By Amanda Lima
When you are searching for some product, solution or service and does not know where to begin, I figure that one of your starting points is making a quick search on Google to check whether you can find one or more companies that can solve your problem. In order to analyze the results, I agree that our particularities as consumers have an important role – we may choose not to click and acquire products or services of the same company. But there is one thing that I am certain of: we search companies whose websites have better credibility among these first virtual contacts.
Migrating a bit from the consumer’s point of view to analyze the company’s point of view, a dilemma emerges: how to make my organization stand out in such a competed universe? The question is nothing more than an invitation to ponder which digital marketing strategies are valid so that a company is more easily, often and by more people found. Today I decided to talk about, maybe, the most essential of them: the importance of building visually interesting, functional and smart institutional website.
A website may be considered your virtual “business card”. Often this is the first contact between your business and your public. And, as all of us – communicators or businessmen – are also consumers, it worth analyzing: have you ever seen a brand with great credibility and visibility that does not own a website? No matter how strong the presence of microbusinesses on social media, such as Facebook and Instagram, is, I am sure the answer is most likely negative. Not having a website means not being found, like if a company did not exist in the phone book – when we compare to the old days when we were not connected 24/7.
The first impression is what counts – and what builds customer loyalty
How to create a website in a sense that it is strategic for the marketing of an organization? To exemplify, I bring you the case ABPM (Apple Producers Brazilian Association), a non-profitable organization that gathers 75% of all Brazilian apple production, 85% of commerce within internal market and 95% of exportations. Race Communications was in charge of complete reformulation of the company’s institutional website.
With full respect for the client’s history and needs, we chose to recreate the institution’s website layout from scratch in order to obtain a more responsive, intuitive and modern look:
We reinforced the seriousness and the presence of the company on the digital environment – along with a strong social media plan, topic for a future publication. The integration with social media is, moreover, another point of a good website: through widgets and plugins, it is possible to concentrate on this digital “business card” all social media where the company is present, which allows improving even more the access of the public to the brand.
Besides all the work reformulating the visual identity, we wanted to take the most advantage of the potential that this channel could have so ABPM became relevant on the web and communicated with their target audience: apple producers (mostly associated to the institution), retailers and, of course, the final consumers.
Production of relevant content
One of the main strategies to be a relevant website and, consequently, obtaining more access, is offering visitors quality content: the so called inbound marketing. Building interesting business blogs, besides having low investment when compared to other publicity campaign models, consolidates the relationship of the company with the public and also increases the relevance of the website on Google searches – being found is our goal, right?
On the ABPM example, we fed two distinctive blogs: an institutional, aimed to producers and other professionals of the field, and one with recipes, aimed to the final consumer. From these two channels, we created a “voice” to the brand and placed ourselves ahead of other association’s initiatives of producers worldwide.
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