The RPM Digital team chose to design the newly launched RPM website as a single page that you can scroll down as opposed to the usual website format of multiple pages. The real decision to do it like this was born out of an informed understanding of the user experience and the ability to manage what people see rather than assuming what they want to see. Companies often assume that visitors want to read lots of content and look at lots of pictures, but the reality of the matter is that they don’t.

Visitors probably want to get a concise view of what we’ve done, who we’ve done it for, and an idea of some of the work we’ve done. They then want to be able to get in touch, and after that leave the website; they don’t want to cruise around and navigate to lots of bits of content. So we took the decision to strip the website right back to basics, and start with the user experience. We asked ourselves: what is it they want to see? Once this is established we simply give them what they wanted to see.

That’s where we came up with the idea of the site being just a single, scrollable page because people are used to scrolling, it’s an intuitive thing, and I think the argument that people won’t scroll down the page doesn’t really stack up anymore. The aim is to give people in a nutshell what we’re all about, without having to leave the page or click elsewhere to get through to a case study etc. It helps visual consistency, and it’s easy to work with. For this particular website build, there have been five people working on it and it’s taken three months.

To create consistency, we took a lot of the branding from our newly refurbished office and incorporated this into the site such as the neon signs we have around the building. We’ve used these to make the text far more engaging to look at. Another feature that I particularly like is that the navigation menu only appears when you want it to and we’ve used parallax layering to make the background move at a different speed to the foreground.

General Advice:
I subscribe to the view that website builds are all about User Generated Content. You must ask yourself: did the user get what they wanted? There are tests done called User Experience, where UX specialists will test or carry out any user experience work, pretty much in every phase of the website, right from when you wire frame it, start designing it, start the build of it, when it’s in test phase, and you simply test the hell out of it! Ultimately the best websites give the user what they want quickly and entertainingly. They’re not concerned about how long a visitor stays on the site as long as they get what they came for.

What’s interesting about making a website is that it really forces the business to put a stake in the ground and look at not only re-evaluating itself but also agreeing some fundamental points about itself. So when you say, we’ve got to put our point of view up here- what is it? When you say we’re going to put our best case studies up- what do we think they are? It forces everyone to make decisions and reassess what their key messages are and what the company is actually about.


Hints & Tips:
1. Ask your clients what they what. Research and insight is the key to the success of any project, and it applies to web builds as well. Ask people what it is they want to see. We knew our prospective clients wanted to know about us, who we’ve done some work for and then how to get in touch with us and that’s about it. So that’s what we’re presenting them with. The number one rule is know what it is people want to see.

2. Intuitive experience so the site it’s easy and obvious to use. The scrolling tool is easy. Creatively the seed trail we’ve got leads people’s eye down the page, showing them that there’s more content further down. The whole site is really intuitive to use and this is key.

3. Creatively excellent. To avoid any website becoming too OTT too quickly, you must scope it correctly and agree a functional signed off document that states an overview of what the website will do and say. If things start to creep beyond that it’ll help you to see you’re veering off the original scope.

4. Easy to maintain and keep fresh. Ensure you use an easy to use content management system, and a system by which people who provide content can simply forward it through. It crucial to make this happen automatically to save time.

5. Make it SEO friendly. This is a challenge for a website with just one page as generally the rule is the more pages you have, the more URL’s there are, and the higher the SEO.

6. Establish Tone of Voice: You must distinguish this early on and decide whether you want a corporate tone, or a warm and fluffy one. We wrote a copy brief for our site, but before we did this, we had to establish the right and relevant tone. A good way to do this is to say that if you were to cut your company in two like a stick of rock, what would it be like in the middle? You have to think about what you are, and what you are not.

7. Keep copy to a minimum if possible. We deliberately didn’t use a lot of copy in the RPM website. People don’t like reading too much copy, so we’ve enlivened most copy in neon signs, making people want to read it. If it’s presented in a creative way it makes it more interesting.

The channel that stands out a mile is digital, as we consume increasing amounts of digital media – and decreasing amounts of traditional media. Brands are finding it increasingly difficult to engage audiences, and digital and experiential both enable brands the opportunity to listen and respond to their customers, enhancing the likelihood of emotional engagement and ultimately, loyalty.

In many ways, digital is experiential activity. Although the user can’t actively sample, feel, taste or touch the brand, they can still experience the brand and its values online. And from a social marketing perspective, being in a community, be it a brand’s community or some other community, is part of the brand experience.

Brand experience provides the social collateral that inevitably spreads through word-of-mouth. More and more of this communication is now being done online (27 million users of Facebook in UK, growing 10% in Sep 2010). It is imperative that as well as creating an experience, a brand creates collateral (content/assets) that can be shared across digital platforms.

Developing a community prior to an event has its obvious benefits, mainly that they it will still be there after the event; assuming that the brand continues to fulfill the users social experience online. And to partner experiential activity, digital is the channel that we use to amplify our experiences and events. We integrate Social Marketing into the whole campaign – it isn’t a bolt on module. For example:

Pre event - Raising awareness, identifying the influencers, seeding content, engaging the community
During event – real time reports, tweets and facebook posts – generating and distributing content as it happens
Post event – using content to nurture and build communities

That aside, there is a time and place for all platforms; what brand would decline the opportunity to place an advert in front of 13 million x-factor fans? The question that it often comes down to, especially in current economic climate, is efficiency; what is the return on investment. Digital and experience are often far more accountable than TV.

In an age where brands are expected to offer something in exchange for customers attention, whether this be entertainment, function, or value, Digital is a natural bed fellow for the brand experience, facilitating the most influential output of all, Word of Mouth.

Banner ads have come a long way – from static two dimensional executions through animated multi frame to the latest 3D and video streaming technology. In fact, the term ‘banner ad’ doesn’t do justice to the technology.

The effectiveness of the ad depends on the strength of the brand and the creativity of the agency. Increasingly, brands are exploring new ideas and stretching traditional boundaries to get real cut through and buzz around blog land. The smarter brands are treating their users to a genuine brand experience.

They should be seen as more than just a sales tool, they should be seen as a brand engagement tool. The ongoing challenge is to maximise the clickthrough rate – or even better, do away with clickthroughs and give them everything they need within the banner.

More behavioural marketing allows better use of budget either used on its own or in conjunction with other forms of targeting based on factors like timing, geography, demographics or the surrounding content.

I do believe banner ads will continue to grow as long as brands are still able to demonstrate tangible ROI from them. As alternative options force down CTR’s, banner ads must provide greater impact to justify spend.

A hot topic at the moment is the move toward Social as opposed to Digital, which is something that’s changing week by week. I'll be bold enough to say that the word Digital doesn’t exist anymore, it’s really all about social these days. Web builds, websites and brand websites seem to be thing of the past as everyone geares towards engaged communities and running their interactions via their Facebook pages.

Facebook pages are becoming online brand destinations. They’re doing the jobs that websites did and arguably much more effectively, (note that I’m using the past tense here which is perhaps indicative!). Facebook pages are providing brand content, brand engagement and conversation; like an online receptionist to the brand.

The beauty of this social network is that it humanises the brand by actually presenting somebody. Yes it’s in a virtual world, but somebody is there at the end actually tapping back responses or asking questions and it makes a real difference to consumer engagement.

Consumers tend to want feedback as quickly as possible, with little patience for automated replies or weeks without hearing a word. Facebook allows for this instant communication and dialogue, scrapping outdated FAQ's or machine like responses, playing a key role in effective brand to consumer interaction.

There are various techniques to get consumers more engaged in your campaign. If you’re planning an experiential roadshow that’s going round the country for example, you might ask your community where they would like it to go. Instead of just stating ‘we are going to 10 cities’, you could say ‘we’re going to 9 cities and we want you guys to vote on where we go next’. It’s all about making the consumer’s opinion count, and everyone has a view on something.

The Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange Project worked like this. Once it was agreed that London was exchanging nightlife with Miami, the Nightlife tour went all over the UK but it was down to the communities to tell the brand where they wanted them to visit. So it’s really nice engagement from a user’s perspective and it shows that the brand is listening. It’s clear from this campaign that the brand wants to touch the consumers in the real world as well as in the virtual world, so it’s nicely joined up.

Community is everything. Where RPM really scores, is that one of the key drivers for keeping any community engaged and nurturing it is the provision of great content. This might be films, webisodes, games, maps, ads, or banners and we’ve got a very strong visual content photographic team here who produce high quality stills and moving images all generated from events that we’ve run. RPM has created the events, covered the events, created content for the events and then atomises that content in other digital and social worlds, to further amplify them.

Mobile Marketing has probably been talked about for the last 10 years and it’s only just starting within the last year to come about. Things like Sky mobile on your TV is fantastic and the apps they’ve got are brilliant, but I think we’re still a little bit behind the curve here. We will get on board with it when things like Facebook places and Facebook deals really start to kick off. If users are out and about somewhere they are able to use this to check into a location and get a voucher for where they are on their mobile, straight away.

A brand who is particularly good at this kind of thing is Starbucks, who have something like 20 million fans on Facebook. They are particularly good at Mobile Marketing. In the States this is much more how things are done than they are over here at the moment. The difficulties you’ve got are making sure you have a network for fulfilment. So for example if you’re doing a deal for your customers, you have to make sure you have a national network of places that can be fulfilled. Starbucks is easy as there’s one on every corner, but how do you do a mobile campaign if you’re a small chain? How do you target it so that you’re really going to be talking to people in your outlets. There are mechanisms to do that, but you need to make sure that’s covered off before you begin blasting out great big messages to people.

An example of how this could work, and something we’ve been looking at over the last few weeks, is checking-in within our Sky Ride campaign. The idea is that you take part in a bike trip around a particular city, and participants can ‘check-in’ at various destinations and stop-off points around the route. Once you arrive, you might get some content to your phone, saying, ‘thank you for checking in, you now have VIP access to the picnic in Hyde Park’ or something along those lines. So once you've checked-in along the route, you’ll get various deals or certain access or exclusive stuff for doing so. That’s a kind of work in progress example of how we’re thinking of using mobile and location based marketing.

On a broader mobile basis, the thing that really isn’t in place yet is that about 50% of UK companies haven’t re-purposed their website for mobile use. This means they’ve only built their websites to work on computers, so when you log on to it using your mobile, the website appears only as a tiny version. In terms of making mobile marketing appealing, I think as long as there’s a value exchange, consumers will be willing to give their number to a brand. You have to incentivize data capture in this way otherwise consumers will not be willing to hand over their details.