A value proposition is a promise you make to consumers. A great value proposition demonstrates what a brand has to offer a customer that no other competitor can and how your service or product fulfills a need that no other company is able to fill. Your value proposition can take many forms, but it should be easy for consumers to understand while setting yourself apart from your competitors.
Key messaging and value propositions have a lot in common. Your value proposition is what sets you apart from competitors, but your key messages are the core messages you want your audience to hear and remember. Don’t think of key messages as taglines or slogans. They are essential pieces of information that connect with consumers and inspire them to act. For best results, develop unique key messages for each of your audience segments.
Is Your Strategy Working?
Marketing that underperforms is likely the result of a shaky marketing strategy. However, the complexity of most marketing efforts makes it difficult to diagnose where the strategy falls apart. You may be talking to the wrong audience or your key messages may not align with your audience’s behavior or any other strategic separation.
Any disconnect in your marketing strategy can cause the whole thing to unravel, so it’s important to take a closer look at your marketing strategy when you notice your marketing efforts starting to become less effective.
Happy Medium has a lot of experience helping brands find their footing and building marketing strategies that deliver results. Our Pulse Branding Workshop is an excellent service we provide to help businesses define their brand and build the path to connecting with customers.
How to Establish a Marketing Budget: 5 Steps to Get Started
Though it feels like we just rang in the New Year last week, the budding trees and warmer temps announce the arrival of another milestone in the fiscal year: the halfway point.
The midway point of any year is an excellent opportunity to take a step back and reevaluate how your actual performance stacks up against the goals you set at the beginning. But don’t spend all your time looking backward. Once you close out the 2nd quarter of the fiscal year, it’s officially time to start planning for next year, and that means it’s time to build another budget.
Budget planning is one of the most important practices for businesses and it’s absolutely necessary for long-term success. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most difficult processes that a business has to complete from year-to-year.
Having a clearly defined budget—especially for specific areas of your business—enables you to better track finances and project overall profitability. Establishing a budget forces your business to think long term about your business strategy and goals and consider where you need to allocate your money to achieve those goals, or where you may need to cut back.
Many businesses that have a marketing budget don’t have a good explanation for how they landed on the budgeted amount. Some just use a percentage of projected revenue, while others simply pick a number out of thin air. Don’t get me wrong, even a bad marketing budget is better than no marketing budget, but we’ve seen what happens when a budget falls apart, and it’s not a pretty sight.
As a digital agency, we have tons of experience using marketing dollars to achieve business goals, and we’re here to help you develop an effective budget alongside a plan that gets the results you want.
1. Look at the Big Picture
First things first: Look at the big picture. You must understand your business’ strategic plan and goals, then identify how marketing will support these initiatives. From here, you can gain a better understanding of the type and amount of activities you’ll need to deliver expectations on to put together some initial costs.
2. Know Your Sales Pipelines
Becoming familiar with your sales pipeline provides clear direction on how to attract and retain more customers. Plus, this allows you to determine the type of campaigns you want to push to best reach your customers. Furthermore, it’ll allow you to identify the platforms, segmentation, targeting, and creative assets you need to activate your marketing plan.
3. Analyze Previous Marketing Efforts and Review Competitors
Learning what works well for your business and keeping an eye on your competitors helps you find ways to differentiate while sustaining progress. When you take time to analyze previous performance and watch competitors, you might find that you need to invest more (or less) in your marketing plan depending on your industry, location, seasonality, past success, current/future trends, and more.
4. Distribute Your Dollars
Now’s the time to get into the deep details of your marketing plan and outline your tactical plans. Whether you want to run digital ads, publish monthly social media content, build a website, or refresh your brand, prioritize your platforms and tactics and assign marketing dollars from your budget to each aspect of your plan.
5. Set Meaningful, Measurable Goals & Stick to Your Budget
That’s the whole reason you have one. Starting off with too small of a budget may not make the impact you need when it comes to achieving your goals. On the flip side, having too large of a budget could also result in wasted spend. Leave room in your budget to test and optimize along the way, so you’re allocating the right amount of money in the right places to reach the right people. Also remember that marketing should be seen as one of the biggest investments your business can make and will bring ROI over time.
If you’re ready to get a head start on your marketing budget for 2021, schedule a free consultation with us. Our team of experts can assist your business in building a budget that gets more bang for your buck.
Caring for Customers in the Age of Social Distancing
The United States has only lived under the shadow of the coronavirus for a little over a month now, but we have already seen tectonic changes in the way businesses work. As would-be customers follow the advice of health officials and shelter deeper into their homes, businesses have had to get creative with the ways they can continue to offer products and services remotely.
From landlords offering virtual apartment tours to neighborhood bars offering take-out cocktail kits, many businesses have done an excellent job of pivoting to maintain customers. But any time customers are required to build new habits, businesses should expect an influx of concerns and questions coming in.
As the rest of the world moves online, customer service will have to as well. And while most customers prefer human customer service, a lot of customers will have to seek digital solutions for the time being.
But digital doesn’t have to mean impersonal.
Happy Medium is built on the idea that digital products are at their best when created with heart, and your approach to customer care should be no different. Here are some tips to help customers feel cared for in the absence of face-to-face interaction.
Provide Answers Where Customers Can Find Them
The most effective way to reduce time spent on customer service is to answer common questions before they come up. But identifying common questions and presenting solutions isn’t the difficult part—the challenge is putting this information in a place where customers can find it.
A recent analysis by American Express found that 6 out of 10 of their U.S. consumers say that their go-to channel for simple inquiries is a digital self-serve tool such as a website, social media, or chat.
This shows that not only are customers willing to accept help digitally; they actually prefer to. Think about all of the frustration you could save yourself and your customers with a website that provides solutions for customers in need. The key, of course, is making sure your digital tools are in good working order and easy to use.
Don’t think, however, that good content alone will save you trouble. Site visitors take only 50 milliseconds to form an opinion about your website, so if you have a site that is outdated or overwhelming, you could be forcing customers to seek solutions elsewhere, no matter how good the content is.
First impressions are 94% design-related, so if you have a website in need of an update, we can help.
Let Technology Make it Easy
Consumers have long bemoaned the presence of automation in customer service. Calling a telephone line for help and being met with a prerecorded voice on the other end is one of the ubiquitous frustrations of modern life. But the disdain that consumers feel towards robocalls doesn’t apply to digital technology used for customer service.
Chatbots
According to a report conducted by Software Advice, millennial’s preferred method of contacting a brand is live online chat, which indicates a shift in how much technology users can tolerate when seeking help.
It’s cliché to say it now, but each subsequent generation of consumers is going to increasingly prefer digital solutions to their real-life problems. And the generations of people (like myself) who choose to communicate via text rather than make a dreaded phone call would prefer to use technology when communicating with businesses as well.
The largest trend in digital customer service is the use of AI and chatbots. These technologies algorithmically match questions with answers using machine learning, which lets customers get answers effortlessly.
The trouble with this technology, however, is making it not sound like technology. The best chatbots are the ones that mimic human interaction, so take some tips on how to get the most from your chatbot by reading this excellent article from BigCommerce.
Social Media
Social media has become such an important part of modern business that it hardly feels like technology anymore. It’s like writing an article titled, “Shopping Carts: The Future of Grocery Stores?” But businesses who only use social media to post about products and services are missing out on a lot of value.
According to the same American Express study referenced above, in 2017, 35% of customers reported reaching out in social channels for assistance, up from 23% in 2014 and 17% in 2012. This underscores the importance of keeping an eye on your social mentions and inboxes for customers in search of assistance.
Another reason for businesses to watch social media is that customers are talking about your company to their friends and family. 53% of Americans have posted about a positive experience with a brand on social media, while 35% have admitted to posting about a negative experience. And with the power of word of mouth to influence purchases, those numbers are hard to overlook.
It’s easy to read your mentions and check your inbox for negative reviews, but a customer with a bad experience may not contact you directly. Searching for your business name in the search bar of many social platforms will let you see what people are saying so you can put your customer service to work. Or, if you need help monitoring your social platforms, it turns out that Happy Medium has experts at that sort of thing…
Keep Your Customers in the Loop
Maintaining the relationship between a business and its customers is just like maintaining any other relationship: Communication is key.
In the midst of COVID chaos, it’s difficult to fault anybody for drowning in headlines and feeling completely lost in uncertainty. The line between opinion and fact was already starting to erode prior to the pandemic, but the unending stream of reports and articles from governments, news organizations, and friends and family have forced people deeper into bewilderment.
But this presents businesses with the unique opportunity to provide certainty to an audience that desperately needs it.
It seems like all businesses, from global companies to your favorite coffee shop on the corner, have issued statements regarding COVD-19 and many of them are saying the same thing: We’re still here.
It’s good to remind customers that, while everything around them seems to be different, the way things were isn’t too far away. Those lattes you used to get to brighten a bad day? They’re still available through carry-out or delivery. And Friday night pizza and movies can stay on the schedule with the help of your local pizza joint and video-on-demand.
Businesses should use digital tools, like social media or email newsletters, to connect with customers and let them know that even though nothing is “business as usual” they can still count on your business, as usual.
How User Experience Builds ROI
Calculating ROI for User Experience Efforts
While rounding the last lap of my 20s, I’ve realized that nothing can provide tangible value quite like cold, hard numbers. Food scales, retirement contributions, screen time, and cholesterol levels all provide me with important tidbits of information that I can then use to extract insights about my own life.
“Five grams of pretzel chips have how many calories?!”
These numerical tidbits go by many titles. Some call them benchmarks, others call them data points. But they all serve the same purpose—they contextualize numerical information into a relevant and digestible framework. Doctors use blood pressure numbers to identify trends in our overall health over time, and I use my daily phone screen time to understand how I am spending my time.
These are simple examples—instances where one quantitative input has a corresponding qualitative value and it’s easy to understand the relationship between the two. But it’s not always that straightforward.
As builders of web products, Happy Medium always tries to emphasize how the work we do helps our clients and their users, but user experience (UX) professionals especially have struggled with proving their value to business decision-makers. Many people would agree that having a website that is easy to navigate and accessible to users of all abilities is an objectively good thing, but the harsh reality is that “objectively good” doesn’t always cut it with business leaders without some numbers to back it up.
Rather than trying to convince decision-makers to see things our way, I think we should meet them in the middle. Decision-makers want to be able to quantify the return on their financial, marketing, and operations investments, so we should be able to show them the impact that good UX has on their bottom line.
R-O-Why?
“But qualitative data are first-person assessments! You can’t argue with how a participant feels!” —Outraged UX Designers
It’s true. In the UX world, we often see qualitative data like moderated testing, user interviews, and diary studies as more important and insightful than quantitative data. Qualitative data lets us understand how users think and feel about a product, which allows us to adjust the product based on direct feedback from users.
A user review that says “this new website is so much easier to use!” is a huge win for us UX professionals, but it doesn’t carry the same weight for business decision-makers. On the flip side, you could show decision-makers evidence of people saying the UX of a product is terrible, but unless the quantitative data shows negative impacts on the “bottom line,” there’s no incentive to make any changes.
I know. That term is overused and cringeworthy—but this is the field we have to play in, so that is what we need to deliver.
Getting your stakeholders on board with allocating more budget toward UX efforts can be difficult. You need to hand over results that speak to the bottom-line ROI. That may sound obvious, but any UX professional who has ever tried to explain their own job knows how difficult it can be, let alone the difficulty in trying to get someone to pay you more money for your efforts.
Creating Conversions
User experience design is focused on creating easy and logical experiences for users online. And when people feel comfortable and in control of the web page they’re on, they tend to stick around longer. On the other hand, if a user visits a website and finds the experience to be frustrating, they will quickly leave the site and find another website to fulfill their needs.
That idea should be intuitive for everyone, even newcomers to web design and UX topics. But when you apply that line of thinking to e-commerce sites or other businesses that rely on their websites to build revenue, then you start to reveal one of the ways UX can build on ROI.
To put it simply, websites that are easy to navigate also make it easier for users to spend money, while difficult websites can literally frustrate a user out of using the site to purchase goods or services.
Time Is Money
Another huge cost associated with poor UX is that customers have to ask for help more often. This means that businesses have to spend more resources helping them. Good UX should predict where users will need the most support and provide them with the nurturing necessary to guide the user to their goal.
Bad UX or (gasp!) no UX confuses users and makes them give up, which can cost a company money, or users will require customer service, which also costs money. Good UX eliminates both outcomes.
In many ways, it’s easier to illustrate the expense of bad UX rather than trying to prove the value of good UX. It’s not possible to come up with a simple equation that encompasses all the ways UX designers can create greater ROI, but some work from fellow UX pros does a good job at providing us concrete evidence of UX in action.
Warning: Math Ahead
Many of the brightest minds in user experience have taken on the challenge of quantifying the impact of good UX. A study conducted in 2005 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a research organization that specializes in computer science, looked into the most common causes for failure of software development projects. The study reached two main conclusions:
- Developers spend 50% of their time fixing bugs and broken software.
- Standard UX efforts can mitigate 25% of those bugs and lost time.
Any business leaders reading this should already start to feel some gears turning. The thought of an employee using half of their time to fix preventable errors is enough to keep any decision-maker up at night.
Before you start thinking that this is just one UX designer trying to convince the world that my job is important, take into account that a recent analysis of six major tech companies reveals that more companies are increasing their ratio of designers to developers on staff. In 2012, IBM had 1 designer for every 72 developers they employed. Just five years later in 2017, that ratio changed to 1 designer to every 8 developers.
Clearly the work of designers is becoming more vital to the operations of the biggest tech giants, but let’s look into why hiring more designers makes financial sense with the help of some math from UX News Magazine editor Doug Collins.
The Equation of Money Saved
Collins came up with this formula to describe the ROI of hiring a user experience designer. This equation is based on two assumptions:
- One UX designer cuts down on necessary development hours by 50% (based off of the study from IEEE.
- A company has a designer to developer ratio of 1:6 (based off industry averages).
If you want to read the full methodology behind this equation, read the article linked above, but for now, we’ll just focus on the end results. Collins breaks the formula down like this:
[.25 * (D)(AHP)(H/2)(AWW)] / [(D/UX)/6]
Where:
D = Number of Developers
AHP = Average Hourly Pay per Developer
H = Average Dev Hours Worked (divided in half based on assumption #1 above)
AWW = Average Weeks Worked per Developer
UX = Number of UX professionals
Let’s look at an example of this formula at work. Suppose there are 39 developers at the fictional Whydea Software company and there are 6 corresponding UX professionals. Let’s say one developer makes $100,000/year, which equates to roughly $43/hour. They work an average of 40 hours a week and an average of 49 weeks per year. Take a look at how the numbers break down.
[.25 * ((39)(43)(20*)(49))] / [(39/6)/6] = $379,376.00 saved
*Note: H is divided by 2 because of assumption number 1
The formula reveals that the UX designers at Whydea Software saved the company nearly $400,000 in developer salaries by eliminating a lot of dev hours usually spent backtracking and fixing preventable errors. How’s that for ROI?
The Bottom Line
As UX designers, we like to think our work is intrinsically noble and valuable. Who could say no to a digital product that is easy to use and accessible? But as terms like “user experience” and “design thinking” expand into the business vernacular, it seems like we’ll be spending increasingly more time explaining to clients and business decision-makers that the work we do has tangible value, especially when it comes to the bottom line.
If you need more convincing, check out our case studies to see how our UX team has helped our own clients. Or, if you have a website or app that needs its own facelift, we’d love to help you out.
10 Tips to Maximize Your Digital Marketing Budget
Advertisers define media in two terms: digital and traditional. Traditional media encompasses the advertising techniques of old, like television commercials and printed newspaper ads, which were once the cornerstone of the industry—until the arrival of digital media.
The definition of digital media is much more expansive than traditional media, and it’s constantly evolving to include even more ways for brands to reach their customers. What was once reserved for intrepid and trailblazing brands, digital media has now become the dominant force in advertising today, surpassing traditional media in spending for the first time last year.
So why is digital advertising taking off while spending on traditional media falls off? The answer lies in three of the biggest letters in business: ROI.
Digital media allows marketers to tailor their ads and target their audiences in ways that traditional media can not, which means less money spent reaching people who don’t care.
But all of these tools require someone who knows how to use them. It’s easy to get lost in the digital marketer’s toolbox and find yourself more confused than when you started. So here are my top 10 tips to maximize your digital marketing budget.
1. Establish Your Marketing Goals to Align With Your Business Goals
The easiest path to digital media failure is by starting off on the wrong foot. Before you start creating ads or identifying target audiences, you need to identify your goals. Without any specific and measurable goals, it’s impossible to judge the success of your campaign.
We recommend starting off with one advertising goal that ladders up to a larger business objective, like building awareness or generating sales. This goal will help you determine which metrics to focus on when building your digital media campaigns, as well as help you establish a budget later on.
2. Choose Your Platforms Wisely
After establishing your goals, it’s time to choose which platforms you’ll use to achieve them. A few of the most popular ad platforms include search, display, social, video, and connected TV. Each platform comes with benefits and drawbacks, so it’s important to do your research to select the right platform for your goals.
We recommend starting with a platform that you’re already somewhat familiar with, like social ads on Facebook or Twitter.
3. Keep Your Audience Specific but Broad
Digital media platforms allow you to get very specific about who you target with your ads—but it is possible to be too specific.
You don’t want your audience to be too narrow or you won’t get any results. It’s tempting to get very granular in who you target, but doing so shrinks the total pool of people who can see your ad. If you aren’t seeing the results you want with your custom audience, many digital media platforms offer the ability to create “look-alike audiences” to widen your target audience. These are computer-generated groups of people who are likely to share similar interests and behaviors with your existing audience.
That being said, an audience that is too broad will spread your advertising budget too thin. The most difficult balance to strike in digital media is creating an audience that is specific enough to reach the right people but broad enough to achieve results. There’s no secret formula to reach this balance, but a little trial and error never hurt!
4. Location, Location, Location
Just because digital media gives you the ability to reach audiences far and wide doesn’t mean that you need an expansive target audience. It’s okay to start off small by targeting a few key cities or states before spending your money on a nationwide campaign.
5. Build Your Creative to Match Your Audience, Goals, and Platform
An effective ad needs to be tailored both to your audience and the platform, as well as align with the goals you set at the start.
Any marketer will tell you that you need to know your audience to create an effective ad, but an impactful digital ad needs to be appropriate for the platform as well. Understanding the capabilities and best practices of your chosen ad platform is also vital to your campaign success.
Regardless of your audience, goals, or platform, these are some general best practices that make ads more effective.
- Be sparing with your use of text on image ads.
- Keep display ads simple and avoid complicated graphics or animations.
- Include a strong incentive and call to action.
- Avoid long videos and make sure video ads feature an initial attention-grabbing hook.
6. Set a Budget Around Your Goals
Another reason why it’s so important to set measurable goals is that it helps you set a budget for your campaign later on.
A key ingredient to maximizing your budget and increasing ROI is knowing what return you expect from your initial investment.
As a rule of thumb, the more action you want a user to take after seeing your ad, the more you should expect to spend to achieve the desired result. For example, a campaign aimed at increasing sales by 15% will require a higher budget than a campaign aimed at increasing awareness by the same amount.
Other factors that you should consider when setting a budget include:
- How large is your target audience?
- How long will your campaign run?
- How much experience do you have with the given platform? (Don’t pour a bunch of money into a platform you’re unfamiliar with.)
7. Quality Over Quantity, Always
Nothing drains a digital media budget faster than having too many underperforming campaigns running at the same time.
It can take a lot of resources to get a digital media campaign off the ground. In addition to the money you spend placing the ads, it takes time to create the ads and perform the proper implementation and monitoring. And all of these costs multiply with every new campaign you create.
Creating a few great campaigns instead of several campaigns of lesser quality makes sure your business is always putting its best foot forward. Google even gives ads a quality score that judges them on several factors, like the expected click-through rate and ad relevance. Ads with higher quality scores can lead to lower prices and better ad positions, which makes it even more important to prioritize quality over quantity in your digital media.
8. Keep an Eye on Your Active Campaigns
The most common misconception about digital media is that it’s a “set it and forget it” project. You should be checking on your active campaigns on a daily basis to make sure that all parts are running smoothly and achieving results. Without frequent check-ins, you run the risk of letting an underperforming campaign overstay its welcome.
You should be optimizing your campaign while it’s still active to maximize your campaign budget. Daily tasks can include responding to questions on social ads, checking conversion metrics, and shifting money from underperforming ad sets to more successful campaigns. All of these daily activities make sure you are getting the most from your ad budget.
9. Gather Data and Analyze Trends
Compared to other forms of advertising, digital media provides marketers with the most amount of data at their disposal—but if used irresponsibly, this data can end up doing more harm than good.
The most important thing to recognize is that results do not happen overnight. Newcomers to digital media have the tendency to press “start” on a campaign and expect results to roll in right away. Unfortunately, this is not how it works and a seasoned marketer has to learn patience to avoid getting distracted by the numbers.
Checking your numbers too often can also cause you to overreact to minor daily fluctuations in campaign performance.
We recommend doing a monthly overview of your campaign performance and key metrics. Reporting too often and you can lose the forest from the trees, but too much time between reports can let poor performing campaigns exist longer than they should.
The longer your campaign runs, the more data you will collect. Over time, you can start identifying trends that will help you optimize your campaign spending in the future.
10. Don’t Be Afraid to Consult an Expert (or Become One Yourself!)
The more time you spend managing digital media campaigns, the more expertise you will acquire, which will translate to better results. There are a ton of free online classes you can take that will give you tips and tricks on making the most from your digital media budget, but even with all the help available online, nothing beats getting help from experts.
We have a lot of experience helping businesses grow through digital media, and we’d be more than happy to help you in any way we can. If you need some support getting your businesses in front of the right audience, feel free to reach out.
What to Consider When Considering a New Web Partner
By the time we meet with a client to discuss a new website, they’ve already endured enough soul-searching. But the questions they’ve spent months pondering aren’t the ones that interest us the most right off the bat.
Of course, further down the web development process, we’ll be happy to let the floodgates open and listen to all the website woes that a client has been experiencing. However, in the early stages of a client-agency relationship, we need to make sure that our team is a good fit with yours.
Picking out a web partner is like choosing a babysitter. At the bare minimum, you want to work with someone who can get the job done. But ultimately, you’re not hiring a set of qualifications–—you’re hiring a person. And the way you get along with that person will play a huge role in how successful the partnership is.
The same goes for hiring a web partner. Lots of agencies or freelancers can develop a website, but it’s important to find a partner that interacts well with your own internal team. The web development process is so huge and collaborative that we need to make sure that our team and your team are on the same page from step one.
These are the questions you should think about when considering a new web partner.
What are your expectations?
Before you even start looking for someone to build a website, you need to identify exactly what problems your new website needs to solve. This includes functional tasks, like eCommerce or online scheduling capabilities, as well as more abstract goals, like making your business appear more modern.
The good news is that setting expectations also sets the foundation for the entire web development process. The bad news is that it also requires a lot of legwork from the client.
We recommend looking at competitor websites and aspirational brand websites to get an idea of what other brands are doing in your industry. If every competitor website allows users to easily purchase products, then your website should probably do the same.
What’s your budget?
What you expect from your website will ultimately determine how much you should expect to spend on your website, which is why we suggest setting expectations before setting a budget. The problem is that many clients set their budget first without doing enough research about how much they should be willing to spend.
Any web project can be as comprehensive or as minimal as the client wants, and there are tons of factors that increase or decrease the total price of a web project. But no matter what your budget is, being transparent about it is critical.
By being transparent with your budget, we can use our experience to forecast the project and move more cumbersome items to later phases, which reduces cost in the short term.
But it’s also important to keep your budget somewhat flexible.
During our discovery and proposal process, we may identify a problem with your current website that we can fix, but it may make the project a little more expensive. While we never recommend features that you don’t need, we do take our job as digital solution-finders seriously, and we will always suggest ways to make your website better.
How will you measure success?
“Was it worth it?”
This is the biggest question a company will ask itself after building a new website. And the only way to know whether the process was worth it is by setting your target goals before you begin.
By the time we meet with a client, they usually already have a general idea of what they want to accomplish with a new website, which is great. However, like with any goal, it’s best to make website goals as specific and measurable as possible. This is where we can help clients the most.
For example, a client will say to us that one of the goals for their website is easier navigation. This is a great start and provides us with a clear idea of what issues they want to solve with their new site. The problem is that this goal is not easy to measure and it will be difficult to determine success at the end of the project.
We can match these abstract goals, like easier navigation or better-organized content, into measurable goals like bounce rate and average session duration, which help the client be more precise when analyzing their new site.
Being clear with your key success measures, no matter how abstract, will help us determine if we can be an effective web partner while helping you measure success down the road.
Do you have experience managing this type of project?
The process of building a new website is extremely collaborative. While there can be different degrees of client involvement, in order to keep all parties on the same page, there will be a minimum amount of back and forth required for approvals and project updates.
Some clients have a lot of experience with managing projects being carried out by an outside agency, while some clients don’t have as much. And while our work on a project won’t change based on your past experience, it’s helpful to know how familiar you are with the process before we begin.
Not only is it important for us to know how experienced a client is in managing large projects, but it’s also a good internal exercise for the client to consider what has worked well in the past and what they can improve in the future.
What barriers might we encounter?
This question might not have a firm answer, but it’s still good to start predicting roadblocks that we might encounter.
Anything from a complicated human resources API to rigid brand standards can cause hiccups during the design and development process and are good to identify early on.
It’s also possible that what a client considers a challenge actually has a pretty simple solution, so it’s good to quell those anxieties right off the bat.
Who has a say and who will make decisions?
This is one of the most important pieces of information that we like to know before embarking on a new project. Clients with a lot of stakeholders can slow down the process, or even cause it to stall completely, making it important for us and the client to identify decision-makers early.
We understand that building a new website is a pretty big deal and that a lot of people want to have a say in the process, but large teams often find it difficult to reach consensus.
Even the most complicated websites don’t require huge teams to make decisions. It’s important to be intentional about who you select to make decisions, and to give them a specific role in the approval process.
Our team has been burned before by a client introducing a new person late in the process who wants to make dramatic changes to work that has already been approved. Not only will this throw off the project timeline, but it also might force our team to exceed our projected hours, which will cost the client more money.
One Last Thing
Deciding to take the plunge and embark on a new website is a huge decision and one that should not be taken lightly. Hopefully, these questions can help provide a good start for teams considering a new website. If you have any other questions about the website development process, we’d love to chat.
How to Keep Your Business Moving Online
As more and more people hunker down in their homes to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, one of the biggest questions we now face is how brick-and-mortar businesses will continue to operate while their customers stay at home.
In the midst of uncertainty, one thing that remains certain is that a strong online presence for your business is essential, especially during periods of limited foot traffic. Digital platforms have always been important for customers to learn about a business. But with the coronavirus threatening to severely impact the way people take part in the economy, many businesses are forced to reconsider their online existence.
The good news is that many businesses can shift a large portion of their operations online, creating an opportunity to build or refresh your digital strategy and identify the solutions that will continue to add value, keep your customers connected and deliver results—both short- and long-term.
There are a lot of different ways to bulk up your business’ online presence, and a lot of it depends on the kind of work you do. Here are some ways all businesses can shift their operations online. Or, if you feel like you could use some support taking your business online, schedule a free 30-minute strategy session to talk with our founder and CEO, Katie Patterson.
Web and eCommerce
A good website that acts as an extension of your business is always important to maintain, but in a time when customers will increasingly seek online solutions to real-life problems, an excellent website is a must.
Many businesses already have a website that contains basic information about what they do, including their operating hours and contact information. Websites like this go a long way in helping businesses bring new customers through their doors. However, when health officials recommend limiting the time people spend in public, your website probably needs to do some more heavy lifting.
eCommerce functionality can be a make-or-break feature for a business website. The ability to sell products online is essential when in-store traffic is restricted. Even after resuming business as usual, eCommerce still provides a valuable asset for businesses. eCommerce spending increased by over 14% in 2019, compared to a 3.8% growth in retail spending, which goes to show the importance of eCommerce functionality for retailers.
Each eCommerce platform is a little bit different and the right one for you will depend on your comfort level with technology and the type of business you want to conduct. If you have any questions about finding an eCommerce solution for you, we can surely help you out.
Automating Social Media Content and Responses
A business operating entirely online will need a reliable platform to share information with its customers. Your website should serve as the primary hub for all important information, but social media is the most important way to provide relevant and timely information with customers and fans.
Keeping a social media presence that is up to date takes some work, especially when trying to handle other aspects of a business, which is why we recommend automating the process whenever possible.
There are a number of free or low-cost online tools, like Hootsuite or Buffer, that allow users to connect their social profiles and access important features, like scheduling content in advance, managing inbound messages, and analyzing social performance.
If you don’t know where to start even coming up with social media content, we’ve got you covered in this blog.
Without much physical store traffic, users may turn to social media to ask questions about your business, which makes it especially important to be helpful and responsive. But, again, this task requires focus and dedication, and automation is your best bet to let users feel like they aren’t being ignored.
Many social platforms allow business pages to set up automated replies, called chatbots, for inbox messages. These can be extremely helpful by automatically answering frequently asked questions, but there’s a big difference between an effective automatic message and an ineffective one. For a great list of chatbot best practices, check out this article.
Driving Digital Traffic with Paid Media
Offering eCommerce to existing customers is one way to keep business moving, but your existing customer base might not be as large as you want. In order to drive more traffic to your website, paid digital media is the best bang for your buck to get the job done.
Paid digital media includes things like search ads, video ads, display ads, and promoted social media posts. Compared to other forms of advertising, digital media gives you the most control over who sees your ads and what action you want your audience to take.
The world of digital media is vast and only gets more complex the deeper you go. To get started with paid digital media, we recommend starting with a platform that you’re familiar with, like Facebook. Or if you need a little more guidance, we’re available to help.
Encourage Customers to Use Digital and Mobile Tools
One of the most important things a business owner can do for their online business is informing customers about the availability of digital alternatives. It may be difficult to do at first, but encouraging your customers to stay home is the best thing to do right now. However, encouraging customers to stay home doesn’t mean you have to tell them to stop supporting your business.
With all of the digital tactics we’ve shared today, customers should have everything they need to continue being customers and business owners should have what they need to continue running a business.
Making a transition to operating online can be rocky, and you’ll inevitably run into some obstacles. Happy Medium has tons of experience helping businesses build their online presence, and we’d love to help you too. Connect with us!
Introducing The Pulse: Happy Medium’s Branding Workshop
As marketers, we tell people all the time that their brand is more than a font, a logo, or colors. We tell people that a brand is what you need to stand out, and without a strong brand, your business can easily get lost among the competition.
What marketers don’t always do a good job with is explaining how a brand should connect with your business and how to build a brand that connects with your target audience as well. Even the term “brand” can be a bit mystifying for business owners who aren’t well-versed in marketing lingo.
A brand, as commonly defined by marketers, is the way a company or organization is perceived by those who experience it. Everything from a logo or slogan to in-person customer service contributes to a brand, which makes it even more difficult to know where to begin building one.
That’s why we developed the Pulse Branding Workshop. Our work with clients of all sizes has revealed that the most common challenge facing marketers is building a brand that accurately represents their business while also making it appealing to consumers. There’s often a disconnect between what a business thinks about themselves and how customers perceive them.
The Pulse Workshop is designed to define the fundamental characteristics of your brand that connect with your customers. We get to the heart of your business, figure out what makes it tick, and use that information to diagnose the gaps between your desired brand image and your marketing.
What is the Pulse Workshop?
The Pulse Workshop is a full-day workshop where a business collaborates with experts from Happy Medium to clarify the core tenants of their brand. Before the workshop itself, we build a custom workbook that we will use to guide businesses through the steps of building a brand.
Our approach to branding workshops puts the business in control of its own brand. Like bumpers on a bowling lane, our experts are there to guide the participants towards an objective, not to muddy a brand with our own input. Consider our role to be more like a college professor leading a discussion than a lecturing high school teacher.
But the Pulse Workshop isn’t just for businesses to learn about themselves. We use the workshop to diagnose the health of your marketing efforts and to provide personalized recommendations and marketing strategies that put your businesses in front of the right people.
What Do You Learn From a Pulse Workshop?
The Pulse Workshop will help businesses strengthen their marketing by focusing on three primary components of a strong brand: brand attributes, target audiences, and brand messaging.
Brand Attributes & Position
Brand attributes are things like voice and tone, logo, color system, and slogan. These are the things that initially come to mind when people think about brands, and since they’re the most salient aspects of a brand, they are also the most important to define.
The Pulse Workshop isn’t designed to come up with a new slogan or logo—most businesses already have that. Instead, we focus on extending these existing brand touchpoints to different aspects of your marketing, like the attitude or tone of your brand.
Target Audiences
The work that goes into building a brand is only effective if that brand connects with a specific target audience. Most businesses have a grasp on who their customers are, so the Pulse Workshop focuses on understanding the minds of existing and targeted audiences to determine how to connect with them.
Bridging the Gap
Brand attributes and target audiences form the foundation of any marketing strategy, but the rubber meets the road when it’s time to reach your audience. Happy Medium’s experts have plenty of experience crafting communication that takes brands from their current position to their ideal place in the minds of consumers. The Pulse Workshop is our chance to apply our expertise to the specific needs of your business.
What Happens After the Workshop?
The Pulse Workshop results in two main outcomes. The first is a firm understanding of your brand and how it can connect with your customers. The second outcome is a bespoke marketing plan built from scratch by Happy Medium.
As we lead businesses through the Pulse Workshop to help them learn about their own brand, we are also gathering the information we need to provide thorough and personalized marketing recommendations to elevate the brand and connect with consumers.
These recommendations come in the form of a marketing brief that summarizes our own findings from the workshop, identifies the greatest opportunities for brand growth, and proposes tactics to capitalize on these opportunities.
Let’s Get Started
A brand without a pulse is a brand on life support. We want to give your business the jolt it needs to find its footing among the competition and establish a brand built to stand out.
If you’re ready to find your pulse, learn more here and contact us to schedule your workshop.
How to Promote Your New Website
If you build it, will they come?
A brand-new website takes a lot of work. It would be a shame if nobody ever saw it.
Hundreds of hours of design, copywriting, and web development goes into a new website, so the moment you press “launch” might already feel like an achievement in itself. Congratulations! Your website just joined the estimated 200 million other active websites on the web.
But this is the internet—not the field of dreams. Just because you built it, doesn’t necessarily mean your audience will come. No matter what you want to accomplish with a new website, chances are you need site visitors first, which makes building a new website mostly pointless unless you have a plan to promote it.
So how are you going to make sure that all of the work that you put into your website doesn’t go unnoticed? Here are some tactics that will spread the word about your new site and help increase site traffic.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of shaping the content and design of your site to improve its rank in organic search engine results. Higher rank with search engines means that more users will arrive to your website when searching for relevant terms, making SEO one of the most important tactics for increasing traffic to a new site.
While improving your SEO doesn’t cost any money, getting the most out of SEO takes a lot of time, effort, and knowledge about the ins and outs of search engines. Happy Medium even keeps an SEO specialist on staff whose job is dedicated to making sure any website we produce is fully optimized for search engines.
There are a bunch of different factors that go into good SEO, like including certain keywords and phrases throughout your site and optimizing your page headings to make them easily found by search engines. Google has also started taking website accessibility into account when ranking search results.
Building a new website means that you are also revising the content and layout of your old site, which means most of your SEO heavy lifting will occur before you launch. However, improving your website’s search rank can be an ongoing process. If you need some help getting your website to appear higher on Google, we can help.
Social Media
While basking in the glow of your new website launch, one of your first impulses might be to take to social media and fire off a “Check out our new website!” post.
All set, right?
Wrong.
Simply telling someone that you have a new website might cause site traffic to rise, but the growth in traffic will likely be superficial and short-lived. Users might click the link in the post, visit your homepage, nod politely in approval, and log off right away. This is not the kind of site traffic you want to attract.
The problem with this approach is that it’s not user-centric. When you decided to build a new website, it was probably because something was functionally wrong with the old one. Maybe it was difficult to navigate, disorganized, or inaccessible to users with disabilities. Regardless of what you set out to fix, social media promotion of your site should focus on the improvements that the user will experience.
Imagine a bakery that replaced an outdated website with a new one that allows users to scroll through tantalizing pictures of sweets and submit orders for custom cakes. A user-centric post would look something like this: “You asked, we listened! Cathy’s Cakes now accepts online orders. Take a look at all of our cake designs and much more on our brand-new website!”
Your social media audience already has a baseline relationship with your brand, which means you shouldn’t have to try too hard to invite them to your website. The important part is getting your audience to stay by letting them know how your new website benefits them.
Email Campaign
When you bring up email marketing these days people might react like you just suggested sending a message via carrier pigeon. Spam emails account for over half of all emails sent, so it’s easy to understand why a forward-thinking marketer might think email is not the right place to promote a shiny new website.
But email provides one major advantage that you can’t achieve with social media. With an email campaign, you can segment your audience and into well-defined groups and alter your message to each specific audience segment. l
The success of your email marketing is dependent on the size of your contact list and how accurately you can segment your contacts into different types of customers. The same bakery from before might choose to send an email about children’s birthday cakes to women 30–50 years old while sending content about wedding cakes to a younger audience.
Remember to always keep user’s benefits in mind when promoting your site via email and always link to your website in your email call to action. It’s also helpful to encourage any new site users to sign up for your mailing list so you can reach out to them again.
Digital Media and Search Engine Marketing
SEO, social media, and email marketing are all free or inexpensive ways to drive traffic to a new website. But if you don’t have the patience to wait for new users to trickle onto your home page, then paid digital media and search engine marketing (SEM) is the way to go.
With paid ads, you can cut right to the chase and reach your target audience wherever you want, without relying on your website’s search engine ranking for visibility. When a user searches “best cakes near me,” you can pay to have your website be featured as the top result on Google, which will certainly help you attract new site visitors.
There are several other ways you can pay to put your website in front of different audiences, including display ads and video ads, both of which we’re experts in. The most effective digital ads are ones that meet your target audience in a place where your brand and website are a natural fit. Our baker wouldn’t have much success placing an ad on a motocross website, but would probably see good results from an ad on a mom blog.
Digital Ads and SEM also allow you to A-B test different messages to see which resonate the best with a given audience. This gives you more information you can use to optimize your marketing strategy on other platforms.
Take Off
The good news is that launching a new website is a gigantic step towards a cohesive and effective online presence for a brand. The bad news is that launching a new website is only half the battle. At Happy Medium, we’re not only experts at promoting new websites, we’re also experts at building them! So if you have an old website that needs a face-lift or a new website that needs some traffic, we’re happy to help.