Websites
Your website is often the first (and sometimes, only) interaction someone might have with your company. It should welcome visitors and invite them to explore, though what they're looking for should be within easy reach. If yours is clunky and poorly-designed, it's about as useful as a welcome mat that reads "leave."
We know good, functional web design starts with a human and ends with a human. Sure, there's a lot of technology in between, but good web design is really all about creating an experience that accomplishes your digital goal—whether it's to educate, delight, persuade, influence, or sell. Whether you need a simple informational site or a large, database-driven e-commerce site, we'll create one for you that's strategy-driven and well-optimized for your audience.
Content Management
We believe content management should be easy, hassle-free, and completely independent of Ashby Dillon. It’s your content, and you need to be able to manage it without becoming a web designer yourself. You have enough to do already, right?
You’ll be happy to know that we work with three or four content management systems that are simple, easy, and well-supported. We’ll help you select the right one for your needs and teach you how to use it. It’s all part of our website design service.
| CMS | E-Commerce |
| WordPress | Big Commerce |
| Adobe Contribute | Business Flow |
| Business Catalyst | Magento |
We have experience with:
- Large websites with ERP and CRM integration
- E-commerce websites on multiple platforms
- Database-driven dynamic websites
- Digital enhancements such as quoting programs and guided application wizards
SEO
We also know that websites should address the needs of a secondary audience: those pesky search engine arachnids. Spiders and humans, as you can imagine, have very different needs. Designing for humans and optimizing for search engine spiders requires planning, research, and an understanding of what those spiders need (besides moist, dark environments). Our web design services are geared to help you achieve the optimal balance between content that attracts and engages humans and content that pushes your site to the top of the search results.
So what the heck are those spiders looking for? How do you create content that's optimized for search engines but still engaging to human users? We can help you with that. Our SEO services include:
- Keyword research and competitive site intel
- Site content optimization
- Page titling
- XML site maps
- Ongoing support and training
Let's face it: people are easily distracted. The busier your surroundings are, the likelier you are to miss something important. Like, just TRY to find the door leading OUT of the casino and it's all beeps, bells, sequins, and feathers before you reach the all you can eat buffet, and OH! what's that shouting at the craps table and YES, I'll have another Tom Collins and WOW is that a polar bear on a leash? All of a sudden, it's next Tuesday and you STILL haven't found the exit.
Uh, well, maybe that was just us.
ANYWAY, the point is this. Even a well-designed website can diffuse focus on something that needs special attention. Maybe you're launching a new product or service, or hosting a special event, or unveiling a new campaign that needs some serious promotion. If so, then you might need a microsite.
Microsites supplement a company's primary website and are incredibly useful tools to showcase singular products, services, events, or limited-time promotions. Sometimes microsites are created to launch a new product but end up being a permanent place to showcase that specific product. Others are temporary creations that live during a creative campaign or limited-time promotion. They can have their own URLs (www.kickasscampaignsite.com) or can reside on the main parent site at www.ashbydillon.com/kickasscampaignsite.
Either way, a microsite from Ashby Dillon will give you the opportunity to deliver an extremely focused message to a targeted audience.
Paid Search
If you think of paid search as just Google Adwords, it's time to think again. These days, paid search encompasses sponsored listings on FaceBook and Linked in, as well as video ads on YouTube. There have never been more opportunities to maximize your paid search ROI and minimize wasted impressions. But like any other media, it takes a solid strategy, good planning, and effective management to maximize your investment.
From effective campaign planning and management to ad copywriting and testing, we'll help you target the right message to the right audience. Then we'll help you figure out what visitors should experience after they click on one of your ads. Do you want a lead or an online sale? Either way, an effective landing page design will help increase your chances of getting it.
Landing Pages
Leads are harder to capture than Sasquatch and unicorns combined. Doing so requires an effective lead generation program and well-designed landing pages that encourage people to share their lead information with you.
Ashby Dillon can help you boost online sales and capture more leads with effective landing pages that creatively match messages with upstream ads, offer focused information and contain a clear call to action. Not sure how to integrate landing pages into your digital marketing strategy? Contact us today for information about how landing pages can increase the ROI for your PPC and digital ad programs.
If cats, snakes, J.D. Salinger, and the clay head from Lionel Richie's "Hello" video have Twitter and Facebook pages, then you probably should, too…
…but only if you have a plan for incorporating them into your marketing strategy.
It's easy enough to set up a YouTube or Twitter page, but figuring out how social media fits into your larger marketing strategy can be challenging. While traditional advertising is typically a one way communication, social media is, at its most successful, a 2-way exchange between the brand and the customer. Social media should inspire lively interaction with your brand that results in dialogue and sharing…NOT selling. When you humanize and socialize your brand, you build awareness, inspire loyalty, interact with your customers and engage them in the brand experience.
For companies moving from product-focused marketing to content marketing, social media is critically important. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs make it easier for you to share expertise, demonstrate thought leadership, and solve problems for your customers. These conversations about challenges and solutions often lead to conversations about products and services—your products and services.
Have the desire, but not the resources to get underway with your social media campaigns? Ashby Dillon can assist you with tweets and Facebook posts, working within guidelines for engagement that we establish together. We can also write your blog posts for you. Starting with topics you provide, we'll interview your internal experts, consult secondary sources, and draft blog posts for your approval.
Social and Blog services include:
- Blog design and customization
- Blog writing
- Custom Twitter/Facebook/YouTube skins, tabs, and apps
- Social media posting
- Social media campaigns
Ashby Dillon can help you create compelling social media campaigns and integrate them into your trade show plans and overall marketing strategy.
Let's throw some statistics around for a bit.
- 71% of B2B and 88% of B2C marketers use e-mail marketing. (Forrester)
- E-mail is the preferred method of communication by 74% of all online adults. (Merkle)
- 57% of internet users worldwide said they are more apt to buy a product in a store after getting a marketing E-mail. (e-Dialogue)
- E-mail is bringing in $40.56 for every dollar spent on it in 2011, compared to catalogs' ROI of $7.30, paid search's return of $22.24, Internet display advertising's return of $19.72 and mobile's return of $10.51. (Direct Marketing Association)
Pretty impressive, but achieving a $40.56 ROI for every dollar spent on e-mail marketing requires four things:
Imagine the most user-friendly E-mail marketing system EVER, and that's LaunchPad™. Ashby Dillon will custom design beautiful, branded templates for you, and then you do the rest. Features include:
- Upload, manage, and segment your
subscriber lists - A/B split test your e-mail messages
- Set up autoresponders and drip campaigns
- Social sharing on Twitter & Facebook
- Google Analytics integration
- Personalization/forward to a friend
- Add subscription forms to your website
- Complete reporting capabilities, including ROI and conversions, as well as campaign comparisons
- No Ashby Dillon/LaunchPad™ logos or links
- Add a subscribe form to your Facebook page
- Integrate with CRM systems like Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM
It's economical, powerful, and fully supported by the people of Ashby Dillon, so you know the person on the other end of the phone answering your questions.
- Great design. The most successful marketing e-mails maintain a balance between graphics and content, and are designed to work in every e-mail client. Savvy e-mail template designers (like the ones at Ashby Dillon) know how to make your corporate or product branding work in an e-mail environment.
- Killer subject line. Take a look at every Internet news site out there. It's all about the headline. In fact, in 2010, research firm Outsell published a report claiming that 44% of Google News readers ONLY read headlines. Your subject line is the headline of your e-mail, and if it's a snoozer, you've just wasted an opportunity to connect with someone who actually wants to hear from you.*
- Strong, segmented list. Please, oh please, stop sending the same message to your entire database of contacts! Did you know that untargeted e-mail programs increase costs by as much as 3.6 times the cost of targeted programs?** E-mail programs, like Ashby Dillon's powerful LaunchPad, give you the opportunity to segment your contact list so that you can direct the right message to the right audience.
- Analytics. Take a look at your performance and tweak to improve future campaigns. Combine campaign metrics with website data to track delivery, open, and click through rates, and overlay that with your website bounce rates, depth of visit, and actions completed. You can't track everything, but we can help you interpret your available analytics and turn that into actionable steps that improve your e-mail outcomes.
*Because of course you're only e-mailing to people who've given you permission to contact them.
**Source: Relevancy Group
Our e-mail marketing services include:
- Template design
- Copywriting
- E-mail campaign design
- List segmentation services
- LaunchPad™ DIY Marketing E-mail System
Your catalog is useful for telling people what sizes you offer, what options are available, and maybe even what the price breaks are. It's useful for helping them cross-reference which accessories come with which products, and what your shipping and return policies are.
In summary, your catalog is useful AFTER someone's already decided to buy your product—but it's not going to do much in the way of selling that product. That's why you need video.
Show your product in action. Let prospects watch an engineer demonstrate how the product works or, better yet, listen to one of your customers talk about a problem you solved for them. Video drastically increases response rates to marketing e-mails and display ads and doesn't require Scorcese (or his budget) to get off the ground.
Video/animation services include:
- Concept development
- Scriptwriting/storyboarding
- Production team assembly
- Sound recording/mixing
- Animation
