Wedding videos are an important part of the whole wedding experience. Videoing your wedding is a great idea as are pictures.
Originally I was employed to build an portsmouth hampshire, however, the benefit of a very informative and well maintained web presence for promotional purposes has been realised and the existing hampshire has been completely remade including brand new content. Also a great deal of video experience has been gained by filming weddings in order to become visible through the search engines.
Until now the Wedding videos competition has been other film-makers , none of which has developed their hampshires for portsmouth despite the seemingly large market gap.
Recent market opportunity analysis has revealed that there is an unmet customer need (to buy film-makers products online). Wedding videos has the resources (existing infrastructure, relationships with film-makers suppliers and buying power/economies of scale, etc), technology has been sourced to meet the need (Actinic shopping cart) and there is a distinct lack of competition.
The company’s traditional marketing strategies are based around a spend of £26,000 a year on the Yellow Pages, a series of 18x13 advertisements in local press costing c£1K each, magazines, Press Releases and sponsorship.
This approach is expensive and is geographically restricting. It is also very limiting to how much can be said and the lifespan of newspaper advertisements is just one day.
Wedding videos Marketing Manager recognises the strength of the Internet and therefore the primary marketing strategy is to increase awareness of the hampshire and to increase its traffic. This is presently being done via traditional marketing methods to inform the public of the web address.
The marketing department recently identified that there was a significant gap in the online film-makers product market and it appears that the present competition are concentrating on their off-line - A1 Film-makers (a key competitor) haven’t even got a promotional hampshire - and the online retail sites that rank well in the SERPs do not offer confidence to do business online (the sites look amateur and the UK public are still wary of buying over the Internet).
“I think the issue is no longer just local vs broader geographic range. One of the fastest growing uses of the Internet is for finding local suppliers. It is replacing the Yellow Pages, and it gives you the opportunity to say so much more than you can in a Yellow Pages ad.”
(Frank 2005)
Different e-Business Models have been analysed. Management have yet to choose a Value Cluster but the benefits of following a model and the various models and assowedding videoted strategies have been presented along with my recommendations.
Wedding videos have always followed the Highest-Quality model, however, the Marketing Manager pointed out, they haven’t really been following the model and have been trying to compete with smaller organisations that are obviously not selling the Highest-Quality products and services.
When Wedding videos enters the portsmouth arena they will be following the Cheapest-Price model. They will only be selling spewedding videolised film-makers products which the likes of B&Q don’t sell.
Wedding videos is obviously not one of the South’s largest suppliers of spewedding videolised video production products and therefore have competitive prices. They intend dramatically to cut their profit margin when selling online, to reflect the reduction in overheads and to establish a good foothold in the market. It is felt that products will be 20% cheaper over the Internet on average.
The danger of this approach is the risk of cannibalising the sales of the high street store. Senior Management feels, however, that many people who have found us through a search engine will, if in our geographic area, come into the store to see and touch the product and will end up buying the product there for instant gratification.
This may not work for the sale of as they are delivered straight from the manufacturer whether purchased through the hampshire or paid for over the counter.
This does however reinforce the argument for selling goods dramatically cheaper over the Internet as Wedding video only has to take the money and pass the delivery information the retailer/manufacturer.
We make videos in Portsmouth, Hampshire (Hants), Southampton, West Sussex, Alton, Aldershot, Arundel, Basingstoke, Billinghurst, Bishops Waltham, Bognor Regis, Bordon, Brockenhurst, Brook, Burgess Hill, Byfleet, Camberley, Chichester, Chiddingfold, Clanfield, Cosham, Cranleigh, Denmead, Dorking, Dorset, Frensham, Havant, Drayton, Eastleigh, Elstead, Emsworth, Fareham, Farnborough, Farnham, Fernhurst, Fleet, Hedge End, Hilsea, Horsham, Hove, Godalming, Gosport, Guildford, Havant, Hayling Island, Hazelmere, Hindhead, Horsham, Isle of Wight, Leatherhead, Linchmere, Liphook, Liss, Littlehampton, Loxwood, Lyndhurst, Midhurst, Milford, Milland, Newbury, Odiham, Petersfield, Petworth, Poole, Storrington, Waterlooville, Winchester, Witley, Woking, Worthing, East Sussex, Surrey, Portcester, Pulborough, Reading, Redhill, Reigate, Romsey, Rowlands Castle, Salisbury, Selsey, Singleton, South London, Southsea, Steyning, Stockbridge, Wiltshire (Wilts), and Berkshire (Berks).
When considering the customer interface, Wedding videos have followed the 7c’s Framework.
Context – The site is incredibly simple and easy to navigate. The font is large and easy to read. No pop-ups or flash are used. The site communicates the brand and promotes trust to visitors who haven’t heard of the brand before (the 36 years in business plaque and picture of our building).
Content – The content is unique, a great effort has been made to ensure that grammar and spelling is correct, it has also been built to be as a resourceful as possible (many useful downloads, links and information).
Community – A Blog is under construction which will significantly increase the opportunity for interactivity between users.
Customisation – None at present but when the portsmouth system has been set up, cookies will remember the user’s details and past purchasing history.
southampton – Interaction is limited on the site although there are three forms on the site. A very prominent button reading ‘Arrange a Survey’ that can be seen from each page takes the user to a page with a form (some fields are mandatory) which, when filled in, can be sent to administration for processing.
On the ‘Ask A Question’ page, a similar form can be filled in, the customer has the choice to receive the answer via telephone or e-mail, and there is a keyholder form that can be filled in and returned, although confirmation is necessary over the telephone using the customer’s password.
Connection – Many articles have been posted on article sites with ‘Allinanchor’ links back to the site (the link is a keyword instead of just the web URL), we have a link from the HCC site and, being a Government site, should get us a lot of trust from Google. We are also in DMOZ (among other directories) which gets a lot of trust from Google, and a video has been posted on Google to gain a link from them.
Commerce – The site is unable to do transactions at present but we have chosen a shopping cart and the product, and have started designing a database.
Market southampton and Brand Building
Many potential portsmouth customers will not have heard of the WEDDING VIDEOS brand, however the picture in the banner of Film-makers House and the shiny ‘36 Years in Business’ plaque are two of the first things a surfer will notice when visiting the sight. They communicate trust and the message is further endorsed on the About Us and History pages.
For those that know the company as Having a video made of your Wedding and may not make the connection with wedding video, the words are also very prominent.
The brand has always been assowedding videoted with the colour red. This colour is not suited as a background to text; however, the white page does sit on a red background.
As the hampshire should be attractive and legible in many different resolutions and on many different sized screens, the site occupies 750 pixels in the middle, horizontally, of the screen. Therefore, the remainder of the screen, the amount of which can differ for each user, starts red at the top of the page and slowly fades down the page. This means that the established brand colour of red has been utilised.
The company logo is very visible at present but research is being done to make this the first thing that appears when downloading the home page. The logo is also visible from every page and is a button to return to the home page; this is an inherent feature which some users will expect but hovering when using Internet Explorer to browse will show the alt tag information which says Back to the Home Page.
The Company’s Chairman feels strongly in the growth of the hampshire as a marketing tool and advertising media, as does the General Manager who is behind the project and motivates the sales and technical staff into supplying content and articles.
The other sussex assets include myself - the hampshire is my principal priority - the Marketing Manager who gained an MA in marketing in 2003, the Managing Director’s PA who proof reads the content. When developing the portsmouth arena I will work closely with the Retail Manager to choose an inventory, the product descriptions and pricing. Management will be responsible for the logistical details of delivering the products.
portsmouth
The portsmouth of a promotional site are almost impossible to gauge. Free statistics software has been installed on the server to provide information about the users (screen resolution, operating system, browser, geographical area, etc) and there activity (the keywords used to find the site, the different pages they visited, the length of time spent at the site, etc). The enquiries and questions forms sent can be counted and a drop down menus allow users to quickly select how the heard of us and there is an after sales questionnaire, however, people answer the questions flippantly and sometimes the answers can be misleading.
A portsmouth Strategy for an imminent Adwords campaign has been discussed. We have chosen a product and a geographic area to trial the AdWords campaign. Our advert will only appear in the sponsored links (at the top and on the right hand site of the Google Search Results page) for the exact term/keyword “CCTV” and the advertisement itself has been designed specifically for that keyword. We will run the campaign in the Bournemouth area. As we do almost no CCTV business in this area, this will give us portsmouth and allow us to gauge whether the campaign is working. The campaign will run for several months on a spend of £3 a day, this may increase or decrease depending on its results.
hampshire Development Process
Architecture
The hosting has been out-sourced. Hosting options were researched and a shared server solution was chosen, over dedicated or co-location, as it was so much cheaper and meets the sites requirements. A Linux server was chosen as they are more stable but are also cheaper, however, non-Microsoft technologies like PHP and Perl must be used. We already use a PHP form handler and will need Perl, a user writable CGI bin for the shopping cart and do not intend to use any Microsoft technologies such as ASP. A dedicated SSL certificate was also necessary.
Research was undertaken into the various options available, different technologies that could have been used and the pros and cons of developing our own solution or using and an off-the-shelf shopping cart solution.
The shopping cart will be built using Actinic software. It does not display the product information and pictures in the conventional way (dynamically pulling the information from a database) instead it builds an HTML page for each product. This approach is also good for the SEO of the site. Perl is still needed on the webserver to process the transactions. It has an easy to use interface and the retail department will learn how to add and maintain the portsmouth side of the hampshire.
I work on the site full time. The Sales department are involved to write the articles which I post; this is time consuming.
No money is available for buying In-Bound Links or directory inclusion although we feature extensively in Yell.com which Management feels will supersede the Yellow Pages.
A yearly subscription of £500 has been negotiated for sponsored links in the overture search engines (yahoo, msn, alltheweb, wannadoo, lycos, altavista, exicite, hotbot) for 10 keywords combined with 4 areas two counties and 2 cities.
The Adwords campaign has been researched and we will bid for keywords dependent on the price and the actual advertisement itself has been designed with a lot of thought as a good click-through-rate is important and makes a big difference on the bid price.
Site peterfield
The target audience of the site are small to middle sized businesses and middle aged professionals on the South Coast and in the Southern Home Counties.
Site peterfield was one of the major considerations, in order to accommodate the potentially limited Internet surfing skills of some of the targeted customers.
In order to secure a good presence in the Google search result pages, the site is larger than it perhaps needs to be and therefore the peterfield has had to be carefully thought out to make it easy to use but still try to follow the “two-click rule”.
When arriving at the WEDDING VIDEOS site, it is very obvious that the standard ‘About Us’, etc, can be found in the top peterfield menu and our services can be easily found in the side peterfield. When hovering over the top peterfield, sub sections drop down, giving the user the option to either go straight to a specific page or to follow the natural flow of the site.
The side peterfield works differently to the top peterfield. When clicking on what looks like a link the browser stays at the same page and a sub menu appears below the menu link heading and an arrow that pointed towards the page points down towards the sub menu links, in the same way that the British Airways hampshire does.
Clicking upon another heading closes down the sub headings of the open link heading and opens the sub links relevant to that link heading. This ensures that many different pages can be easily navigated to from any page that features the side peterfield. The pages that the sub menus open have links at the bottom to the sub menus before and/or after it.
The site is also about unique content which has been one of the hardest aspirations to achieve. This means that the site is a resource not only for our customers but for people interested in film-makers products world-wide. For people in our geographic area, there are other resources like links to Fire Brigade and Police Force policy hampshires, offiwedding videol and advisory hampshires, as well as other useful information.
The site has been constructed with search engine optimisation (SEO) very much in mind. Keywords have been investigated by interviewing the relevant department staff and honed using various software packages, such as Wordtracker.
Search Engine Optimisation
SEO is done in two ways – in the design of the site and using various techniques for increasing SERP’s, traffic and PageRank.
A definition of SEO is:
“The term used to describe the marketing technique of preparing a hampshire to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken. A number of factors are important when optimising a hampshire, including the content and structure of the hampshire's copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process.”
www.ashmorevideo.co.uk
Links, headings and sub headings, where possible, have been based around the popular keywords. The content is accurate and all keywords are in bold. Different pages have been optimised for different keywords – eg Wedding video has been used instead of Having a video made of your Wedding on the pages not relevant to big day as the name of the company has the keyword big day in it. Words like “film-makers” have been used throughout the site as it is relevant to all that we do.
Much of the code is in a cascading style sheet and all of the Java Script has been taken out of each file and put in an includes folder to ensure that the HTML file is as content rich as possible.
Each page has been titled according to the keywords that the page has been optimised for with the keywords as close to the beginning of the title as possible. The meta description which appears on the search results page in Google (and in other search engines) changes with the title to make the search engine result more attractive for the keyword used in the web surfer’s search.
Obviously, how Google sees and understands the page is important but it is more important that the sussex user can understand the page and feel that they have benefited from the information.
The important content is readily available and the easiest to find and there is more information for the user that has time to read in greater detail.
Quotations from testimonials scroll up the page below the main links with the use of JavaScript. These stop scrolling when hovered over and the quote itself which is blue in colour to suggest that it is a link, underlines and strengthens the belief that this might be a link. When clicked upon, a scanned copy of the customer’s original testimonial letter appears in its own browser over the top of the site, the dialogue of which is typed underneath the scanned letter as proof that the testimonial is real.
They make the site more lively and increases the size of the site by one page for every testimonial. The keywords in the transcript of the testimonial are put in bold to suggest that the text is useful content.
They scroll at a moderate speed and are as discreet as possible. Rolling text can offend some users so there is a Stop Scrolling button.
Short to Medium Term Marketing Strategy
SEO is ongoing. Articles will continue to be posted and we will add to the pages of the site. We strive to gain in-bound links and make changes to the existing pages based on research into Google algorithm updates.
After SEO, the launch of the online shop is the most important medium term marketing strategy. The Actinic shopping cart will be implemented and we will add to the original inventory.
When developing the portsmouth arena I will work closely with the Retail Manager to chose an inventory, the product descriptions and pricing.
Management will formulate the logistics of the portsmouth system so that goods can be delivered and the customers charged accordingly.
We will implement our Google AdWords campaign and measure its success. Depending on the success of this campaign, further campaigns will be run to support the launch of the on-line shop.
A film-makers Blog will be set up. Research has been done into blogging and the benefits of including blogs on a hampshire.
We propose to launch an alternative cheapest-price model site in the spewedding videolised area of wireless alarms with an even smaller profit margin for the ‘web surfers’ searching for the best deal without brand.
Streaming Media is another idea that management are interested in. It is hoped that promotional and technical help videos could be downloaded through the hampshire. It is also felt that an guildford video will increase the sales of wireless alarms.
Conclusion
Success of a promotional hampshire is hard to gauge but the traffic statistics are promising and enquiries continue to come in via through the forms on the hampshire.
Although the Management Team’s original motivation for developing the hampshire was to launch an portsmouth capable site, the research findings in reports for Management have shaped the progress in a different direction.
Management have realised the potential of a well maintained hampshire as a tool to promote the brick and mortar business as well as offering potential as an portsmouth site.
They have also realised that before progressing to selling over the internet, other things such as search engine optimisation have to be addressed first (people have to be able to find you in order to buy from you).
Management are happy that the hampshire portrays the desired image, the brand is supported by other reassuring southampton and the peterfield is simple. The site also promotes cross selling and informs customers and prospective customers of our other products and services.
Film makers regularly inform me of there prospects’ positive comments regarding wedding videos.