Experience Matters 28 Years of Solving Nearly Every Kind of Communications Challenge
I write regularly about how branding impacts your website, your marketing and your business. Last week, in celebration of RainCastle’s twentieth anniversary, we launched our new website, in which we introduced our new brand theme, “EXPERIENCE MATTERS,” here’s why.
What happens when the self-service digital ethos in which we are living is applied to a website design and development process?
There’s still concern in the B2B community about just how important social media is in creating and sustaining relationships with partners and clients. But when it comes to building brand loyalty online, social media is the most beneficial tool available.
Many of our client’s businesses and sales processes are relationship-based so traditionally that they have not engaged in specific marketing or lead generation programs. As the B2B world, like the rest of the world, becomes increasingly digital, internet marketing — of which lead generation can be a subset — is becoming the new sales. But lead generation programs and relationship-based sales and marketing need not be mutually exclusive. Instead, they can help a relationship-based approach by identifying additional potential clients and enable your company to initiate a relationship rather than waiting for your potential client to reach out (which could take months, which is more like years in internet time).
Our clients and partners are a bright bunch; highly educated and accomplished in their fields. So it has surprised me lately in a few conversations about internet marketing, social media, content marketing, etc., that they can be uncertain or uneducated about it. It’s interesting to see that in the world with everything at our fingertips, we can still live in our own bubbles.
There are tons of “5 Best Reasons…” blogposts about what to look for when hiring an agency, so I’m going to try not to do the done thing. When I think about what makes a firm worthy, I think the issue of characteris often sublimated in favor of what an agency does, what name brand clients they have, how slick their portfolio looks or maybe how embedded they are in social media. The characteristics that lead to great work and strong relationships are, in no particular order, awareness, curiosity, empathy, humor and objectivity.
Next week is Marathon Monday in Boston, which got me thinking about “marathon web projects.”What the Boston Marathon and marathon web projects have in common are that both can be painful, long and tedious. Where they differ is that running in the Boston Marathon can result in a feeling of deep accomplishment. Marathon web projects are…less satisfying.
You might think that after seventeen years of designing web sites so much of the process would be boilerplate. You’d be wrong. While our internal processes are rock solid and and instill confidence, every client relationship and thus every job is just enough different to keep us on our toes. That said, there are some universal principals for building successful long-term client relationships in the web business.
This is the third of five posts about the mistaken assumptions, both from the client and designer perspectives, about web site development projects.
In the New York Times Annual “Year in Ideas” issue, that came out this past Sunday, December 13, 2009, there are a collection of ideas that the editors believe characterized the year. One idea that caught my attention was titled, “Good Enough is the New Great,” and was described by Robert Mackey. Mackey contends that everywhere you look, people are accepting a lower level of technology and quality in exchange for ease-of-use and lower cost. Mackey provides examples such as the growth of Flickr, which displays snapshots often taken with cell phones and cheap point and shoot cameras. Despite the easy availability of multi-megapixel cameras with zoom lenses and auto focus, iPhone images are “good enough.” Although high definition plasma TV’s are available, more and more people spend time watching blurry, low-res videos on their laptops or iPhones. Younger audiences he contends, actually prefer the lower-end sound of music on an iPod than then the crisper fidelity of a CD and so forth. In the field of graphic and web design, this has been true for some time, although 2009 put the ! on the concept. Read more
