My mother taught me how to write. My father taught me how to defend myself (verbally). Art Center College of Design taught me how to present my ideas. But none of these venerable resources taught me how to read minds. What does mind reading have to do with marketing or design: practically everything.
The other day, I saw a website for an agency that uses the tagline, “We Work on Your Business, Not Just Your Website.” I related to the line’s strategic positioning and have to admit to being disappointed that I hadn’t come up with it myself.
Good storytelling is the new frontier for the website.
As Responsive Design homogenizes the look and feel of websites (I love the usability but dislike the cookie cutter designs that Responsive Design so often engenders); now, more than ever, we need compelling content to break through the visual monotony and fuse the “brand experience” with the “user experience.” This is especially true in B2B, where it is easy to “live above the neck” in a world of features, functions, dense and often technical content.
Here are five websites that successfully use compelling storytelling to build their brands. Read more
Much like last year when websites with Parallax scrolling took off, we’re seeing a growing number of sites using video on their websites, in new ways, to enhance their brands. But rather than, and in some cases in addition to “talking heads,” we’re seeing “ambient video.”
Ambient video is background video whose purpose is to establish a visual brand identity. While words and still images do the heavy lifting in terms of creating messages, the addition of web video can provide an emotional resonance that can help an otherwise purely rational brand become a more emotionally satisfying user experience.
Watching “Seinfeld” and then “Curb your Enthusiasm,” has taught me to look for the universal truths, if not humor, in the mundanity of everyday life. Web design has as much mundanity as any other profession, but if you look carefully, there are patterns or trends (in addition to Responsive Design) worth noting that can help you transform your website from mundane to magnificent.
Content Now Drives Design
This may sound obvious today, but for most of the history of the web, we (web designers) designed the site first and fit the content in later. This is how it went:
With this process, design could sometimes be a formulaic exercise. Read more
In our data and analytics driven marketing world, why would something so touchy feely, so ethereal and hard to quantify as brand personality be something you care about?
Everyone wants to be Apple. Everyone wants to, “Think Different.”
In “How to Build a B2B Website That Serves Multiple Audiences, Part I,” I discussed the B2B branding and website design implications of how to create a website that effectively speaks to two or more disparate audiences. In this second part, I will adress this “multi-audience” web problem from the perspectives of information architecture, content creation and SEO.
Maybe it is the function of the multi-product, multi-tasking, multi messaged nature of businesses these days but it seems that practically all of our clients share a common problem, which is how to create B2B websites that effectively speak to two or more disparate audiences — without diluting the user experience for each of those audiences. In this two-part blog post, I will address this “multi-audience” web problem, which spans brand, design, information architecture, content creation, and SEO.
B2B Branding for Multiple Web Audiences
Chief marketing officers have never had it easy. In today’s tight economic climate and with transformational shifts in marketing technologies and trends, some would say the job of CMO is tougher than ever. But those same shifts create exciting new tools and opportunities for reaching and motivating B2B buyers.
In this conversation with seasoned CMO Mike Mitsock, we explore his thoughts on meeting today’s challenges and practical approaches for creating strong brands and generating measurable growth.
Are you struggling with your company’s content strategy and social media strategy? Video is an effective way to elevate your social media plan and hook your viewers. Several of our clients are asking us to integrate video into their websites and social media and here’s why we recommend doing it.
A short video (up to two minutes) is an opportunity to tell your company’s story. We recently updated our website and by embedding a video on the “About RainCastle” page, we were able to tell our story in a new way. Within seconds, prospective clients and employees gain insight into our culture and team, even some of our technologists who often work behind the scene.
Video shows how your product or service works. In less than a minute, by showing a demo, a video can explain how a new technology or product works. Our client, AirStrip Technologies, creates medical software that allows healthcare providers to monitor patient data on their mobile devices. They use video to demo and promote the exciting new technology they’ve developed – technology that enables clinicians to interact with and respond rapidly to clinically relevant patient health information.
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