LO1; Apply professional marketing techniques to a showreel website to gain feedback from industry professionals.
As someone who has little experience in marketing, this would be a task i’d have to put a lot of research into both on a primary and secondary level. The two main methods of marketing i’ll be looking at within this post will focus around paid for marketing and free marketing.
The main method we would have to look into in terms of free advertising would SMM(Social media marketing). Although focused around social media, SMM is a broad spectrum, it mainly focuses on creating and sharing content on social media networks in order to achieve your marketing and branding goals. In our case the branding goal would be to get as many eyes on our website to increase our chances of getting paid work. Esteemed advertising expert Dan Shewan runs a blog focused around marketing websites on wordstream and here are some of the key takeaways from the blog:
– If you’re running a promotion and you want to post about it on social media websites then you should link directly to the promotion, not to your websites homepage.
– Targeting the right people with your social media marketing is important. Going after the right people at the right time is incredibly effective. For our social media’s we will need to follow people within industry, it’s way more efficient to focus on people within the industry who will actually require jobs doing. It’s more important to have a small crowd of industry followers as posed to many non-industry followers.
– Within marketing, visuals are often more important that the text itself when it comes to getting potential clients to consider you. Offering an aesthetic visual experience will often be the gateway for people to read through the rest of the website, never have a page of text on your homepage.
– Use in app functions within social media to gauge how well certain posts do. For example, Twitter makes use of analytics for Tweets including an impression rate. This will be useful to find out which Tweets result in the most engagement,
– Take into account cross platform contract details. For example Facebook has a “call now” button that is useable on pages. This limits the chances of loosing customers/established engineers before they arrive to the landing pages.
We could also potentially take some paid for advertising routes as well. One of the possibilities is implementing automatic bidding on GoogleAds. This would be handled by a external company who would adjust bids on keywords within google searches depending on the success rate of the search terms. Using something like this would allow us to constantly be on top of what key terms people are using to look for services such as ours and by readjusting the bids, we will be higher on the Google search. Another route we could take is paid for sponsorship on either social media or paying for GoogleAd placement, ensuring we get more eyes and potential clicks onto our websites.
Whilst the paid for advertising methods are potentially useful, we as a company need to ensure we stick within a limited budget and save as much money as possible, this is however a route we could potentially look at once we are more established. For now we will need to make sure of free promotion through having a good social media marketing strategy.