PlusOne - Musings of a marketer

A thread on a forum demonstrated how experience in real world marketing does not automatically translate into internet marketing prowess - things are different on-line and a real world marketing background may fail you.

This paragraph got me thinking…

We’ve heard the splash page comment a few times, we’re trying to do an in-between corporate identity thing but include some product images. My wife has a lot of marketing and branding experience and she is really trying to create a brand image so we really don’t want to go straight into the product area. We’re going for a more boutiqe-y market than mass market.

This demonstrates that a background in real world marketing and branding does not always translate into internet marketing and branding.

The site itself looks really nice - it is boutique-like, but the aim of hoping that a splash page will contribute to branding does does not work on the internet.

This is for two reasons.

• search engines often do not treat splash pages kindly,
• a splash page serves no useful purpose for visitors except to perhaps make them wait while some big flash file loads, or adds another extra click to the experience.

If your visitors are going to bookmark your site, they are going to do it from the page that gives best access to the rest of the site - and this is not going to be the splash page. They will never see it again.

Certainly the look and feel of the site is important, but branding best comes in other forms of customer experience and there are several important branding opportunities:

• The ease of getting customer service
• The ease of site use
• Carrying through the website brand experience through to product ordering and delivery - this is where offline marketing and branding experience can be highly valuable - especially in recognising that the customer experience does not end at the website
• Other forms of customer communication - that is your customers communicating with potential customers

Branding on-line is not the same on-line as offline - where billboards, newspaper advertisements and POS material can be used. Sure there are banner ads, directory entries etc that can be used on-line (and lets face it, banner ads are the most widely-used method of branding rather than traffic generation around - [affiliates there is a lesson there!]), but a splash page is not the place for branding.

The real benefit anyone has is best used in knowing and effectively using offline marketing to drive people to a web site - unlike many whose business experience is limited to on-line - they become transfixed by on-line marketing - like rabbits in the headlights!!

Share your views on branding and on-line and offline marketing via comments