Page 144 - Duct Tape Marketing

128 Part II: Sharpening Your Marketing Focus

ߜ Be constructive with your criticism.
ߜ Set up a decision-making process and then stick to it. Eliminate the

words “let’s just run it by so-and-so” from your vocabulary. Ads never
get better as they go through a committee process.
ߜ Stay involved. A direct correlation exists between great agency work and
great interest at the top levels of the client organization. That doesn’t
mean that you should be cocreating ads. It does mean that you should
care about the objective, the strategy, and the creative rationale.
ߜ Review the relationship once a year with both sides present.
ߜ Be the agency’s best client. How? Just follow the preceding advice and
send over an occasional gift or note of thanks.

Hiring Help for Web Site Design

Hiring a Web design firm involves many of the same steps involved in hiring
an agency, plus a few additional ones, described in this section.

More than anything else, start by knowing what you want to achieve. With
detailed specifications in hand, Web designers can do a better job of creating
their bids, plus you’ll be able to make apples-to-apples comparisons, since all
design companies will be responding to the identical request.

Creating a request for proposal

Your request for a Web site design proposal should include the following:

ߜ Brief background information on your company. Notice the word brief.
The design firms aren’t trying to learn how to manage your company;
they just want to learn your business purpose and online marketing
objective so that they can create a successful Web site.

ߜ A description of the kinds of people you expect to visit your site.
Again, reduce it to a sentence, or a sentence for each visitor group.

ߜ Your site storyboard. This can be a simple outline of how you think
your site should work. Here’s an example for a florist’s site:
SAMPLE SITE MAP
Home
Flower Arrangements
Catalog