Google Lighthouse is a free, open-to-everyone tool that lets you check how your website is doing—no need to bring in a web design company. Not straight away anyway! It gives you a report card on how your site performs, how accessible it is, how well it’s optimised for search engines, and even checks a few other best-practice boxes. Here’s a breakdown and then we’ll show you how to access and use it.

What does Lighthouse measure?

• Performance: Looks at how fast your site is and whether it works smoothly. It checks things like how long it takes for the largest elements to load (LCP), how stable your layout is (CLS), and how quickly the page becomes interactive (TTI).
• Accessibility: Makes sure your site is user-friendly for everyone, including those with disabilities. It reviews things like clear link names, readable text with proper color contrast, and properly scaled viewports for different devices.
• Best Practices: Evaluates whether your site is up-to-date with web standards, like using secure connections (HTTPS), avoiding unsafe links, and following coding best practices.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Spotlights areas to improve so search engines can find and rank your site more easily.

Why use Lighthouse?

• Easy insights: Get a clear, detailed report showing what’s working and what’s not—great for making informed fixes.
• DIY-friendly: Whether your site is public or behind a login, you can run Lighthouse on it.
• Better website: Use the tips to boost speed, security, and user experience while meeting industry standards.

Some of the findings you may be able to do yourself – others you’ll most likely need the help of a web designer. The main point of the tool for me is that it gives you control, third party information that you can use to make informed decisions.

How to use Lighthouse

First off you need the Chrome browser, you can download it here. The rest is in the video and following screen shots below:

Step-by-step

Knowledge is power and Google Lighthouse is an independent 3rd party tool that you can use to help be properly informed about issues related to your site. We’ve used it with clients who have been confused about the conflicting advice they have been given when trying to develop their site for marketing. They can see for themselves if the advice been given matches up.

Give it a go, or if you want to learn more get in touch, we’ll be happy to take you through things.

It’s seemed so straightforward. That was until your business idea needed transferring to web design.

Whether your website plans are to support a growing business, rescue a declining one or promote a great new project – getting the idea from the workplace to cyberspace is a whole other matter.

Often businesses start immediately by focusing their web design ideas on other site examples, templates or images. But here at Cocoonfxmedia, we’ve seen how jumping straight into graphics web design can cause your marketing objectives to quickly become lost in translation.

So for a truly successful website, web design should start at the very basics – with stakeholder analysis.

Introducing Stakeholder Analysis for Web Design

Knowing your audience is vital when considering what information should be included on your website and how it should look.

After all, your audience is the people that will keep you in business.

But stakeholder analysis isn’t solely about your website audience. It involves those who endorse and use your website internally and externally.

So to properly inform web design, here are some helpful questions for you to consider and then we’ll look at how your answers could influence the final design.

Who are the stakeholders that need to be considered for your web design?

If you’re already involved in the running of a business you should have a good idea of who your stakeholders and customers are (otherwise you may want to do a bit of research).

Stakeholders can include more than just customers, they can be staff members who will be using and updating the site, partners that you are representing and management staff that require the site to deliver business objectives within an agreed budget.

Your customers can also be quite different, so it helps to profile them into groups depending on their demographics (or firmographics) so that you can identify those with similar needs and which groups should be your priority.

Impact on Web Design: Incorporating the priorities of your most important stakeholders when starting web design will ensure you start on the right path and avoid having to make large changes later. So next, you need to identify the stakeholders who hold the most influence on the success of your web design.

How important is each stakeholder to the success of your site?

Stakeholder mapping is a great way to identify who needs to be considered and consulted during the web design phase. This is where we can use a useful tool frequently referred to as Mendelow’s Matrix; simply add each stakeholder group where you feel they sit in the chart depending on their interest and influence.

Every matrix will be different – but once completed you will need to remember that stakeholders in quadrant A will need to be kept satisfied (possibly in a legal sense) and those in quadrant B will be the ones that will influence your site the most; their needs should definitely be included in any plans or design requirements.

Impact on Web Design: Once you’ve identified the stakeholders that matter the most for your web design, their needs can be incorporated at the earliest stages, especially when it comes to budgets and the function of the site.

What are the needs of your stakeholders? 

Now we know that we don’t have to worry about pleasing every single stakeholder, we can focus on those with the most influence over the success of your site.

So now it’s time to ask, what does each priority stakeholder need to accomplish from the website? It can help to list 2 or 3 important information needs of each stakeholder; for example:

For your marketing manager:

1. The ability to easily update content
2. Easy ways to monitor success and customer conversions

For your target market:

1. Solutions to questions and concerns easily available
2. Secure sites for purchasing
3. Easy ways to make contact
4. Resources for additional information to support them to make informed decisions

For your partners:

1. Approval for use of logo and information
2. An appropriate representation of their brand

For legal bodies:

1. Meeting agreed on terms and conditions
2. No content or actions that could breach UK legislation

Impact on Web Design: Definite requirements can finally be put into the web design, including how the site will be accessed both by customers and those updating the content, and which additional sections and security are required. This is where professional web designers will include the best approach for usability, accessibility and functionality.

How will your website marketing objectives be met?

With the basis of the web design now in place, it’s time to incorporate your business and marketing objectives – in other words, what do you want the site to deliver?

It may be that you wish the site to generate leads, increase sales or just boost awareness of your brand? It may be all of these, but it’s best to focus efforts on just one at the web design stage.

So if the motivation behind your website is to generate sales, the web design will focus on engaging first-time visitors and making the purchase process as simple and efficient as possible

If your objective is to generate leads, the web design will need to focus on having clear incentives and sign-up details available.

Impact on Web Design: when business objectives are set at the start of the web design stage, they can be built upon so that each decision for content, graphics and layout will all lead towards meeting business goals; making your objectives achievable and easily monitored.

Why will stakeholders use your site?

Now we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty of web design; user experience.

This is where your knowledge of customer profiles and preferences come in handy.

It’s important to have a website that resonates with the customer; if it’s informal and fun, it may appeal to the younger generation, but that approach may not work if your customers are serious and professional businesses.

So identify why your customers are there.

Are they looking for prices? Or are they searching for product specifications? Maybe they want to find reviews or answers to unique questions. If you fail to include quality content that your customers seek out, you could lose out to competitors.

Once you’ve determined the content and details to be included on your site, it now needs to be displayed in a way that can be easily viewed and navigated through expert web design structures and visuals – but based on the expectations and preferences of your audience.

Impact of Web Design: Structures used for web designs will vary depending on the audience preferences and purpose of the site. The main elements of web design at this stage are to make it as efficient as possible for users to complete tasks, which in turn meets your business objectives. Therefore, web design elements will include:

• site structure: which will mostly be covered during the stakeholder analysis stage and include the function and layout
• visual design: the colours, graphics, images, screen resolution and device access that meets the preferences of your website user
• site navigation: ensuring it is easy for users to locate and travel through the site without getting ‘lost’ or ‘confused’ by including a menu and predictable options such as search, contact or FAQ.

Setting Strong Foundations for Successful Web Design

The next stages following your stakeholder analysis and agreed content are for the production of wireframes or blueprints that show how your site will be structured.

Due to the intricacies of web design, we can’t exactly include all aspects of it in this blog such as coding, search engine optimisation, widgets and so forth. However, you can be sure that you’re on to a winner if you start the web design phase by considering the needs of your stakeholders and incorporating business objectives.

And remember to test, test and test your website design to ensure it is meeting the needs of your users and stakeholders. One way is to simply ask.

Ask your users/stakeholders what they like, dislike or find difficult about the site and then fix it.

You could also present two different web designs called A/B testing to see which users prefer and then use the more effective version.

Great web design is an evolving process, and will require reviews, alterations and adjustments every so often to keep up with changing customer behaviours and expectations – but if you’ve laid the groundwork with web design stakeholder analysis, you can be sure you’ll always be on the path to success with your business website.

For a free consultation on professional web design and development, contact Cocoonfxmedia or call 0121 8203659.Share

5 Sources of competitive advantage

Competitive advantage is a set of circumstances or conditions (such as being first to take a product to market) that puts one company in a more favourable position than the other. Here are the 5 sources of competitive advantage that you can identify and build upon in your company every day. 

Sources of Competitive Advantage:

1. Superior Skills

“The distinctive capabilities of key personnel that set them apart from the personnel of competing firms” 
“The benefit of superior skills is the resulting ability to perform functions more effectively than other firms” – Chadwick and Jobber

By having the right personnel with the same values, with the right skills and drive will completely separate you from the competition. It may be that some of you don’t have Masters Degrees but have the flare and creativity to make things happen.

2. Superior Resources

Having superior resources can help massively. “The tangible requirements for the advantage that enable a firm to exercise its skills” Such as;

• The number of salespeople in a market
• Expenditure on advertisement and sales promotion
• Distribution infrastructure
• Expenditure on R&D
• Scale and type of production facilities
• Brand equity
• Knowledge

3. Core Competencies

The distinctive nature of these skills and resources make up a company’s core competencies. Capabilities that are critical to a business achieving competitive advantage. “Core competencies are the most important sources of uniqueness” 1990 Prahalad and Hamel. They are a “harmonised combination of multiple resources and skills that distinguish a firm in the marketplace”.

Are they Core Competencies?

1. Relevance; they must give something that strongly influences the consumer to choose the product/ service.
2. Difficult to imitate; the competence must be difficult to imitate
3. The breadth of Application; Something that opens new markets. If it only opens a few small niche markets then success in these markets will not be enough to sustain significant growth.
4. Value Chain

The value chain is a high-level model developed by Porter. It is used to describe the process by which businesses receive raw materials, and add value through various processes to create a finished product, ready to sell to customers. The overall goal of the value chain is to deliver maximum value for the least possible cost to create a competitive advantage.

5. Differential Advantage

Unique benefits/ selling points/ characteristics that set the product/ service apart and above its competitors in the customer’s viewpoint.

Avoid the ‘me too’, syndrome otherwise price is the only thing you can be different about and the market is damaged. e.g. TkMaxx ‘big labels small prices’

• Promotion
• Price
• Distribution
• Product

Apply this model when drawing up competitive strategies for the market and explore what your company’s sources of competitive advantage are and how you can leverage them in marketing plans.

RISE of the Millennials Gen-Z! Death of the Freight Forwarder

The logistics & freight forwarding industry is incredibly challenging at the moment with the dreaded B word COVID and those pesky Millennials Gen-Z demanding quality of service & ethics (according to a survey). We all know the logistics industry is quite far behind like many industries when it comes to technology and marketing and particularly online.

Does your website look something similar to below? Old looking and non mobile responsive?

We did a quick search online on shipping lines to help write this blog and it wasn’t hard to find a lot of what we would describe as ancient looking websites. This is a non secure, non mobile responsive website. The typography is small, the content isn’t layout at all well. However this is a common issue within the logistics & freight forwarding industry.

Digitalisation of Logistics – Doesn’t mean just IT Systems.

When I started to write this blog, I was thinking about Millennials but actually your business needs to think about Gen-Z.  Both Generations are tech savvy and some of the newest billionaires are under 40. A lot starting apparel and fashion businesses which demand a supply chain and shipping thousands of consignments. If you website hasn’t been touched since 2007 you could be losing revenue. These individuals will not be using desktops they will be using mobile devices to search quickly for a logistics company which provides a quality and ethical service over cost. They will not hang around trying to navigate round old content, out of date imagery and really basic information on what your business does. You need to move with the times.

No one visits my websites! I does nothing for me! 

We often hear this or we don’t have time of the budget to fix our website or marketing. WRONG! you do have the budget and you need to make time or find someone who can help you market your website. It is very simply you could miss out on 100 TEUs or 10,000 shipments via Airfreight or storage because a 20 something could do the following:

1. Find your site on google or social media.
2. When they did stumble across your site it didn’t work very well on their mobile device.
3. Content was outdated and used freight terminology and buzz words from before they where born.

We know profit margins are tight in logistics as we’ve worked in the industry, but you can’t have that the old mindset that you can drum up business through cold calling and word of mouth. You need to add your website as your top sales person to drive enquiries you never had and the more you promote your website it will continuously pay for itself everyday. You need to change your mindset on technology and customer expectations. Customers now demand more at their fingertips and want an easy life trying to get to it.  Don’t miss out on an opportunity to modernise your business for the future. 

We can help with the above and we can help your business modernise to meet the demands of the next generations. If you want to find out more about our Web Design services please do get in contact.

The way people perceive your brand has a significant effect on how well you grow. If your brand name doesn’t match what you do or is too difficult to remember, you might lose customers before they ever find you.

Fortunately, you can rebrand or use other methods to increase awareness and take your business’s recognition to the next level.

Why Is a Brand Name Important to Customers?

The Small Business Administration estimates there are over 32 million small businesses in the United States. Figuring out which companies align with your values takes a lot of research. Once consumers find a business that stands for what they believe in and offers a quality product, they tend to be fairly loyal.

Your brand name can make you seem serious or fun. It can be linked to a great reputation or a poor one. It might even confuse people if it is too similar to another company’s name.

Here are some tips to help improve your brand name’s impact and the perception you have on your target audience.

1. Choose a Memorable Name

Whether you create an entirely new word or combine existing ones, think about the natural language people use when talking about your type of product.

For example, the name Swiffer helped make the product a household name. It is familiar-sounding, because of the word “sweep” but then plays on that word showing how the process with the product is quicker than without. The product outperformed its competitor by 500%, much of the success due to the name.

2. Conduct a Brand Perception Survey

One of the best ways to see how your brand name resonates with your audience is to survey them. Ask them what the name makes them think of. Does the name sound similar to any others they do business with?

You can also use some word association exercises to see what other words they think of when they hear your company’s nomer.

3. Study Popular Brands

Thinking about the branding of some of the more iconic brands of today can help give you ideas for your own name. Do you want to reach the younger generation? Studies show they’re highly educated, with around 57% of them enrolling in college compared to only 43% of Gen-Xers.

Companies such as Starbucks, Snapchat and Coca-Cola all serve as easily recognizable names for various reasons. Think about which works best for your industry and how you might come up with something as memorable.

How do these brands protect their name and image over time? Has anything changed from when they opened their doors?

4. Identify Your Audience

Knowing who your audience is and how they relate to words can make the difference in brand perception. For example, those grieving may not react well to words related to death or sadness. Take the time to write out user personas. Seek control groups and see how the audience you want to target response to different names and branding efforts.

You can base your buyer persona on internal information about your current customers. You should also seek out information that is more general in nature by looking at who follows your competitors or thinking through what types of people might be interested in your product.

For example, if you sell memorial stones, you might currently market to Gen-Xers whose parents have passed. However, there may be other categories of potential customers, such as those wishing to memorialize a young person who passed or parents and spouses of soldiers killed in battle.

Do your research on each potential segment and see how they might react to your branding and reputation. What do you need to adjust to reach them and make a positive impression?

5. Resonate With Your Customers

Link Once you have a buyer persona or two, think about the best ways to resonate with them. In the past, your brand reputation could carry you a long way. In today’s marketing environment, though, it’s more important to reach your audience on a personal level.

Think about the colours, emotions, language and imagery you must invoke to make a positive impression. Using psychology helps you make a connection with your buyers no matter what your brand name is.

6. Take Constructive Criticism

Does your name make people think of poop? If your customers keep making comments about your brand name or image, pay attention to what they’re saying. One person complaining might not seem like a lot, but keep in mind all the others who feel similar and never say anything.

Companies with a poor reputation might also consider rebranding and coming up with a new name. Although you can do damage control, sometimes it is easier to refresh and start new. Getting rid of a name with negative associations might encourage people to give your brand another try.

Work on Recognition

The most creative and interesting brand name won’t go far if people have never heard of you. Get out in your local community. Sponsor a little league team. Attend a local art fair and pass out freebies. Look for ways to connect with your town.

At the same time, take out ads on social media and have a strong presence. Answer questions in your industry without any expectation of people buying from you. Support causes you to believe in and that your customers care about.

You should also work on getting positive feedback going. Most people search online for reviews from their peers before they make a decision to buy. Ask your loyal customers to write a review on Google or another review platform. The more exposure you receive, the more likely someone will give your business a try. Your name is everything, but you can enhance it even more with a little effort.

Eleanor is the founder and managing editor of Designerly Magazine. She’s also a web design consultant with a focus on customer experience. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dogs, Bear and Lucy. Share

8 Tips To Create A High-Converting Blog Post

Content marketing is one of the most valuable ways of converting casual readers to your site into new subscribers or customers. It involves marketing principles that encourage site visitors to complete an action that you have as a goal for your blog posts. This could lead to more leads and increased sales for your business or brand. 

However, there’s no fixed formula or blanket recipe to create content that can automatically convert leads, as each blog post and brand is different. But, you can apply the tried and trusted methods used by successful blog writers to improve the conversion rate of your content.

This article lists notable tips to help you create a high-converting blog post. Continue reading below to learn more. 

1. Know Your Target Audience 

One of the most crucial steps in crafting high-converting blogs is to understand the audience your content is intended for. Without a focused analysis or discovery process to find out who your target market is, your content could have a large bounce rate percentage even if web traffic is high. This means your readers might look at your content but will leave without completing any actions. And for that reason, a target audience strategy is necessary to tailor your messaging to people who could be interested in the content you’re creating. 

Constructing audience personas has been helpful in discerning who your readers are. These are fictional profiles that represent your audience’s character, lifestyle, motivations, values, and behaviour. Knowing this can assist you in finding ways to appeal to and resonate with them and create valuable content that they can relate to and benefit from. 

You can also use this information to improve your existing website’s ease of use. If perhaps, you suspect that your blog site might be too complex for your target audience to navigate, you can view this list post to find solutions to streamline your reader’s journey.

2. Create Content That Is Timely 

Knowing what your audience is looking for in a blog post is just as important as knowing when to post your content. This is especially true since timeliness can be a critical factor in determining whether your target audience interprets your post as relevant to them. 

For instance, if your content topic is about weekend activities with the aim of converting visitors to book for a restaurant, posting on a Monday could yield low conversions. The same could be said about calendar events. 

That said, make sure that you post your blog posts timely, possibly close to when your content is suitable for your audience to take action. This can also give you the advantage of creating urgency with your call-to-action (CTA) by making it timebound.

3. Conduct Keyword Research 

The keyword research process involves optimizing your content for search engines. Doing this makes the content on your blog more visible and easier to discover, allowing you to reach more audiences. However, these keywords should be used sparingly and distributed evenly throughout your blog post so that you don’t engage in keyword stuffing. This can cause the search engine to penalize your content and lower its ranking. 

To find the most commonly used keywords for your content, you can create a list of words related or relevant to the content you create. You can also look into how your competitors rank with the keywords you’ve identified. To do this, you can use a keyword research tool that’ll show you how many times the keywords were used in a blog post.

You can analyse the data to look for related and outlier keywords that are unique but still have a high search frequency. These are the keywords or phrases you can use to include in your blog post. Doing this allows you to draw your target audience to your blog quicker without having to use the same keywords as your competitors. 

4. Write For Readability

How you format your content in your blog post is also essential to retain readers’ attention. Positioning your content in a layout that’s easy to scan and read through seamlessly has a higher chance of audiences staying to read the whole post. Readability also concerns the writing copy that can be understood by your target market using common words they’re familiar with and doesn’t go beyond their difficulty level.  

As such, high-converting blog posts have content made from short sentences that are easy to follow and contain a single subject. Most often, five sentences at maximum can be used to make a paragraph. Then the large white spaces are used to break up each paragraph section sorted into secondary headlines. 

In addition, to increase your copy’s readability even further, you can add listicles and bullet points to summarize your ideas. This especially applies to long-form content that needs to hold a reader’s attention for an extended time.  

5. Use An Attention-Grabbing Headline 

Your blog headline is generally the first glimpse or exposure your target audience will have to your content. This can either be on the web search engine page, a landing page, or shared with them as a link. That said, aim for a headline that’s compelling and intriguing enough. It should be something that can spark your reader’s curiosity and interest. Also, note that your headline could be a factor in whether your readers will continue reading your blog post or bounce from it.

There are several approaches to creating attention-grabbing headlines. For instance, you can add and use ‘trigger’ or emotive words to establish a personal connection with your audience. Words such as ‘free’ and ‘online’ also tend to appeal to readers looking for information and reviews about tools or products they need at a bargain for instance. More so, readers looking for universal experiences to relate to or personal development respond well to words such as ‘improve’ and ‘better’.

The general rule for crafting unique headlines is to keep them brief. Also, keep in mind not to give too much away in your headline. Otherwise, your audience could lose interest in reading further.

6. Include Visual Media

Several studies have shown that web users are more attracted to eye-catching visual media than written text and are more likely to engage with it too. This is due to pictures, videos, and infographics being interesting and conveying a single idea in a shorter period successfully. And more so, viewing them doesn’t take as much mental ability as reading. 

As such, keep in mind that most readers prefer consuming information that’s concise and easily digestible. This doesn’t mean that you should skip writing content. Rather, utilize visual media to complement your writing. 

Additionally, high-quality visual media can also boost your blog site’s credibility, particularly in the case of the infographic to organize statistics and information. These visual aids can make it simpler to interpret and remember data. And once this trust has been established, more of your audience will likely be willing to convert to consumers and subscribers.

A tip to note, it’s ideal that you use two types of visual mediums at the most per post. However, try not to embed too many in one post, or it could distract your reader by taking attention away from your written work.

7. Make A Call To Action 

Ultimately, the key to creating a converting blog post is the call to action itself. This is the vehicle that can drive browsing readers and site visitors to become consumers and potential leads. And as such, your call to action should be simple but can prompt users to go through with the goal you want them to take.

It’s advised that your call to action be placed at the end of your post so that it can guide your audience to their next steps. They can be simple and direct phrases such as ‘buy now’, ‘learn more’, or ‘subscribe to our newsletter’ if your CTA goal is lead generation. Furthermore, if your CTA includes phrases such as ‘hurry while stocks last’ for instance, it tends to create a sense of urgency and may even help increase conversions at a faster rate. 

Additionally, an important consideration for retaining purchasing conversions is your landing page. Once visitors click on your CTA button, the land page should ideally have simplified information on how to proceed and complete the action. Otherwise, you might find that many visitors fail to make a payment or click the exit button, decreasing your conversion rate in the process.

8. Boost Blog Post Credibility 

Getting readers to complete a prompted call to action will need them to trust that you and your blog are reputable. This is particularly the case wherein your conversion goal is a signup or site visitors completing a purchase. Your target audience needs to feel safe that you won’t spam them, misuse their information or that your website is secure enough to enter their payment information. 

Thus, to boost your blog’s reputation, you can refine some of the profile features that best display your brand identity. For instance, you can create a recognizable and fantastic logo or a personal image visible on your blog post. You can also include personal information such as an about us section, email address, social media handles, and a business address.

Wrapping Up

A highly converting blog post aims to increase customer leads and acquisition using content marketing. Your blog post can achieve this by focusing on what your target audience can gain from your blog and using ways to get them to complete your call to action. And in terms of visibility, using keywords and optimizing your content for search engines can ensure users find your posts easier. 

And ultimately, all of the elements listed above can be used together as part of a strategy to turn your casual readers into new consumers. Share

The integrated marketing communications plan is an approach that achieves the objectives of a marketing campaign, through a well-coordinated use of different promotional methods that are intended to reinforce each other. It is successful within B2B and B2C companies and can be used by small retailers who can’t afford to outsource marketing, large global brands to even non–profit organisations, this model is applicable to cater for many companies.

Within the IMC plan, the company carefully integrates and coordinates its many communication channels to deliver clear and consistent messages about the organisation and product or service.

The plan involves getting a communication message to a customer; this message has to be clear, consistent and compelling. The process of the IMC is important for better managing the communication mix with target audiences and maintaining a strong market position through brand differentiation.

Planning provides direction for creating and delivering brand messages, it provides new opportunities for advertising agencies and for companies to create added value for their customers and ensures that the message being delivered to consumers and clients can be monitored every step of the way.

Belch G. & M. Belch suggest that the IMC process consists of six key steps outlined below:

1.    Contextual or Situational Analysis

The first stage of the IMC planning process is to conduct a situational/ contextual analysis. This can involve a SWOT analysis and an external and internal environmental analysis. 

2.    Target Markets

You need to research and decide who your target markets are and map them on a demographic and psychographic level. Then you need to decide what the benefits are to the consumer and why they would use the product.

3.    Communication Objectives

The third step of the planning process is to decide what the communication objectives are. These are objectives that your company wants to communicate to the public and their target audience. Some examples of these are;

• Develop brand awareness
• Change customer beliefs
• Enhance brand image
• Increase sales
• Reinforce purchase decisions

4.    Budget

The types of budgets that companies have can vary. These can be, a percentage of sales, competitive partially, percentage of profit, or a budget depending on objectives and tasks and how much the company can afford.

5.    Marketing Mix Strategy

The marketing mix (product, price, place, promotion), is selected in line with the communication objectives and within lesion with the budget selected.

6.    Evaluating the Programme

The final step of the IMC planning process is evaluating the programme. This can be done by certain social media metrics, by analysing online traffic with the use of Google analytics, and by sales and social media tools that allow you to track engagement with certain items.

For more marketing tips, why not take a look at our article on the 3p’s of marketing or join our mailing list to receive actionable digital marketing news with interviews from people high in the industry! 

Advertising theory

Advertisements, annoying 3 minutes of hell in between your favourite television programme. Radio jingles that get stuck in your head all day, billboards that you pass on the way home showing you Big Macs, or Chinese takeaways from Diliveroo. We’ve all been subject to advertising.

Some of us try to remove them from of our homes, and live a corporate free life, others just make a cup of tea when they’re on. Advertisements are hilarious, some are hard hitting and some are a little dull. You might think that the people who create them have no idea what they’re doing and you’d be half right… but actually there is some sort of theory to all this madness.

Advertisers are the great evil, the story tellers, all the promises in the world offered to you on a plate in form of a fairy-tale before you go to sleep, they create emotions, make us actually want to purchase things, catch our attention and sometimes make us turn over the channel.

In this article, we’re going to look at advertising theory. The way that people who want to sell something curate different images, sounds and effects to make a viewer feel a certain way and take action. The model we’re going to focus on is the means- end theory/ MECCAs model which is broken down into five parts.

Means-end theory (MECCAS model)

This model states that advertisers require five elements to create an ad.

1. The product attributes
2. Consumer benefits
3. Leverage points
4. Personal values
5. The executional framework

The product attributes

The product attributes. What are the features of your product, what makes it up? What is its purpose?

The consumer benefits

What about your product is going to benefit the consumer or target audience? Why should they buy your product what are the pain points your product is solving?

Leverage points

“A leverage point moves the consumer from understanding the products benefits to linking those benefits with personal values.”

A leverage point can be: A message or phrase e.g. a question to a consumer or a combination of visual images and phrases. This is the part where the advertiser hopes to portray the emotional benefits of buying your product instead of something else.

For example, why does a child drink Coke instead of Pepsi? Its deeper than just the taste, is it because all the skater kids are drinking Pepsi and they want to identify with skaters. You need to parallel your target audiences beliefs as well as their self identity to champion this one.

Personal values

Personal values are the way in which your product makes a connection with the viewer. For example, if you are using music in your advert you might emotionally connect with a viewer, however, if the connection they have with a particular song is related to a bad feeling or painful memory it may create those kinds of connections with your product. So, be safe and stay away from Back to Bedlam!

The executional framework

The executional frame work is the manner in which an ad appeal is presented.

1. Animation – Originally used by small budget firms. Now popular due to the upgrade in PC graphics, they personify products, animal’s humans and are used by companies such as Red Bull who are quite a high-profile brand.
2. Slice of life– This is a soft sell approach, provides solutions and a scenario in four stages Encounter Problem Interaction Solution

3. Testimonials – Testimonials tell the viewer of a positive experience with products offered. These promote services and products, authenticity is key with this framework. Actual customers should be use and enhance imperfections, customers shouldn’t be airbrushed or altered. There is also evidence to suggest that customers with accents are more trust worthy, and northerners are perceived to be friendlier.
4. Informative – Present information in a straightforward way. This is used lots for radio, its good in high involvement situations and is particularly used within B2B industry.
5. Authoritative – This shows superiority using expertise. For example, you could use dentists, doctors, engineers, scientific research. The claims made in this framework are powerful and they rely on cognitive process good for print especially magazines.
6. Demonstrations – shows the product working, its functionality. The product is the core focus. Used in television/ online in flash media- not so much in print.
7. Fantasy – This can also be realistic, it is used for services and products. Involves romance, love, sex and it targets older audiences. Shows experience of the product and is used in TV.

So, there you have it, everything you need to know about the Means- end advertising theory. Try and put it into practice on your next advertising campaign and measure your results! If you need help with any of your marketing efforts whether it be digital or print get in touch and see where we can help your company succeed.

During our training in Marketing (as every marketing student can attest to), we were drilled in the importance of the ‘Marketing Mix’, otherwise known as the 7 Ps.

The traditional 4 P’s of Product, Place, Price and Promotion were easily applied to tangible products, however, it was the extended 3 P’s added for the service sector that really caught our attention, especially working in a ‘service’ industry ourselves.

The extended 3 P’s of People, Process, and Physical Evidence sounded great in theory, and in the world of textbooks and imagined scenarios, we could see how they could be implemented. However, in the real world of business, using the extended P’s in practice wasn’t as straightforward as we expected. But as a marketing business ourselves, it’s something that we have always considered and promoted.

So how can you use the extended 3 Ps in practice? Here’s our experience…

The Extended 3 P’s in Action 

PEOPLE: In the traditional sense, the people part of the extended 3 P’s refers to employees, because in the service sector, how employees interact with people can be the reason for a sale and even a repeat purchase. Therefore happy, skilled staff equal happy, satisfied customers.  By offering a better level of pre-sales and after-sales support, you can gain that all-important advantage over competitors.

We found this to be the case when providing our web design service to a voluntary sector organisation called Talent Match.

The organisation had funding to develop a website aimed at helping young people (who were classed as furthest away from the job market) to work. However, they needed the young people involved in the web design process, but this wasn’t a typical service offered by web design companies.

Trained in the importance of ‘people’ in the marketing mix, and the development of B2B working relationships, our staff accepted the challenge of a new service. We provided focus groups to the young people that were not only inclusive and informative but fun and informal. You can see the outcome of that ‘people-focussed service in our Talent Match case study.

However, offering that personal touch in our service offering didn’t just end there, we also offer continued communication, making sure staff working on projects are always just a phone call or email away; defining the timing of responses based on customer concern, not our own workload.

Read more: School system helps teachers stay bang up to date with their websites

PROCESS: The processes involved in delivering your marketing function and services will help form your brand reputation, either for good or for bad. Every process you have in place, from contact response times to complaint management needs to meet (and preferably exceed) customer expectations. Basically, the more efficient, easier and understandable the process, the more success you’ll have winning over customers.

An example of how we have supported customers to achieve the process aspect of the marketing mix is by offering custom made website tools and designs to ease ‘pain points’ within the customer journey and experience.

For a recent project we did for a popular music festival, the client had identified that the original processes were not working well or meeting the needs of their new digital audience. Customers looking to book at a number of individual venues were being redirected from their original website to another site. They were also struggling to use the site on their mobiles and this caused further confusion and frustration.

To make the process more customer-centric, we updated the digital system to ease the booking process, making it a seamless transition for both the customers and B2B music venues to manage and monitor. Ensuring that the customer-preferred channel for booking was fit for purpose resulted in an increase in ticket sales from the previous year, and a wider audience reach.

PHYSICAL EVIDENCE: For a business to meet the physical evidence variable of the extended 3 P’s they must carefully choose how to portray their image through their physical presence; their premises, marketing collateral, staff appearance etc.  This is an important aspect for companies that don’t actually have a physical product to offer, as their image can be crucial in influencing customers to conduct business with them.

For companies that only offer intangible services, this is an aspect that can’t be ignored. Careful consideration of the appearance of your place of work, right down to the business cards you hand out, must work together to portray your brand message.

In an online context, each company website is a virtual ‘shop front.’ So the design and appearance often determine if visitors will stay and engage further. An outdated website, with poor function, portrays an outdated company, with a poor understanding of its customer’s needs.

To support businesses to achieve the physical evidence part of the marketing mix, we provide websites that represent the company’s brand values, as in the case of a driving school client. This client found that its website wasn’t attracting, or keeping visitors, with its outdated appearance possibly damaging its overall reputation.

The website needed to be updated to integrate with the offline experience and the message the company wished to portray. The driving school already utilised modern, bright and fun vehicles for students to learn in, and had enthusiastic and friendly instructors; the website and associated social media pages needed to portray that too.

Within a short time of improving the website with bright colours, easy navigation and fun, friendly content, the image of the business became more noticeable to visitors. Website users began staying for longer and the result for that business was a huge increase in enquiries which you can see here.

Reaping the Benefits of the Extended 3P’s

Within the service industry, the extended 3 P’s are actually very useful at helping businesses to achieve a competitive advantage; which is why we don’t just try and implement them in our own practices, but also support our clients to achieve these variables for their business services.

However, to be useful, they must be put into practice and developed to the individual needs of a company’s specific market. One size just doesn’t fit all.

By understanding each aspect of the 3 P’s and auditing your own business offerings, you should be able to identify areas for improvement that can be addressed within budget. This will then provide you with a stronger value proposition as well as establish you as a reputable business that works hard to meet the needs of its customers.

Have you recently supported a business to put one of the 3 Ps into practice?

What lessons have you learnt from the extended marketing mix?

We’d love to hear your experiences, results and ideas below.Share

The Marketing Mix is a set of controllable variables that the organisation can use to influence the buyer’s response (Philip Kotler, 2009). The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM, 2008) promotes the philosophy of a Market Oriented organisation, where by the target market and user is central to every single decision made, and that decision should be in the best interests of the target market, whilst doing so at a profit. It is within this approach of placing the user at the center that marketing and design share a mutual dialogue.

An organisation will execute its strategy through the application and blending of the marketing mix; describing the combination of tactics used by an organisation to achieve its objectives by marketing its products or services effectively to a particular target market / segment. More commonly it is also referred to as the ‘4 Ps’ – Product, Price, Promotion and Place:

Product – this involves ultimately what products and services will be marketed. Key decisions include design, core product benefits and features, quality, branding and packaging.

Price – as the only element in the mix that develops revenue you can appreciate it is one of the most important, decisions include price levels, methods of payment and discounts.

Place – deals with making products and service available, decisions relate to items such as shop fronts, warehouse, distribution channels and market coverage.

Promotion – decisions relate to advertising, PR, direct marketing, sales and items such as exhibitions. Each of these items can be used in many, many ways. With such a broad range of media available the possibilities are endless, but as with all things in the plan we need to maintain out customer focus and this will help determine channels used.

With the growth of the service economy the Marketing sector made consideration of the service characteristics which resulted in the creation of an additional three marketing mix elements, the service extension, to Borden’s original 4Ps; product, price, place and promotion.

These extra considerations gives the marketer the framework to deal with some of the issues raised by ‘service characteristics’. It also allows for further tailoring of the service to best resonate with the target market.

People:

In the process of meeting customer needs an organisations staff will directly or indirectly affect the quality of the service delivered. Often this element relates to the direct contact with the customer in service marketing and consumption. This makes this element a powerful tool of the marketing mix in building a sustainable competitive advantage. The ‘people’ element also considers the possibility of consumer-consumer interaction.

Automation of a service provides the benefit of removing one side of the service; that of the service provision. The customer will still judge the quality of the service based on their experience, how easy or how quick, for example the automation is to use.

Even within the traditional manufacturing sectors the importance of quality customer service, the ‘people’ element is recognised and included in the mix to develop competitive advantage.

Physical Evidence:

This element relates to the physical properties of the services and the tools used to market the service offer. With tangible products the customer can actual touch the product, a physical object that they can interact with before a decision has been made on whether it meets their needs and ultimately should they purchase the item or not. With services, and their intangibility, this is not possible. This can be particularly problematic when dealing with a customer who has not used the service before. The customer will use other physical signals as evidence in evaluating the service providers offering.

Process:

The process element relates to how the customer accesses the product or service. ‘Process’ provides a framework for analysing the delivery of the service. Although developed with service marketing in mind its importance has again become recognised when marketing physical products.

One fundamental technique is customer journey mapping, where does the target market start to interact with the product, what do they do next? This exercise helps to identify customer ‘touch’ points’, places in the customer journey where an organisation can communicate with the user.

‘Process’ also deals with delivering the service in terms of efficiency, this can have an effect on time scales that an organisation can use to improve on profits or the number of people served in a given time.

The marketing mix, including the service extension, can be used to drive change, create new products, help in choosing a pricing strategy, placing so products are easily accessible and promoting a product to all the right customers through the right channels. Remember the mix (or indeed any part of a marketing plan) is a working document and should respond and change to new external situations in the broader environment.