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The Marblehead agency site is an interesting case. The main website is typical of most agency sites, perhaps even a minimalist example. But their blog is excellent. Jeremiah Owyang often boldly asserts that the “corporate website” is irrelevant. I don’t agree but here’s a case where the agency’s blog is far more robust and sophisticated than the main site. And I think it serves them well.
Let’s start with their positioning. The home page identifies their positioning as “a marketing and design firm that can help you improve the value of your customer relationships.” That’s an intriguing positioning statement. It has potential. But I need to know a bit more about how and for whom for it to be persuasive. Their main navigation labels are a bit vague “identify, innovate, inspire, improve.” But the identify page talks about data management and business analytics. This starts to answer a bit of the “how” question for me. It starts to differentiate them. Although most agencies say they evaluate the effectiveness of their campaigns, this page seems to indicate that Marblehead goes deeper in this regard. The “improve” section give a bit more detail about how they use analytics, dashboards, and customer scorecards but they don’t provide details or examples. The main site leaves me a bit unclear on how their focus on data and measurement relates to improving the value of customer relationships.
The positioning breaks down a little when I view the services (inspire) page, where the horizontal positioning broadens out to include all the stuff every firm offers (print, web, identity, logo, design). Ironically, if you dig down deep enough you’ll find that under the “about us” tab there is another list for services that is much more compelling. It lists Data Warehousing, Data Integration, Data Management, Customer Relationship Management, Campaign Management, Relationship Marketing, and Marketing Segmentation among their services. These particulars make them different from many other design and marketing firms. It’s odd that the main “inspire” page lists generic services when they offer such fine-tuned, differentiating services. Why bury these under the about us page? Another positioning weakness is reflected in their client list which doesn’t indicate any vertical industry focus.
The content of the main site is weak. But the blog is much more robust. It’s odd to me that an agency that has devoted so much attention and effort on their blog would leave their main site so sparse. I really like their blog. They’ve designed an advanced layout and feature set, but more importantly they have a clear content strategy and it serves to bolster their main positioning statement.
The platform for their main site leaves much to be desired, but their blog platform is excellent. They use WordPress for the blog and it’s fairly well optimized for SEO. The URL structure could be improved by changing the permalink setting. The default date setting adds too many slashes in the URLs. I also think more thought could be put into their browser titles. But all things considered it’s an excellent blog. The main site though is less ideal. The transition effect they achieve is nice, but in my opinion it’s not worth obfuscating the content behind indistinguishable URLs and a single generic browser title. At least the sites not built entirely in Flash.
The visual design of the site, especially the blog is excellent. I’m less impressed with the main site though. It’s unnecessary to make the navigation less intuitive simply for the sake of assonance. Let the navigation serve to navigate by being clear and intuitive. When you find yourself redefining your labels on rollover or on click (ex. the inspire label is further described as “creative services upon clicking) stop and just use the clearer label “creative services.” Let your services be creative, not your navigation labels.
In my opinion, Erickson Barnett sets the bar for advertising agency websites. While there is still room for growth the site does very well on all four of the most important factors for agency web strategy. I really like their positioning. Not because it’s the tightest, boldest positioning I’ve ever seen, but because it’s so genuine. Let’s face it, B2B technology marketing is the bread and butter of most mid-sized advertising agencies. Yet agencies would rather highlight one or two consumer brands than feature their more substantive work done for B2B clients. Erickson Barnett embraces this focus and leverages it on their site. B2B technology prospects will be drawn right into this site.
The content of the site is excellent. They have a “thoughts” section containing white paper like topics, as well as a frequently updated blog. The content orbits their positioning with refreshing consistency. They’ve also integrated video commentary from clients and staff. I would like to see a bit more content integrated into their portfolio section.
And as far as platform goes, the portfolio is the only part of the site I’d reconsider. There is so much potential for an agency’s portfolio section (especially for lead generating SEO). Settling for a slide show presentation leaves a lot of value on the table. Simply giving each sample a unique URL with thoughtful strategic copy can significantly increase performance.
I give the design high marks. The site is navigable, clean, easy to read and visually compelling. None of the design features get in the way of the content, yet every part seems considered, balanced and executed with skill. Erickson Barnett demonstrates that they understand web strategy both with how they’ve built their own site, and with its content. And this proves they can put the web to work for their clients. Nice job!
Blair Enns is upending the new business process for creative service firms all over the world. And he’s doing it from his remote mountain location in the village of Kaslo, British Columbia, Canada. Blair is a frequent speaker and author who advises his clients that the pitch process is no way for creative services to pursue new business. His radical ideas effectively point out the flaws and fallacies of spec creative and the competitive account review process. Most importantly his point of view helps us realize that to the degree clients have a surplus of available alternatives, we’ll never maintain a valuable, sought after service. In other words, tight positioning is critical for agencies to eliminate the surplus of options. His emphasis leads us to refine our offerings and develop expertise that cannot be readily reproduced.
You can find out more about Blair’s valuable services and publications on his site Win Without Pitching.
[Disclosure: High Rankings is a client of Newfangled Web Factory]
I’ve been following Jill Whalen’s High Rankings Advisor Newsletter for many years. Jill is a fixture at just about every search engine optimization conference I’ve heard of. One of things I appreciate about Jill is her no-nonsense approach to SEO. As part of her email newsletter she answers questions from subscribers. As you can imagine there are tons of questions out there. People will do just about anything for a top ranking on Google. But Jill won’t green light any sketchy SEO practices. And she doesn’t play off people’s fears that their URL structures are hurting them, or that they don’t have the perfect keyword density on their pages. She stays true to the basic formula that, so long as the most egregious technical problems are addressed, a steady stream of quality content and inbound links will produce the best results.
But while High Rankings isn’t going to set off alarms if you haven’t squeezed every ounce of SEO potential out of every page, they are going to go deep into analyzing effectiveness and advising their clients on best practices. When you visit the High Rankings website you notice that they have an amazing number of training and educational opportunities and services. Not to mention their famous High Rankings Forum. As any good SEO consultant knows, there is ultimately only so much they can do for their clients; successful search engine optimization comes from clients that learn how to develop excellent content and then leverage that content with the best SEO practices available. So High Rankings emphasizes training and instruction as much as selling their own services.
Social media is a hot topic these days. Books are being published faster than social networking sites, mashups and aggregators pop up. In any list of books on social media The Cluetrain Manifesto is going to be at the top. It deserves to be there if for no other reason than that it was written in 2000–a good five years before social media was on anyone else’s radar. The Cluetrain did indeed foresee the dramatic dynamics that the voices of crowds create as their voices are just as accessible as main stream media. Communications professionals are experiencing the challenges that come when a search for a popular brand can result in links to an angry consumer’s YouTube video or blogger’s dissatisfied rant. Power is shifting from brands to consumers. There are plenty of examples of social media corporate meltdowns. But despite the gaffes social media is creating an incredibly rich fabric of knowledge, community, and sharing that can be leveraged to the benefit of both corporations and consumers.
But this isn’t a review of Cluetrain, it’s a review of Groundswell. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff are both Forrester analysts. Perhaps their slightly more professional context, or maybe their data orientation makes their book Groundswell clearer and more acceptable than Cluetrain. Their day jobs, advising large corporations and enterprise level executives, give them a voice that’s more considered and detailed. But don’t get the wrong idea, Groundswell is not at all dry or dispassionate. Both authors are deeply enthusiastic and excited about the benefits to be gained from the rise of social media. But they offer their vision and insight in a reasoned, balanced way that other books in the vein of Cluetrain do not. Where Cluetrain’s overstated assertions declare “all marketing is conversation,” Groundswell would say that in addition to other forms of marketing, social media presents opportunites to engage in conversations: listening, talking, energizing, helping and embracing consumers.
When I read Cluetrain I was inspired despite the arrogant tone of the manifesto. When I read Groundswell I felt inspired and hopeful, especially now that I have a book I could confidently recommend to my clients that will impart a vision for navigating the social media landscape.
Groundswell is surprisingly practical, providing a metric for evaluating the various opportunities that fall under the social media umbrella. They’ve developed a matrix called “The Social Technographics Profile” (a data analyst’s title if ever there was one). It categorizes various groups of people into social media participation tendencies. Groups are broken down as Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives. Depending on the engagment level of a particular group across these traits, certain social media opportinties will be more fitting than others. They give examples such as “Alpha Moms.” Alpha Moms, according to their data tend to be critics and spectators more than creators or joiners. So for them an emphasis on forums, ratings and reviews would be more effective than social networks.
I appreciate Charlene and Josh’s patience with their executive audience. They understand that social media is not only new, but hard to explain and integrate into today’s corporate culture. They encourage people to begin by just listening to the groundswell before leaping in, or kicking off a “social media campaign.”
If you’re trying to get a foothold on social media pick up a copy of Groundswell. I don’t think there’s a better epicenter for orienting yourself to this rapidly spreading technological and communication shake up.
Though this announcement is good news, it leaves me even more concerned for agencies. Technical problems between search and Flash have been significant, but the impulse to build a site entirely in Flash has other problems too. Problems that now, with this change, may be all the more ignored. Agencies that lean too heavily on Flash may be emboldened to do so all the more. (more…)
