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Web Collateral

Web Collateral Solutions at InForm Web Design

Web collateral is used to support your sales message, marketing activities and brand growth online. In it’s basic form this might be PDF downloadable versions of existing printed marketing material. Extending this, your Online Marketing Collateral portfolio may include interactive e-Brochures, micro-sites, landing pages, Blogs and Customer Portals.

For over two decades, InForm has been successfully applying the classical AIDA marketing model to help our clients develop their online strategy. We still feel it’s as relevant today as it was 20 years ago. We’ve refined the model to include Customer Retention and extended the relationships it defines. Traditionally this was between the company and the consumer, however, in today’s digital age, characterised by the wide-spread adoption of social technologies, we’ve extended the model to include a wide network of interactions. These interactions even include C2C (consumer to consumer) conversations held online. That aside, the principles remain unchanged. AIDA is simplistic but effective when it comes to defining Web Collateral.

Attention

Attract the attention of your customers.

This is what many people think of as “marketing”, when in fact it is advertising, a component of marketing. Here you are letting people know about your products and services in such a way that they want to find out more. As the list below shows, there are numerous pieces of web collateral a business can use, however, always keep in mind your brand / service and how appropriate a channel is before using it.

Interest

Raise customer interest by focusing on and demonstrating advantages and benefits (instead of focusing on features, as in traditional advertising).

So now we have their attention it is time to start turning them in to a customer. At this stage we need to show why your products / services meet customer needs by focusing on the benefits. We also want to start reducing any perceived risk by having positive reviews available both on your website and 3rd party websites.

Desire

Convince customers that they want and desire the product or service and that it will satisfy their needs.

There are numerous ways to make someone desire your product or service, too many to list here. Some ideas include positioning yourself as an expert/ thought leader, using customer reviews on your collateral, using competitor comparison charts and of course limited time price discount.

Action

Lead customers towards taking action and/or purchasing

We are entering the end of the conversion funnel but there are still plenty of pitfalls and barriers that could see the potential customer disappear. Not every purchase happens instantly so it is important that potential customers can find you again if they want to come back. With a lot of people relying on search engines rather than directly inputing addresses in to browsers, you must make sure you rank high for your brand / service search terms.

Additionally, when someone does come to purchase or get in touch, this process should be intuitive and easy to follow. Use Google Analytics’ funnel visualisation tool to see where people are dropping off your website.

Retention

The average business loses around 20 percent of its customers annually simply by failing to attend to customer relationships. In some industries this leakage is as high as 80 percent. The cost, in either case, is staggering, but few businesses truly understand the implications.

Imagine two businesses, one that retains 90 percent of its customers, the other retaining 80 percent. If both add new customers at the rate of 20 percent per year, the first will have a 10 percent net growth in customers per year, while the other will have none. Over seven years, the first firm will virtually double, while the second will have no real growth. Everything else being equal, that 10-percent advantage in customer retention will result in a doubling of customers every seven years without doing anything else.

Customer Retention is an area that is often poorly addressed by web design agencies. At InForm, we’ll help you to examine different forms of web collateral that will help you to put an effective customer retention scheme in place. Examples include:

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