How to setup a website for your business.
Launching a business is a big deal; deciding on the name of your company, what logo to use, and how to communicate your services or show your products. Often, once the website is up, one hardly ever takes a look at it again. But then, just like spring cleaning should be done once in a while, so should the digital cleaning spree happen every now and then. In other words, you should know what people think of your business based on what you show to them on your website. You should regularly look through what you say your services are, your latest references, reflect, and you should regularly check whether your company’s profile mirrors what benefits you deliver to your clients.
Just like people, businesses evolve too, and thus it’s important to keep track of how people perceive your business every time they google you. Your website is your chance to make sure people find the right information about your services, know what to book you for and know how to best contact you.
A couple of months ago, I was lucky to be invited to shape taliaYstudio’s digital appearance. The studio produces amazing work, yet nevertheless, in the past, they had faced a glass wall when communicating to potential clients. While talking to the founder Talia Radford and looking over their online appearance, several things occurred to me. First, their website was a portfolio of work the studio had previously created. It was setup just like a student portfolio where one demonstrates the work without communicating the benefits the project delivered to the clients. When planning the content of your website, you should first consider who your target group is and what you want them to do after they’ve discovered your site on the internet. In the case of taliaYstudio, the aim was to clarify to potential clients what they could hire the studio for and why they’re the best choice.
We scheduled a series of meetings to work on taliaYstudio's communications strategy; first, we asked ourselves what clients the studio is interested in working with because it’s much easier to find the right clients when you know who they are and how they could benefit from your work. It’s important to know how to respond when people ask you what your services are.
During our strategy sessions, it quickly became clear to us that Talia and her team are enthusiastic about technological innovation and they like to help innovative clients communicate the benefits of their developments through design. A perfect example is the project Thermobooth, which taliaYstudio developed for OSRAM to showcase the potentials of OLEDs in the consumer sector.
Following our analysis, the next step for us was to change the way taliaYstudio’s products and services are being communicated on their website. You’ll notice it’s all about the benefits for the client, and it’s clear what you could book the studio for and if your company can find use in taliaYstudio's services.
Looking through the portfolio of taliaYstudio’s past projects also gave us the chance to look at different ways to use social media to communicate about past and future projects. For example, we identified a way to better utilise Instagram to spread the word about the studio’s Jelly Series, for which we have developed a shareable online and offline communications strategy. Generally speaking, when working on a strategy for social media, you need to think about how you could give people incentives to take a picture of, or at least talk about, your product. For physical objects, the best way to market them is by cleverly utilising the packaging. To give you a practical example, the Jelly Series necklaces now come with a photo mission and the studio regularly organises little gatherings to learn more about the people they address with their work.
The grand finale of our collaboration with taliaYstudio was the Salone di Mobile 2015 in Milano where the studio could practice their new communications strategy on potential clients. The excited call about the results that I’ve received afterwards testifies the positive results achieved by a little time we took to reflect on the business Talia wishes to run. I am glad I could facilitate the reflection process and help build a new digital strategy for the studio. If you need help with your digital appearance, please don’t hesitate and get in touch.
