Radiohead King of Limbs - Marketing and Design

This post is about marketing and web page design - the takeaways are:

• If you have something that people want, they will tell their network about you
• If you have something that people want, make it easy for them to find and purchase it
• Set expectations and then over deliver

Marketing (Part 1)

Radiohead are notorious for their lack of communication, they have the best signal to noise ratio of any band I know.  This means that when they do communicate, people comment on it.

The band announced the release of their new album with a simple blog post on their website on Monday.  I don't regularly visit Radiohead's website, but I found out about the record’s existence from a news aggregator on Tuesday.

Marketing (Part 2)

I read eleven music related aggregators and I receive three of them in email format, the rest are RSS feeds. I scan their headlines every morning and if something catches my eye I dig deeper.

Pretty much every one carried the story about Radiohead's new album and in every format I was able to click through to the band's website.  Once I had verified the information and pre-ordered the record, I then tweeted to my network about it.  Over the next two days I saw people in my own network going through the same experience and tweeting and blogging about the record to their network.

Design (Part 1)

When I arrived on the King of Limbs website I immediately knew that I was dealing with the band:

Band name (brand) is big and easily identified – the text is simple and straightforward and the graphic immediately funnels your attention to the purchase process.  Note how there is no menu navigation – there is only one way off this page and you choose it by identifying which market you are – brilliant!

Design (Part 2)

There are two products on offer – the higher margin one is presented first, but again – look how clean and simple the language is.  Look at the relative size between the title and the text and the information delivered.  There are only two visible buttons on this page – the pre order and order button – there is no doubt what the purpose of this page is.

Although menu navigation does make an appearance it is super simple – no drop down menus, no multiple options, simple and clean.  The rest of the purchase flow is just as easy – there are no “up sells”, no additional offers and no superfluous requests for information.

Marketing (Part 3)

When Radiohead announced the new album on the 14th, they said it would be available on Saturday 19th.

When I woke up this morning and looked at my network on Twitter I saw that people were already listening to the album.

http://twitter.com/thebluesage/status/38611832986025984

I immediately went to the site and saw that they had released a day early, I downloaded the album, started listening and immediately told my network the news.

By exceeding the expectations that they themselves had set, they delighted me and made me feel good about the whole experience.

Takeaways

If you have something that people want, they will tell their network about you

If you have something that people want, make it easy for them to find and purchase it

Set expectations and then over deliver

Simple huh!

Don't Call it a Blog...

Call it whatever you like!

board

If you think of your website, you’ll need an about page where you talk about your business, what it is you do, where you are, etc, you’ll want a contact page – let people know where to find you and how to contact you and then you want an area that reflects the changing priorities and offers that you want to show your customers. You can call this anything you like – Promotions, Newsletter, Announcements, Current Specials, etc – you could even call it a blog!

When we think of the word “Blog” we think of left wing media, self-obsessed egotists and unreliable information – certainly having a “Blog” is not something that’s high up the list for a traditional small business – however…

Forget the name!

Think of the underlying principle! The reason there are so many blogs is that they are seriously easy to use. It’s just like using a word processor except you are doing it online and when you hit save, it is published to the Internet. If you, as a small business owner stop and think for a minute – this is a fantastic tool for you to promote your business. It makes sense to have an area on your site where you promote what is going on – it’s no different than if you are running a promotion in your store – you want to have signage that  tells the customers what is going on. If you are a restaurant, you need to have your Menu online, if you run Auto services, what about your pricing list?

When is a blog not a blog?

If you think of your website, you’ll need an about page where you talk about your business, what it is you do, where you are, etc, you’ll want a contact page – let people know where to find you and how to contact you and then you want an area that reflects the changing priorities and offers that you want to show your customers. You can call this anything you like – Promotions, Newsletter, Announcements, Current Specials, etc – you could even call it a blog!

Everyone’s different!

Some Small Business Owners will get addicted to writing on their website – comments from customers are like candy to a baby and writing a regular update can be rewarding to your bottom line. Other businesses may be content with writing up what this month’s specials are, the current promotion or service that they want to feature. The bottom line is: there's no right or wrong way to go about it, only the way that works for you and even more importantly - your customers!

Trading Up...

We think that once you get the hang of regularly updating your website you will want to move forward with other social media tools. Check out the Social Media Business package  for more details.