The Problem
Fiona and I met at a writer’s convention where we were both tabling (she makes book covers). She and started talking about this new portrait business she was trying to get off the ground. She loved the project, and knew she really wanted to get serious about seeing if it could succeed, but she wasn’t sure how she could measure her success or when she should call it quits. She didn’t need a website (she knows how to build them) but she did need solid strategy. So she purchased a strategy package and we got to work!
Defining Success
How do I know if I’m successful? In all my years working with creatives in online marketing, this is bar-none the hardest question to answer. Because the answer is always complicated. This question was at the core of the Flight of Fancy strategy, since Fiona didn’t want to keep pouring energy into something that wasn’t viable. In our first meeting, I helped her take a serious look at her life, time, and finances and we put concrete goals with dollar signs and a reasonable timeline on the business. If she could meet these goals, she was succeeding. If not, it was time to call it quits. The rest of the strategy would then revolve around giving her as much support as possible to reach these goals and find success.
Identifying Audience
After defining success, we attacked audience. Who would want to purchase these portraits? Who was already selling something similar and who was buying that? Were there any untapped markets (oh yes!)? The fun part of working with creatives, is they are willing to think creatively. Fiona send me a fire hydrant of ideas, and combined with my own research I compiled three unique audience segments, complete with defining characteristics, needs, and major questions they’d have approaching the website. After we determined how the website would answer these questions and lead visitors to convert into customers, I jumped into designing the User Experience.
UX Design
User Experience (UX) design is all about making sure the website does it’s job for the user. Does it have the right pages? Are they easy to navigate? Are things laid out to entice the user and lead them to an action? This is all part of UX. Taking Fiona’s audience segments, I created a sitemap (list of pages in hierarchy), wireframes (structural outlines), and action pathways (how the user would navigate the site). Fiona is now using these to create her own website designs!
Marketing & Outreach
The final piece for Flight of Fancy was marketing and outreach. It’s all fine and well to have a perfectly functioning website, but it wasn’t going to get her any closer to reaching her goals unless people were coming in. I created a comprehensive guide for social media marketing, complete with campaign ideas and image dimensions. We also tackled SEO (getting the site to top of google searches), Etsy marketing, convention table best practices, and email marketing! Having a variety of outreach options was going to best for Fiona, so she could experiment and see what is and isn’t working for her brand.
The Results
I delivered the strategy package to Fiona on April 16th, 2018 and she’s already jumped into building her website using the wireframes and guidelines I laid out for her. When she’s ready to launch, we’ll start up with an analytics package to track her visits and conversion rates and test where her marketing efforts are succeeding. With this data at her disposal, she’ll be able to strategically adjust her implementation of our strategy and have the best shot possible of making Flight of Fancy a success!
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