Small but perfectly formed

The most important elements of web design for SMEs with global ambitions

Indigo Multimedia has worked with North East SMEs since 1995, at the very beginning of the internet and its role as a key channel for businesses to operate worldwide. In 2018, it’s not enough to just have a digital presence. To capitalise on opportunity and capture interest from potential customers, an optimised, personalised and interactive website is critical for business development.

Effective, intuitive website design is complicated. But the return is well worth the investment. At Indigo our process is really centred around co-creation with the client and / or your audiences. The better you know your customers, the more defined and targeted we can design the website, so that it acts as an effective sales funnel and provides an excellent customer experience.

At Indigo, every project we take on has all the requisite digital marketing functions to elevate the site to best of breed in current web design standards. In 2018, we have five non-negotiable standards, and two exploratory trends to watch out for.

Fast Loading

No one wants to wait (and wait and wait) for your site to load. We design sites with super-fast loading times for all users on all devices (even the ones with slower internet connections). Consideration of loading speed is even more crucial in 2018 when using video in page backgrounds is so popular, and image galleries are a key part of online marketing collateral. One of our SME clients, Projected Image, has an image library of many thousands of products, which meant we had to design with this in mind and focus on optimising loading times throughout.

Mobile Ready

Virtually everyone uses smart devices on a daily basis. Have you checked your web stats lately? It’s likely that your mobile traffic is now a significant proportion of your visitors, and the mobile experience is critical for them. Indigo will help you examine your audience and their browsing habits and take a mobile friendly or mobile first design direction that maximises conversion rates. The RE mobile experience was designed by Indigo to be smooth, engaging and somewhat addictive!

SEO Savvy

Don’t underestimate the power of optimizing your site for both browsers and humans. Indigo will support you to develop compelling, readable content for your followers. For the search engines, always include all important on-page SEO tags and elements, including schema and XML sitemaps. We can advise you how to do this yourself using SEO software, or we can implement an SEO and online marketing strategy for you. Indigo has supported many clients with optimising web content, including Emtelle, who landed a major new international client who found them via a search engine.

Conversion Optimized

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) involves creating campaign landing pages into your website. These designated pages can keep your readers moving through your site and direct them to schedule an appointment, request a product demonstration, and even make a purchase. Indigo builds CRO into the design process by creating persona pathways for different types of customers. This proved highly effective for Mslexia the build of its new website increased sales and enabled them to diversify their product range by appealing to ‘digital natives’.

Social Media

Never miss an opportunity to leverage the power of social media. Integrate all relevant social media platforms within your website. Allowing users to quickly access social media pages from the website instantly broadens a brand’s reach and helps increase visibility and traffic. Indigo can advise on social media strategy and has designed some sites that rely almost solely on user generated content, such as the School in the Cloud project for Newcastle University.

So there you have five essentials of web design, which matter no matter what size your business or your budget. And for something to think about for the future, two emerging trends you’ll be hearing a lot more about…

Emerging Trend 1 – Progressive Web Apps

Intrigued by the impact apps have on mobile media platforms, we can now successfully blend the very best web and app features into a hybrid known as Progressive Web Apps. Expect to see Progressive Web Apps out in full force throughout 2018. Now when you are thinking about what your website could do for your business, consider including various features into your design such as splash screens, push notifications, and animated page transitions to elevate the user experience and provide more touch points with your brand.

Emerging Trend 2 – Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Yes, really. Artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic, high-tech term and has successfully worked its way into our everyday vernacular and online experience. Adobe’s Sensei is delivering AI tools to various web design platforms worldwide, making it a more accessible, available resource.

So, is your brand’s website up to 2018 standards?

If not, it’s time for an immediate online renovation. Remember, it’s not about grand gestures and overhauls. Rather, 2018 will focus on a shift towards simple, functional, and futuristic designs. Implementing these (relatively painless) standards as a non-negotiable design baseline can have a significant impact on the way we do business and connect with potential customers online for optimal ROI with every user engagement.

What Indigo clients say:

In first six months from launch of new site

PAGE VIEWS DOUBLED

BOUNCE RATES HALVED

“We have had a lot of success in getting people to use the site and the difference in bounce rates and time spend on the site is looking great.”

Ian Spoors

Marketing Manager, Projected Image

“Indigo explained things clearly; converting technical functions into easily understandable terms…when developing the site their attention to detail was excellent and most importantly they listened to us, taking time to understand our brand identity.”

Jenny Vaughan, Co-Founder, RE Found Objects

Digital and Heritage – striking a balance

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What is the correct balance of technology for your cultural or heritage attraction? Do you want your audiences tethered to their phones to supplement the experience – or do you encourage visitors to put away their technology and disconnect? At Indigo, we believe the key to success is allowing visitors to make relevant choices for themselves.

Consistent research has shown that guests visit arts and heritage sites for a variety of reasons – most notably social, educational and entertainment. Arts and heritage organisations have taken this on board and have produced immersive elements at their facilities where visitors become a part of the story. This includes taking on the persona of a passenger on a famous form of transport, a worker in a particular industrial sector, or a citizen in a particular location or particular period of time.

There are many ways to re-imagine how a visitor could engage with other guests and with collections to create a strong attachment that will remain as a strong memory long beyond the visit. Producing “memory” tickets in the form of boarding cards, signup papers, identification papers, etc., are all key devices that can help to keep the visitor engaged beyond the initial visit and can carry the message of the organisation to a broader audience. Linking such immersion experiences to online experiences post-visit is also helping to deepen visitor relationships between visitors and arts and heritage organisations.

Organisations such as the Titanic Museums (with their passenger and crew experiences), the Concorde exhibition at Aerospace Bristol (with its boarding card experience) and the ss Great Britain (with its Transatlantic voyage experience) are all examples where visitors are actively encouraged to become involved, emotionally and physically, in the subject areas that the organisations are passionate about.

Indigo started as a multimedia design and production company but we’ve always looked past just the technology, to its impact and effects on audiences and mostly to convert audiences into participatory actors, creators, generators within the context of an arts or heritage site.

Our approach uses what we call the constructivist view of education. We think that humans learn best when they’re involved and engaged and when they create and generate things. So we look to how we can affect people and create situations where people generate new ideas. Technology is a huge facilitator for that, but there is always something ‘real’, something tangible or historical or profound at the heart of arts and heritage experiences that the technology hangs off.

We look at architecture, we look at storytelling and most of all we look at emotional impact.

So when we design a new visitor experience, we think about how will this be emotionally engaging? Because in our mind, whether or not that user is high technology, low technology or old technology, emotional engagement is really what will age well. That’s why, when we were commissioned to develop a brand new visitor experience centred around the Tees Transporter Bridge in Middlesbrough, we started the design process with co-creative workshops with local people in order to tease out the key stories that would impact visitors the most by creating the most human connection.

An unintended but happy consequence of these consultations was the realization that the visitor experience went beyond the location of the Transporter Bridge site, and that we could use digital to send and guide visitors out into the town with a Digital Heritage Trail App with augmented reality. Users are taken on a journey around the heritage of Middlesbrough by the ‘Blue Dragonfly’ character (representing the Transporter Bridge). Dramatized audio scenes allow the characters to speak for themselves and tell the user the stories of the town

The key opportunity with this project was to engage and inspire new and returning visitors to the Tees Transporter Bridge and to convey the pivotal role that Middlesbrough had in the industrial revolution and its incredible impact on bridge building and engineering throughout the world.

Digital provides a unique opportunity to enhance visitor engagement, by providing interactivity, the ability to present large amounts of information within limited space through screens, and the increasing availability of cellular broadband brings the opportunity to take visitors on a virtual journey around heritage sites.

Ultimately, we believe the right balance for arts and heritage attractions is to offer audiences choices when it comes to digital. The changing needs and expectations of our audiences are the key drivers for change and innovation and although the stories may not have changed, the way future generations experience them will help them stay relevant in a rapidly changing world.

A digital blueprint for local democracy

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We were delighted to hear that Newcastle City Council won the 2017 Pride Award for Best Use of Digital, for a website Indigo helped develop.

The People’s Budget is an online tool to encourage the public to engage with the council’s draft budget proposals. This engagement has always been difficult because it’s a struggle to get people interested in the first place, let alone to the point of understanding the intricacies of local government finance and the dilemmas councillors face when setting the budget.

For the past seven years, councils up and down the country have faced significant budget pressures which has resulted in services being removed or reduced.

Unless people are aware of this and understand it better, they are not inclined to get involved and the process ends up being very negative and attracts criticism of the council.

Our brief was to create a digital platform which:

Allowed members of the public to get a better understanding of Newcastle City Council’s budget
Make residents aware of the difficult choices facing the council
Empower local people in the decision-making process

The Council’s rationale was that effective community engagement can significantly increase public confidence and trust. Also when those who serve listen to the citizens, they become better informed of what is needed by the community and generally make better decisions. So the key to this campaign was to radically change the existing process and create a digital platform that would simplify the council’s budget and the proposals that were put forward to be considered by Newcastle residents. It was imperative that this digital solution would empower residents in the decision-making process and put them in the seats of councillors, to understand the scale of the challenge, and that every decision has consequences.

The existing process meant the public had to read 20 individual documents consisting of 750 pages, and then directing them to a survey to have their say. The Council needed to find an easier way to present this information which would allow people to just ‘get it’.

There was a strong desire to improve on the figures from 2015/16, when the budget consultation process generated only 3,500 unique visits to the consultation website and 193 people completed a survey. Due to workforce reductions, the council stopped facilitating drop in sessions with about 10 staff where the public used to go and find out more information on the budget and have their say.

The Council wanted the digital platform to be as simple as possible. We took the principles of Sim City and applied it to the simulator so that residents began to understand that every decision has consequences. We made the platform as interactive as possible and converted council jargon into everyday language so that residents could appreciate the difficult choices facing the city.

We also built the simulator to explain the difference between Capital and Revenue spend to counteract the argument that ‘you’re spending this money on shiny buildings when you could be spending it on social care’.

Crucially, we empowered residents by allowing them to submit their own budgets. Individual budgets were then collected and the aggregate budgets created the People’s Budget, the sum total of all budgets submitted. The Council made this public to enable transparency and greater accountability.

Results

Over 46,000 unique visitors interacted with the platform in the 3 months it was live, an increase of 1231% in visitors from the consultation website in 2015/16. This resulted in 539 budgets being submitted and attempted, an increase of 179% from last year’s budget consultation.

The People’s Budget platform also sparked a lot of social media conversations, with 300,500 reach on Facebook, 116,621 impressions on Twitter and 49,980 video views on all the videos posted on the budget.

Residents were not only able to interact with the platform and get a better understanding of the Council’s budget position, but they influenced a council tax rise of 4.95% in the city to deal with the cuts.  For the first time, residents were able to influence which services could be protected and which services could be cut.

“This level of intelligence and insight from what our residents wanted has been revolutionary. And it has helped our councillors to listen to what our residents have to say.” Newcastle City Council statement

Interactive Exhibit Design – transforming visitor experiences

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One of our core services at Indigo is developing fun and engaging interactive exhibits for the cultural and tourism sectors using JavaScript and html 5 technologies. Digital and touchscreen technology has a unique and universal appeal for audiences of all ages and tech abilities. Touchscreen exhibits are simple to use, intuitive and highly attractive to visitors as they offer a two-way interaction. From a curatorial point of view, digital offers a huge opportunity to present information and interpretation that would otherwise be impractical or impossible in a physical exhibit.

This opportunity was well taken when Indigo worked with Middlesbrough Council to develop a new digital visitor experience at the Tees Transporter Bridge. The small visitor centre is often un-manned and so presenting fragile or valuable exhibits was impractical. However with digital, we were able to create three interactive touchscreen exhibits, one of which is based on the original tender documents and technical drawings of the bridge. These original drawings and documents are housed safely in the Teesside Archives and can be viewed by the public by appointment only. Through digitization however, these fascinating documents are accessible to all, and can be explored as part of an interactive touch screen kiosk allowing users to explore the original scanned blueprints of the bridge and learn how it was constructed. The kiosk also includes a quiz ‘Are you engineer enough?’ which is based on the original tender document.

‘Bridging the World’ is an interactive game that brings to life a previously static exhibition about 18 famous bridges that were designed in Teesside. Indigo’s design team utilized universal bridge-building engineering principles to develop a game that challenges users to solve the puzzle of which bridge to build in which location. Through playing the game, visitors learn key engineering facts such as the reason suspension bridges can have such long spans, and why the unusual solution of the hanging transporter bridge was chosen for Middlesbrough.

The third touchscreen kiosk we developed for the Tees Transporter Bridge Visitor Experience links to a son et lumière display in the Winding House and Engine Room. Users are able to touch an area of the diagram of the machinery on the screen and light up that machinery and hear a voiceover description of the workings.

These interactive exhibits have transformed the visitor experience at the iconic bridge site, as Heritage Development Officer, Dr Tosh Warwick says:

“Indigo Multimedia have brought a well-known landmark structure to life with a range of new visitor and educational experiences combining interactive touchscreens, augmented reality apps and exciting learning resources alongside high-standard interpretation both in the Visitor Centre and across the site. Early visitor feedback has reflected increased understanding of and fascination with Teesside’s landmark Transporter Bridge thanks to the new Tees Transporter Bridge Visitor Experience.”

New app brings Middlesbrough’s heritage to life

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We are delighted that a new mobile app created by us here at Indigo has been launched by Middlesbrough Council. The Tees Transporter Bridge Heritage App brings to life the fascinating history of the Tees Transporter Bridge and Middlesbrough using the latest geo-location and augmented reality technology. The App guides users around the Transporter Bridge and the town on a virtual heritage trail, encompassing more than 30 historical locations and featuring a fascinating cast of characters that lived, breathed and built ‘Ironopolis’.

The app was developed as part of a wider project supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, to create a new Tees Transporter Bridge Visitor Experience. Indigo created a range of new interpretation materials in the Visitor Centre including three interactive touchscreen kiosks featuring bridge-themed games and e-learning materials for visitors of all ages and abilities. The whole visitor experience includes cutting edge digital technology that is designed to spark interest and enjoyment from a ‘cradle to grave’ audience. Dr Tosh Warwick, Heritage Development Officer for Middlesbrough Council, had a key role in this ground breaking project. He says:

Councillor Charlie Rooney, Middlesbrough Deputy Mayor and Executive Member for City Centre Strategy, said: “The Transporter is one of the great icons of the North East skyline, and a symbol of Teesside’s proud industrial heritage.

“The Heritage Lottery Fund upgrades have made it more accessible than ever, both as a working bridge and as a leisure destination, and this new app adds the finishing touch to this important project.

“Visitors young and old will be able to step into the rich history of the Transporter and its surroundings and find out more about what makes this area so special.”

Indigo asked a number of local community and history groups to help create the content for the heritage app, and this process helped to identify the core messages and stories to tell. Talented Performing Arts students from Middlesbrough College act out the stories in a series of dramatized aural histories that are presented via the app along with photographs, artworks and text about the location and characters.

The main character featured in the app is the Blue Dragonfly – a lovely local lass who portrays the voice of the Transporter Bridge and gives a sense of the uniqueness and magnitude of the structure. This character was inspired by the Ian Horn poem, Ironopolis:

Ironopolis
Where alchemists
Were born
Below Cleveland’s hills
A giant blue dragonfly
Across the Tees
Reminds us every night
We built the world,
Every metropolis
Came from
Ironopolis

The Blue Dragonfly pops up throughout the virtual heritage trail, often with cheeky come-backs for some of the ‘men of power’ that are featured, such as Henry Bolckow, John Vaughan, Samuel Sadler and Sir Hugh Bell. She also has her own unique story, which she tells app users as they stand near or on her magnificent structure.

One of the themes of the app is to give the user a sense of the impact of the generations of powerful men, the ‘Ironmasters’ who manufactured power in and around Middlesbrough, starting with coal, then iron, then steel and eventually chemicals. A nod to the potential future of sustainable energy production is also included.

The app timeline runs from 1829 and the location of Parrington Farm, with the story of Joseph Pease finding the site of what would become Middlesbrough and deciding to buy the land from Farmer Parrington in order to build a new port from which to export coal. Using geo-location and mapping technology, the app leads users on fascinating historical trails around the town. When an app trail location is reached, augmented reality is triggered and used to present dramatisations of key events such as the worker riots on Vulcan Street in the early 1840s, the mythical tale of John Vaughan discovering ironstone in the hills above the town, the eventful unveiling of Samuel Sadler’s statue, and of course the maiden crossing of the Tees Transporter Bridge in 1911.

The app also reveals the social and community stories of Middlesbrough, in which women were much more influential. For example the lively interior of the Winter Gardens is brought to life, with a nod to Lady Florence Bell’s desire to reduce the drunkenness of the work force by providing warm and entertaining ‘dry’ places to get out of the cold. The opening ceremony of the Transporter Bridge is narrated by six-year-old Hilda Jessop, the first person climb and cross the top of the bridge.

The Tees Transporter Bridge Heritage App is designed to appeal to and be usable by all ages, from school groups, to family groups, to tourist groups with a special interest in history, bridges and engineering. It is free to download from the iOS App Store and Google Play.

Below: augmented reality live view of the Middlesbrough Dock Clock Tower

User-centred Design

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One of Indigo’s key working principles is user-centred design, or co-creation. We use a variety of consultative and research methodologies to achieve this, but by far the most commonly deployed and most productive of these is the Creative Idea Generation (CIG) Workshop.

CIG is a methodology that aims to generate a flow of ideas and creativity around a central Big Question, with guided discussions that identify and seek to answer related questions.

Indigo has developed its unique framework process for CIG workshops over a number of years and deployed this creative consultation technique on a range of projects. Some recent examples include:

Middlesbrough Council – community engagement CIG workshops were delivered to a range of community groups in order to develop interpretation plans for the new Tees Transporter Bridge Visitor Experience. The CIG workshops provided rich narrative threads, bringing the exciting industrial history of ‘Ironopolis’ to life through the stories of the men and women who built the city. These stories and characters became embedded in the exhibition which includes a mobile heritage app and interactive touchscreen kiosks. One example of the creative spark that came from the CIG process is the Blue Dragonfly – a character representing the Tees Transporter Bridge based on a poem by Ian Horn cited by one of the CIG participants:

Ironopolis
Where alchemists
Were born
Below Cleveland’s hills
A giant blue dragonfly
Across the Tees
Reminds us every night
We built the world,
Every metropolis
Came from
Ironopolis

Blackburn with Darwen Council – Bee Yourself web application – CIG workshops with 62 children and young people were facilitated by Indigo in order to shape the development of an online resource for emotional health and wellbeing. The CIG workshops resulted in a host of innovative developmental plans for the online platform including a mood mapper, community network and user-generated tumble blogs. One of the key research methodologies we used on this project was heuristic play – where young participants were provided with digital environments/apps and asked to explore and use them without intervention. One of the clear outcomes of this process was the importance of touch navigation on mobile devices and how intuitively young people use even very complex interfaces. These findings have influenced our whole approach to developing mobile experiences which now include a whole range of intuitive touch navigation including 3D touch and animated gestural transitions that create a textural effect for users.

National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (Ireland) – Phyz App – co-creation workshops with 68 young people and 12 PE teachers were facilitated by Indigo, in order to develop a mobile app for the assessment of Senior Cycle Physical Education in schools across Ireland. The process informed every element of the UX and UI, and resulted in a focus on peer-to-peer motivational features and functions based on social platforms, particularly Snapchat.

Our experiences of co-creative projects have shown how powerfully energising the process can be. The legacy is not just a better product, which genuinely reflects the needs of its audiences; we find that co-creation also leads to improved internal working practices and the uptake of a more agile and customer-focused approach to product development.

Rate your digital marketing capabilities

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Here is a matrix to help you understand and evaluate your company’s digital marketing capability. Read each of the stages and rate your own organisation’s capability in order to see where you are on the path towards digital marketing excellence. Get in touch if you want Indigo to help you move to the next stage.

University Challenge: digital transformation

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We are offering Universities and Colleges a free Digital Transformation Workshop. Enquire by 30 June 2017 to set yours up.

When talking to Universities about their digital presence, we are often asked to demonstrate that Indigo will bring more than design and technical services to the table during a digital transformation exercise. It is essential for us to be proactively forward thinking about what our clients in the Higher and Further Education sector will benefit from in the short, medium and long term, and we thought we’d share some of our insights so that if you are thinking of commissioning a digital agency to work with on your digital transformation project, you may find inspiration and new aspects to consider.

For example, one of the key strategies for Higher and Further Education institutions is to integrate personalisation into their website build.

8 Indigo Insights on website personalisation for Universities and Colleges:

Establish Personalisation Boundaries
Start Simple
Device Tailoring
Define users
Make it easy
Go under the radar
Mine for behavioural nuggets
Perma beta testing

Establish Personalisation Boundaries
It’s crucial to get the balance right between what’s possible with personalisation (a lot!), and what will genuinely benefit both the potential student and the University. Rushing into using personalisation technologies can result in a ‘spammy’ experience which can have a negative impact on conversion rates. Remember, the ultimate objective is to help students decide your University is the best one for them, not to bombard or overwhelm them with sales messages.

Start Simple
Add data sources to student profiles in the first instance, starting with referrer (and perhaps campaign data), then introduce website behaviour patterns, progressing to offline data.

Device Tailoring
Responsive website development goes far beyond ‘making it work’ on different device types. Indigo recommends that the entire user journey is tailored to different devices, along with the personalisation elements. One of the main website bounce culprits is difficulty navigating so every journey is created as equal, yet different.

Defining Users
The personalisation journey is defined via splitting up target markets into specific personas. We begin this by basing this on the user’s IP address for location, visitor path journey and frequency of visits. This will allow us to analyse, learn and react accordingly. Personalised ‘welcome back’ messaging along with a personalised hierarchy of content based on their previous visit helps the overall user experience, guiding them towards interests, courses, amenities and places relevant to them.

Making it Easy
Utilise data as much as possible, for example identifying top course searches and local area based searches and making sure these are page prominent and easy to reach. Changing categories and menus to fit in with student behaviours rather than categorising by internal criteria which means nothing to customers is key to achieving maximised student user experience and conversion activity.

Go under the radar

Listening to historical and live data is imperative to ensuring a successful conversion cycle throughout a University website. The homepage will obviously be a very prominent page of the website but course pages, attractions and activities might have a broader impact in some cases. For example, if analytics lists the nearby coastline as being the most popular location based attraction to your University, use coastline images as backgrounds in key areas of the sites. This forms part of a personalised experience and yet contributes towards an ‘under the radar’ conversion technique.

Mine for behavioural nuggets
Personalised web analytics will reveal actionable insights into individual prospects, for example:

Students’ personal preferences and current course/content interests
Where students stand in the decision making, enrolment life cycle
When they are most susceptible to being persuaded or converted
When timely action must be taken to retain them
Which courses & offers will be seen as most relevant and persuasive

These insights can be transformed into target marketing initiatives at every stage of the student visitor life cycle.

Perma Beta Testing
Consider the site as a moving target. Times, technologies, devices, browsers and ultimately people change. Continuing regular testing helps to cultivate the website organically through this process, always working alongside such changes.

This is a taster of the kind of insight Indigo can provide your University or College with during a free consultation workshop. We can facilitate Digital Transformation workshops at your site, for up to 12 people. Contact Caroline Greener to discuss your requirements – 0101 209 2100 or caroline.greener@indigomultimedia.com

How to write a Digital Plan for Arts & Cultural organisations

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If you work in the cultural sector you will be aware that Arts Council England is now strongly encouraging all organisations to make a digital plan (it’s an application requirement for band two and three organisations). This is a smart move, since although there’s a credible school of thought which argues that digital shouldn’t be hived off and treated as some special case, the reality is that as a sector, the arts is some way off digital being so integrated that it negates the need for a stand-alone plan.

As an audience development specialist working in the digital sector, I have developed numerous digital plans for arts and cultural organisations both large and small. It’s never easy but it’s always worthwhile because digital offers so many low cost and low risk opportunities for experimenting and playing with audience development and creative outputs.

As with your audience development plan, your digital plan needs to sit comfortably with your overall organisational aims, other aspects of the strategy, your structures and resources. It usually makes sense to integrate both plans into your overall strategic plan.

If you have anxiety about writing a digital plan, because of a lack of internal knowledge and resources, it can be a worthwhile investment to bring in an expert consultant who will be able to maximise the impact of the process while minimising the time and stress for the organisation. A good consultant will leave a legacy of internal development. I always include creative idea generation workshops and staff training as part of a strategy development project because I want the team to be able to implement the plan once I disappear into the sunset!

The Arts Council’s Digital Policy Guidelines has some good advice about how to approach a digital plan, and make a good starting point for organisations going it alone. I would also suggest setting time aside to consider the following pointers:

Pinpoint the challenges facing your current organisation and consider how digital might help mitigate some of those challenges.
Identify the areas where you feel your organisation is currently weakest: that might be digital marketing, or a good CRM, or using Google Analytics effectively. Prioritise this list. Yes it would be great to do everything but you have to be realistic, so your plan needs to tackle things step by step.
Identify what is stopping you tackling those weaknesses tomorrow: is it due to lack of skills? Lack of resource? No idea of what tools might be able to help you achieve a particular aim? In each case, you need to figure out how to remove the challenge. Need to up-skill? Make training a priority. Limited resource? Consider how others within the organisation (or external resource) may be able to help you. And so on. Apply ruthless common sense to this process.

If it all feels too much however, don’t be afraid to seek help: there are lots of useful free resources online (for example, CultureHive) and I am always happy to offer a free initial consultation and quotation for taking on the task. Indigo’s relationship with National Glass Centre began with the development of a Digital Strategy. Strategic digital planning has also been central to wider projects with Northumberland National Park, Middlesbrough Council, Mslexia, and Live Theatre among others.

In short, take heart! In terms of the opportunities digital technologies afford, we’ve never lived in more interesting times. Digital transformation won’t happen overnight but small, significant steps will set you on the right path.

You can find the Arts Council England digital plan guidelines here (opens a pdf).

Caroline Greener

Marketing and Social Media Specialist

caroline.greener@indigomultimedia.com

Is your website world wide ready?

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New developments in web design have transformed the way that North East businesses working in global markets are able to optimise the opportunities to attract and convert new international clients.

There are a growing number of powerful and effective web design and development techniques that are helping businesses stay ahead of the competition in international markets.

Indigo Multimedia specialises in working with North East businesses that trade internationally, and the knowledgeable, friendly team has guided many clients through digital transformation exercises that have delivered tangible results, such as Emtelle UK Ltd.

“A leading European Telco which works in 50 countries and turns over €62BN was looking for a new supplier. They found Emtelle along with our competitors via Google, carried out a full audit using the websites before even contacting potential suppliers, and on the strength of the website Emtelle was shortlisted and has actually become the supplier of PVC ducts for the company.”

Laila Pederson, Project Manager, Emtelle UK Ltd

So what are some key elements of an internationally optimised web presence?

International Persona Pathways

Customer-centred design is at the heart of conversion rate optimisation. Through careful consideration of who the customer is, what they want, and their barriers and psychological triggers, we can start to imagine a ‘perfect’ website pathway for that particular persona, which will lead to a goal conversion. Indigo has developed a very effective process for building persona profiles, and has a particular expertise in co-creating these with clients. We understand that many successful companies have limited time for self-reflection and strategic team planning. We also understand how to make it happen in a way that harnesses and calibrates internal knowledge. When thinking about international personas it is particularly important to consider country-specific cultural, ethical and social ideologies that might effect procurement decisions.

Geo-targeting and language switching

Your company website can be developed to incorporate IP recognition so that it automatically detects the country of origin of the visitor and loads a perfectly optimised and translated landing page containing targeted messaging. This vital first impression is all too often damaged by neglecting the basics of customer-centred design. For some clients, Indigo has developed a geo-targeted suite of mini sites which cater to particularly important territories.

Using Content Delivery Networks (CDN)

Indigo has worked on numerous international projects with high volumes of traffic. In such cases we use CDN to ensure peak website performance in different countries around the world. Often these projects are ecommerce based where ultimate performance is imperative.

Personalisation and Adaptive Behavioural Marketing

The ultimate goal of customer-centred design is to provide benefits to the end user that genuinely improve their experience and convince them to become a customer. There are many personalisation technologies available which fulfil an incredibly sophisticated Marketing function. At Indigo we advise a simple starting point such as adding data sources to user profiles (referrer, campaign data etc), then introducing website behaviour patterns which can progress to offline data. Device tailoring is essential to ensure that every user journey is created equal, yet different. Benchmarking through analysing live and historical data can contribute to subtle but meaningful improvements to messaging, taxonomy and imagery. Personalised web analytics can reveal actionable insights into individual prospects, such as:

Prospect’s personal preferences and current product interests
Where prospects stand in the decision-making cycle
When they are most susceptible to being persuaded or converted
When timely action must be taken to retain them
Which products/offers will be seen as most relevant and persuasive

These insights can be transformed into target marketing initiatives at every stage of the customer life cycle.

These are just some of the techniques available to improve the international performance of your business website. Indigo is a forward thinking digital agency with over 20 years’ experience working with North East businesses. More than just a web design agency, we can provide all the advice and support you need to ensure your online presence is working hard and returning results.

For a discussion about your specific requirements contact Caroline Greener, Marketing and Social Media Specialist on 0191 209 2100 or caroline.greener@indigomultimedia.com.