What's New

This month sees the exciting launch of the new Wickedweb brand and reinforces a very positive transition into a more strategic digital marketing agency

Traditionally Wickedweb has been known primarily as a team of web design and build specialists but our continued growth over the last 18 months and  recent account wins with Ellas Kitchen, Watts International EC Harris, & Medway Council, sees Wickedweb leading on strategic digital planning and execution and results-driven tactics.

The brand has been given an injection of understated confidence and leadership and effectively repositions Wickedweb into a more strategic and consultancy-led arena.  It also allows for a shift to a more integrated focus as clients are looking for a wider range of activities across the marketing communications landscape that can be pulled together under the umbrella brand.

Wickedweb are proud of our award winning portfolio of work  and continue to push the boundaries for our clients with wicked ideas, wicked consultancy, wicked technology and wicked creativity.

Both the Agency and our Clients are set for great things over the next 12 months...

Focus groups should play a significant role in any project scoping and user-centered design process, helping   agencies to fully understand a client's audience and their motivations, requirements and goals for the client's website before any digital work starts.  We believe that only through combining the project brief with the client's business objectives, target audience insights and the agency's expertise - what we term 'strategic orienteering' - will the perfect solution be developed.

However, the value focus groups provide doesn't stop there.  In addition to helping the agency live and breathe the brand or organisation, focus groups also encourage 'buy-in' from key client stakeholders and ensure that the audience feels involved and considered throughout, and therefore positive about the changes ahead.

Wickedweb has recently run a series of focus groups with Kings Hall prep school and Kings College in Taunton, Somerset, which provides a perfect example of the 'double value' that focus groups can deliver.

During the user research sessions, we met over 100 members of the target audience through 20 focus groups, ranging from catering and teaching staff at the schools, to Head Boys and Girls, students of all ages, parents associations and groundsmen.

From the agency's perspective, our understanding of the schools' ethos and strong sense of community became clear so the online representation of the schools will be able to closely reflect this.  From the client's perspective, there is now buy-in from key stakeholders including the Head Masters, the marketing team and financial director, who are both confident in the value the project can deliver and Wickedweb's expertise as the schools' newly appointed digital agency.  At the same time, the key audiences - teaching staff, support staff, parents and students - feel fully consulted and through participation, excited by the potential of the website to deliver the requirements they highlighted, and passionate about the next steps.

We know we're not unique in this service, but do wholeheartedly believe in the value of user research - the end result will be a website that considers design, usability and functionality from the audience's perspective, thus ensuring lower bounce rates, longer dwell times and higher levels of user engagement.  In short, investment in understanding the audience at the outset will go lengths to achieving ROI in the long-term.

The search engine landscape is changing and digital marketing strategies with it. How results are generated is going beyond algorithmic data generated from indexing of the World Wide Web. Firstly, the introduction of real-time/live search has seen greater emphasis placed on news results; and more recently tweets have been taking a high profile on many page 1 results. Whilst some would argue that Google have introduced the latter too soon and without enough relevancy/authority on the tweets, the additional challenges posed to search engine optimisation lie elsewhere.

Good SEO companies have always adapted their practices and rolled with the Google punches, but effective SEM is going to require businesses to re-evaluate their online strategy.

So what is changing? How you use the internet, what search terms you typically use and what websites you visit are all adding up to a wealth of non-web metric data that will contribute to what you see in your search results. Therefore, Google’s ambition to improve relevance in their results has led to “customised search” right down to the individual’s historic web activity.

This doesn’t spell the end for search engine optimisation. Far from it; it actually puts an even greater emphasis on tying together SEO with social media marketing, pay per click advertising and other SEM techniques. OK, there’s nothing new with this, but for a while many companies have been able to focus purely on SEO for their search engine strategy.

So how can businesses respond? Setting up geo-targeted PPC campaigns could be a good starting point. If historic visits will really contribute to organic search engine positions, then PPC may help you to give your SEO activity a boost.

Visitor loyalty and user experience will also become a factor. Every SEO expert will need to review the Analytics of their site to make ongoing changes to improve the user experience and lower bounce rates as much as possible. Usability testing before website development will be crucial and web designs need to engage visitors at every level.

Search engine optimisation is definitely changing, but realistically, strategies need to be about refinement as much as realignment.