Waterspot Case

Waterspot Case

What is Waterspot.org and what solutions were implemented

 

WS creative

 

Watersport.org is a startup based in Malmö that aspires to bring the community of people who love visiting beaches and are water sports’ enthusiasts. It aims to provide all relevant information in a single place, like the distance from parking to the beach, availability of facilities like changing rooms, toilets, cafes, the type of terrain of the beach, the wind speed, and direction, availability of learning schools or campsites nearby or even a possibility to buy or rent equipment. Finding relevant information in one place is a common struggle faced by all.

 

Working for the startup I covered different tasks starting from fixing technical issues and website cleaning, to creating new content as posts, images, videos, creative designs, as well as creating Social Media accounts and start using them. All the work was done by using the latest digital instruments available for good teamwork like Slack, Zoom, Trello.

 

1. Design & Redesign (Illustrator, InDesign, AfterEffects)

I redesigned the Logo, water sport Icons and Pins with the main sports, Style Guide, series of creatives for Instagram (posts and videos), Conceptual Map to visualise the WaterSpot’s idea.

 

2. Video content (AfterEffects, PremierePro)

To create beach videos I did:

• Visit and video shooting the nearest beaches like Lomma’s, Helsingborg’s and Råå, a few Malmö’s beaches and learning schools, as well as two lakes (Vombsjön and Sövdesjön) in Skåne.

• Create videos from this material for every water spot, learning spots, beach café or restaurant, parking lot close to the beach. Inserting these spots on the website, including the videos, all together resulted in creating of something like 25 spots in Skåne.

• Insert these videos on YouTube.

• Exercised to use the drone for video.

• ‘How to add a spot’ – conceptual and instructive video of the process of how and why to add

3. Create Instagram & FB profiles

I created a FB business account. For the Instagram profile, in order to give more support and publicity, I have the idea and created a satellite account to point to the main account and website. I created @spot_that_spot, where I‘ve got more than 100 followers for only 2 months, with a real interest to follow me, without having prior my own content and experience on the topic (water sports).

 

4. WordPress web site cleaning, reordering, fixing issues

The Word Press web site was already running but with numerous technical problems to fix. In many cases, I was in helping to find the right PHP file and place the right snipped instead to use one more additional plugin.

 

5. Insert Costa Brava’s Beaches, Spain

This was really intensive work since Costa Brava extends over a length of 214 kilometres from the French border to Barcelona. The rough estimation of all beaches was around 100, of which nearly 70-75% were inserted. In practice, the final result is that Water Spot is maybe the one that has the most complete Costa Brava’s beaches guide.

9 steps to the success

9 steps to the success

1. MARKET RESEARCH

Even before building the website, market research is one of the first steps to start with. You need to know from the very beginning what is the market need of your product or service before even to start it. You need also to know what are the biggest competitors, what is their position, where will be your place, how do you compete with them. Then you need to know your customers, what are their problems, what you can do for them better or give more than your competitors. That is the step called: Strategic Planning.

2. STRATEGIC PLANNING

Knowing your main players – competitors and clients will help you to construct what will be your strategy. If you found a niche, this could already be winning alone, but not all of the business have that chance and need to do the whole optimisation planning.

Then by improving the thinking, planning and fixing what are your aims, your milestones, your tools to make it, your resources, for how long time, how to measure it, how to know you do it right or wrong you can have the understanding if you are heading the right direction and what is working well, what not. When you have clear ideas it is the time to make your Resources planning.

3. RESOURCES PLANNING

Now to complete your business plan, need to know is it achievable what you are planning? Do you have resources? Budget and people, time and knowledge? Digital marketing can help you to get clear ideas. Examples are a lot: no need to build expensive and heavy site if you are not going to sell, there are a lot of cheaper solutions. No need to open all social media channels if you don’t have a budget and people to work, follow and update daily/weekly the content. Just start with a few steps, learn to use them really well, after that go to expand. We will discuss all of this. If you know that you need a site to build, continue with us to the next step.

4. WEBSITE BUILDING | BRANDING

Now we are ready to start with your web site. This is your window, the way how you show and expose your services/products and the extra attention to build it in the right way is absolutely important. It has to be pleasant, following all the rules of the nowadays SEO. It must be secure, strong and fast in the same time, with all certificates and verifications, placed in a good hosting server, to be easy for the search engines bots to find it and index it properly, without errors. Especially these rules are the absolute must-do for the eCommerce or big business sites, where every error, low-quality hosting, tools and integration can lead to losing the indexing, positioning, visibility and hence sells.

5. SEO & SEM

The SEO strategy is to be applied right from the beginning. Even the names that will be given to your pages, to the different categories of your products or services does matter. SEO is the best and free way to achieve better visibility for your site. This free on-page optimisation, of course, needs to be done properly and without errors for the search engine crawlers. The process is slow, the first results are not visible immediately, but in the long run, this is the winning strategy. To accelerate the process we can use SEM, the paid traffic. But this alone, without SEO will lead only to waste of the budget. It is time to start also the branding strategy.

6. BRANDING, REBRANDING, REDESIGNING

If you start from the beginning a new activity you will need to make your branding and design strategy.  This is not only the logo and colours to use, but it is also the message to transmit, using the logo design. It is also the language and way to communicate to transmit your value and ideas. The communicating language and style can be different for the website or on the socials media. It is also the price strategy, the way how you enter the market, how you will distinguish from the others, how to make customers to recognise and follow your brand. In the case of existing business, sometimes it is enough just to redesign the existing website for better expression of the message, but sometimes there is a need to rebrand as a whole. In all cases, the Content Production is the next important step to think about.

7. CONTENT PRODUCING

Now when the previous steps are clear and done, it is time to put some content. Of course, it should be not just any content. It should be of high quality, fresh and up to date, should include the keywords important for your business, should be optimised for the human readers and differently optimised for the Google and others search engines. In none of these steps should be made compromises. The articles should be unique, copy-written, not copied, plagiarism is punished from Google and similar, your site simply will drop down. And that equals invisibility. The content can be enriched with videos, different creative, internal and external links, showing and engaging the audience with valuable stories.

8. EMAIL & SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

These are the additional channels that can lead more users to your site. In a few cases even without a proper site, only the email and SoMe marketing can be enough. The SoMe marketing can start with zero budget, but it will take forever to go to some reasonable level. The paid options will accelerate the events. If done properly, they are raising the awareness that your site exists, engaging and selling by redirecting the clients to your eCommerce site. The email marketing is special with its an almost-zero-expenses way to retain the existing or to find new customers. It is strait-away, flexible, can be automated and is proven instrument when used properly. We can help you with all this essential steps or only those that you really need.

9. CUSTOMER SUPPORT

After all the journey together our support is not finishing here. You may prefer to go further alone, and maybe just sometimes will need some small adjustments? Or you prefer long term professional support? Do you want us to handle for you the whole creative and advertising part? And to continue with the marketing part and expand your boundaries? Because digital marketing is power in this and definitely can do miracles. But it is not a one-time setting, not even one-month work. It is a long and continuous process, that need to be handled professionally. In all cases, we can make our tailored services to offer you the best support for your needs. We can also train your in-house team. We can offer long term high-quality collaboration. Just call us.

Website Building Process

Website Building Process

Building a website is actually a continuous process of experiments and improvements, where many crucial factors can play a role.

It is also a process to follow, update and upgrade continuously.

Not only applying the new design, SEO, Marketing or Social Media tendencies. This is not just a design process. Not just digital marketing, it is the art to create content for humans and at the same time reachable by the search engine bots.