What is a holding page? Is my business losing traffic without a holding page?

Why have a great holding page for my new website domain name before I launch my site? Read on…

Over the last week the Integrati team have been flat-out working on the new Integrati Marketing site. As part of the process of building a new site on a fresh Domain or website name such as; www.integrati.com.au has been registered for the new site. A great way of showing the world and to start to being ‘found’ by internet search engines is to have a ‘holding page’ on your new web website or Domain Name.

A holding page does essentially what it says on the tin, it lets you create a soft launch of the new site by creating a single web page. This allows for ‘good things to happen’ like being found by search engine bots, robots or more correctly web crawlers. This helps as when a web crawler finds your site it means your on your way to start page ranking in Search Engines (SE) for your site.

Also after a web crawler has found your site it will check ‘intermittently’ back to your site. A really important area which many sites forget about with web crawlers are Sitemaps. Whilst I believe it would be overkill to have a site map on a holding page (as it really is one page such as “integrati.com.au/” when you launch the full site you absolutely need an xml. file with a Sitemap or Sitemap in your directory.

So, if you want to have your site accurately ranked by Search Engines then you must make sure that you have a Sitemap in your website!

So what, does a holding page look like? Well you can obviously have a look at our site now at www.integrati.com.au until we launch. Here is a screenshot of what the Integrati Marketing holding pages looks like.

Also, you may have noticed (if you clicked through to the site before launch) that there is an opportunity for interested users to register their interest with Integrati Marketing by “subscribing by email“.

This is important as it allows for the holding page to be put to work straight away and for the site to build up a user list of email addresses which can be informed when the site goes live. It is also a great way to potentially build partnerships with prospective customers and service providers early on.

There are some other important areas you will need to consider as well, such as;

• If you do not have a holding page it will either come up with a generic error page (page not found 404) or worse from your company’s perspective send them off to your Domain Registrar which is an ad for them not you!
• As we know by getting your site up starts the ‘page ranking’ which should improve the sites ranking in its first weeks and months at launch
• Opens your site up to be linked to again helping your page rank
• If you can be found you should be able to be contacted, so email, phone number, mail address are all options you can consider for your holding page
• Also, your site is a direct communications platform to create brand awareness and position your business in the market you choose to serve

Overall there are more benefits to creating a landing page than drawbacks, that’s why the Integrati team built ours.

 

 

Until till next time, the Integrati team.

Did you know?

We all know that the internet and the access to local, regional, national and international audiences is simply unprecedented at such a low-cost.

In fact, we are living in revolutionary times with old media like newspapers in terminal decline and commercial Free to Air TV such as Channel Nine, Channel Ten and Channel 7 in Australia having to write off billions in equity. Commercial TV is suffering from a literal loss of eyeballs! You see, the less people sit and watch the less effective TV advertising becomes and of course this is noted by the Advertisers, marketers, and advertising specialists that are sending more and more advertising to the web.

Also, we are living in exponential times. The internet is a perfect example of this theory in action as well as China!

Now for some fast facts from “Did you Know? 3.0 Rome 2008″

• China is on track to be the number 1 English-speaking country in the world
• The US Department of labor estimates that todays learner will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38
• 1 in 4 workers has been with their employer less than a year
• 1 in 8 US couples married in 2007 met online
• There are 31 BILLION searches on Google every month! (B.G. where did we search Before.Google.?)

These are just some of the facts that will help you to remember the pace fo change and the speed at which technology is evolving is simply awesome.

Please watch the video, I know it is a ‘keynote video’ from a conference but it will give you some great perspective about why it is so important that you engage the web for yourself and with your customers.

Connect or Die – the business mantra for the 21st century.

Until next time, the Integrati team.

How to write a great brief? The top 5 things to include in a brief

Writing a good brief or briefs is an art not a science, but process helps!

It has been said that a brief should be exactly that – brief. This in my past experience normally comes from Advertising professionals who are always focused on the “Big Idea” and are time poor. That works well for agency’s with clients that have worked together long enough to know the brand and how to deliver that single creative proposition. but it may not be ideal for enterprise and small business who may not have that deep relationship which some corporates and national and international agency’s share.

But what do you need to do when you a smaller business and you have a million ideas and are looking to start work with a new agency, designer, web developer and internet marketer to create you a great campaign, website or promotion? Well, like any business you can have a million ideas but you most probably will not have the funds to pay for them all! So, a brief is a great way for you, the client, to focus on what you really need and can afford to invest.

Also, a good brief will help you and your supplier get to common ground and understand what your requirements or needs are and how they can best support this.

To create this, firstly you need context, who are you writing your brief for and what are they going to do for you? If this gets you thinking then we know the process is already working!

As a quick step guide I have noted 5 general top areas to cover in your brief which are;

1. Background
2. Objectives
3. Target Market
4. Requirements
5. Budget
6. Learning

OK, lets start to discuss these top 5 categories to include in your brief.

1. Background

What are you planning on doing it and why? Say for instance you are looking at running an email campaign. The agency which will help you create a campaign will need to know what sort of email campaign you want to run and who will be receiving it. For instance is it going to existing customers as a newsletter or are you looking to send to prospects who have sent you?

2. Objectives

This sounds easy right, well sometimes in the rush to get everything in this can be missed. If you do not set objectives you will have issues with the context of what you are trying to create and why. Objectives help you keep in a single frame of reference what you are trying to achieve.

It keeps you and the people working with you on the brief focused to the objective. in this case a customer email which may be communicating a new product to existing customers by email. So there is a general communications objective and potentially also a sales target, to sell more ’stuff’ to people who read the email.

3. Target Market

The whole point of a brief is to ensure that your allocating your resources to hit your objectives. The best way to make sure that this is a success is to include who will be receiving this email like demographics and customer preferences to make the communications targeted.

You or your company should know who you’re targeting with the communication. The target market can be by interest for instance, customers who have recorded a preference in their customer data with you for a type of product or service. Or, it can be defined by a ’segment’ of customers which your company looks to target. To ensure the communication is read and acted upon by the customer it has to be relevant. by knowing who you’re targeting this will help with; design, language and the offer to name a few.

4. Requirements

If you do not include your requirements so the agency knows what they have to do and not do for you this can be a confusing and expensive exercise. By being exact with what you need to have created, coded and reported on will aid in the cost effectiveness and success of your activity.

With an email for instance you may require that it is tested before it is sent to ensure it can be displayed properly on email software or browsers, get through SPAM filters or be in a HTML format, Text format or even in a mobile message format. By being precise with what you need improves the success of the communication by reducing errors and giving you a consistent process which you can reuse.

5. Budget

This is the single most important component of the brief for you and your agency. Not because of the cost/investment in itself but because of how the budget will be used. The budget has to be realistic otherwise you will be on the back foot and any ‘extra’s which pop-up along the way will be added in at extra cost. The other important fact is Return on Investment or RoI.

Before you get to the brief stage you should have created a business case or profit estimate for running the activity. This is of course a forecast as when dealing with humans and marketing you can never 100% predict if they will all buy – even if it is free! So you and the agency should have a response rate in mind and a sales rate or conversion rate so you can calculate the success of the activity in real terms.

6. Learning

“Ahah!” you say, there is 6 not 5 top categories required for a good or actually a great brief! If you run an activity and you do not take the time to review;

• what went well
• what did not go well
• what we can do better next time

If you do not take the time to do this then really your wasting 90% of the effort. Every time you run a promotion or a campaign you should look to learn from the experience which will add to your teams expertise. If you do not, and many do not, then you are wasting a lot of time and effort. This is the scientific bit, if you create a process and you follow all the steps consistently, with refinements over time. You will be on the way to creating great outcome for your business.

Well there you go, the top 5 things to include in a good brief but to make it a great brief use the top 6 things by adding in learning!

Also, if you would like this in an open source word template, then please find one located here. I hope you find this useful.

Till next time, The Integrati team.