There’s a balance between functionality on the web and creativity on the web.  You can bore a visitor with no creativity but plenty of functionality, or you can annoy a visitor with plenty of creativity but not much functionality.  The magic of the web doesn’t come from magic tricks, it comes from fulfilling the needs of the visitor.

We are a branding firm that does interactive, not an interactive firm that does branding.  Our business in the interactive area has grown rapidly over the past few years.  Here are a few things we’ve learned along the way.

1.  Start with a clear objective–What do you want the site to do for your business.  Sell, inform, entertain, create a following, all of the above?

2.  Be realistic about expectations–We would all like to have a web site that has millions of visitors a day.  Business would be good.  But that’s not reality for most businesses.  If you’re selling bearings from China, you’re likely not going to make the top twenty five.  The important thing is that the right people visit your site.

3.  What does the visitor want from the visit--They have taken the time to search you out.  They obviously want something from you.  Do they want quick information, or a total product demonstration?  Do they look to you for the latest information in your category?  Do they want a price and if they do are you going to make them call to get it?  I hate that.

4.  Make the website brand rich–Your web site should be the best representative of your brand in your organization.  You control it. Think of it as the center of your marketing programs.  Make everything point to it.

5.  Promote it–Buy AdWords.  Maximize SEO.  Include the URL prominently in everything you do promotionally and otherwise.

6.  Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should–Web sites become information dumping grounds.  Less is more.  The other point to this learning is just because you can do magic, make things appear, disappear, move, dance and sing, doesn’t mean you should.  But if you determine you should and your visitors will love it, swing for the fences.

7.  Don’t be awed by the technology–If you can think it, you can do it and you can find somebody that knows how.  We have yet to meet anyone who knows everything about the web and programming.  But we’ve developed a deep network of people who know how to make our sometimes crazy ideas work.

8.  Monitor results frequently–Your web site is real time marketing.  You can see when promotions are working, and when they’re not working.  You can use visitor habits to finely tune your site to reap the biges rewards.

There’s a marketing lesson to be learned from the Tour de France.  The race is won on the hills.  It’s not the downhill easy selling that wins, it’s the selling against the wind, up hill, against the odds.

Everywhere we turn, we hear how bad this recession is…or is going to be.  How marketers are hiding in their shells and budgets are being devastated.  It won’t be until after the recession is over that we hear about those companies that chose to make gains during the bad times.  They’ll be the heroes.

I don’t know what our competitors are doing, but here are our strategies:

1.  Focus on our clients success–There’s no question we have clients who have cut their budgets, but we have come to the collective conclusion that we have to work harder to make every dollar they spend count.  Our goal is to help them come out of this challenging time as a winner in their category.

2.  Investing in ourselves–We all know there’s a great convergence of communications capability.  We are investing in cross training to significantly improve our capabilities across all communications venues.  We believe that the future lies in the capability to bring convention, non-convention and what some call “new” media together into an integrated marketing effort focused on results.

3.  Focus on creativity–The tougher the challenge, the better the creative needs to be.  Our goal is to produce work that is a multiplier in terms of effectiveness.  Work that creates buzz and ingrains our clients’ brands in the hearts and minds of our target audiences.

4.  Demand more–We are going to demand more of ourselves and our vendor partners.  We’ll pay for performance and extra effort.  We’ll negotiate so our clients win but nobody loses.  Fortunately, we have vendor partners in the media who work with us as partners for a common goal.

5.  Focus on results–This is a time where everything we do for our clients, must meet the test of results.  If something works, we’ll find ways to do more of it.  If something does not work, we’ll dump it fast and invest in what does.

6.  Be smart, but be bold–No time for the brash or timid.  We’ll do our homework and swing for the fences.

If you haven’t read Blue Ocean Strategy, it is a highly thoughtful discussion of how a product strategy can make the competition irrelevant.  A red ocean represents bloody competition and a blue ocean represents a market where there is no competition.  To zig, while competitors zag.

Books like these have great examples of successes and few examples of failed attempts.  Still there is much to be learned. The simple truth is it’s very hard to succeed doing what your competitors do.  Sure you can sell some product, but you never can really break out.  Yet the temptation to follow a successful competitor’s lead is great.  It feels safer.

The key to sleeping at night is to make a breakthrough idea feel safe.  We’re not talking about deluding ourselves into warm feelings of security, we’re talking about doing homework with your target audience to develop breakthrough communications, or strategies. After all, if you know that your audience will act on your communications, or buy into your strategy, there’s not much risk in implementation.

Start with foundational research that explores how your consumer relates to you and your competitors.  How do you fit in your consumers’ lives?  What are the rational reasons to buy your product and what are the emotional attachments to your product?  Once you gain that kind of understanding, you’re ready to develop a potential creative strategies.  We suggest developing three to five strategies to test with your target audience.  You’ll know which strategies have the best chance of success.  Many times the creative that wins, is the one you thought would lose.  That’s when you know you have created Blue Ocean Creative.