Client: “Whew! Three (or was it six?) months of back n forth and my beautiful new website is finally finished. Now I can move on to other important marketing matters and not give this another thought.”

Agency person: “Well, yes but no…”

ReThinc Advertising loves to build highly functioning, properly optimized, and aesthetically pleasing websites for our clients (not necessarily in that order). We are especially happy to do this for our clients that require pay per click (PPC) advertising to attract new customers.

A new website with optimized landing pages and a solid user experience helps to make your PPC campaign more effective.

Regardless of what your overall needs are, our website building experience starts with a comprehensive deep dive into your business. This helps us to identify the role that your site will play in your overall marketing strategy as well as formulating the proper user experience for your site.

Our goal is to build you a website with ‘lasting power.’ One that will exceed your needs while also not having to be rebuilt for as long as possible. We design ‘responsively’ which is a fancy way of saying your website will look great on a cell phone (or other devices) which is important as our phones continue to take over our very existence.

OK, back to my point. We build you this really awesome website and then we have nothing to do but watch customers come pouring into your business.

Right? Wrong.

Once the site is completed there is work required to make sure the site remains stable and functioning properly. Essentially it’s just like keeping apps updated on your phone. This work is typically done by the site designer/developers but can be done by you folks playing at home. If, and only if, you know what you’re doing. Updating your site ensures that all aspects of your website are working as designed.

We do this monthly for our retainer accounts and of course my friend’s account in Chicago that knows all the horrific details of my adolescence. (Hi Carl!)

We do not ‘host’ websites, nor does any other ad agency that I know of. Whereas it’s a common practice to offer this service, it’s typically just a front for agencies to make more money. At ReThinc, our digital team will set up your hosting and provide you with all the credentials you need to gain access to your backend. Again, for our accounts on retainer, we’ll also troubleshoot any issues you may have related to hosting.

So, it’s important to know that once your site is completed you need to conduct routine maintenance on it just like you would your car, your pool, and your marriage. If we are not kept on retainer or if you don’t have carnal knowledge of my behavior as a 17 year old, you must do this site maintenance on the regular. Failure to do so could result in your site losing its functionality or worse, making your brand look janky for people visiting your website.

Beyond updating your site, we also recommend adding fresh content by way of posting blogs. Blogs are a great way to keep your audience engaged and to position yourself as a thought leader in your industry. This is also a great way of making sure that your site stays organically relevant to those very important people who we call potential customers. We talk more about the importance of blog content here.

Simply put, websites are our jam. Designing and developing a site is just part of a bigger process that keeps you and your customers interacting with your brand in a favorable way.

Have an old site that needs an update or just want to learn more on how to keep your site up to speed? Send me a note anytime … ed.olsen@rethincadvertising.com.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR – Ed Olsen is the president/owner of ReThinc Advertising and Public Relations. He has lots of opinions on all things marketing. To read more of them, click here.

Let me be clear that the purpose of this blog is to educate. I really don’t use my blog as a sales tool to attract new clients but as the owner of a digital ad agency in Phoenix I do have to write a self-serving piece relative to what we do every so often to keep my digital manager happy.

Here’s his comment on last month’s blog that I wrote about ZOOM … “that’s a clever blog Ed, but it won’t get us any new clients.”

Offence taken. I would like to think that I was able to passively/aggressively offend the Chinese government while also motivating at least a handful of you to stop using golf course backgrounds on your calls.

Who doesn’t want to hire an agency that can do that?

Sorry, I digress. Back to the blog du mois … (that’s French, not a typo).

Let’s pretend that you have a business and you realize that you need to market said business. You hire some ne’er-do-well ad agency (not us) to create an ad campaign. Could be digital, could be traditional or as we like to do here at ReThinc Advertising, it could be both … doesn’t matter.

The goal of the campaign is to acquire new customers for your business by sending them to your website to purchase your new product offering.

The agency comes up with great creative, negotiates great placement on media, finds relevant sites for a digital display campaign, geo targets, makes social media magic happen, and even sends you a $100 gift card good at any Sam Fox restaurant.

The campaign launches and subsequently fails.

What went wrong?

There are a lot of important pieces to a well thought out and executed ad campaign. The ne’er-do-well agency executed all of them except one of the more commonly overlooked (yet critical) components to ANY ad campaign.

The landing page, or as we sometimes call here at ReThinc … the Happy Place.

Before we go any further, let’s make sure everyone understands that a “landing page” is the specific page on the website you are sending traffic to with your ad campaign. It’s the destination for your CTA (that’s not French … it’s ‘call to action’ in agency acronym lingo).

Let’s also go on to say, that the reason I capitalized ANY was to drive home the fact that both digital and traditional ad campaigns with a CTA that directs consumers to a website must take that consumer to a page relative to the message in the ad. In other words, don’t serve me an ad for a really awesome fly rod only to have me click on it and land on your home page where I then have to search for said fly rod.

Are you paying attention Orvis?

Yes, brands both big and small make this mistake all the time. It compromises their results, impedes the sale, frustrates the consumer, and potentially wards off the acquisition of a new customer. The time it takes a consumer to be served an ad to the time that consumer takes action is critical. If you send them somewhere that slows them down you’ve lessened the efficacy of your campaign.

You don’t have to be radio genius Jim Knapp to make the argument that traditional media typically casts a wider net and it’s therefore acceptable that your message lacks the specificity that you may get with a digital campaign. But, you still will benefit from making sure any CTA in a radio,TV or billboard campaign is readily showcased on the website a consumer may visit to learn more or perhaps even execute the purchase.

My digital manager is a stickler for making sure we are sending people who engage our campaigns to a page on a website that is highly-relevant to the ad they’ve engaged with. Even something as simple as spring training has a multitude of ads speaking to specific audiences in the ways that are most convincing for them to take action. When they do, they land on a page relevant to the ad that was served to them. As much as it creates more work for us as the ad agency it fosters greater success for our clients and keeps people from referring to us as that ne’er-do-well agency over on 44th St.

As a business owner your happy place is when you get a good return on your marketing investment. For us, it’s a well designed, properly optimized page on your site that immediately provides the pertinent information that a consumer is showing interest in. We’ve built plenty of happy places in the past 12 years we’ve been in business. Let us know if we can build one for you.