Internet services

"Once in a while, an effective, readable site is born... And it's not just because of the design, but also because the company has something to say. Balancing the two together to convey meaning is at the heart of communication planning... Which is to say, that this print and recruitment advertising agency - Giraffe - has its planning down pat." www.digitalthread.com - July 2004

Your website should be your brochure, your job site, your statement to the world about yourselves - it should be professional. But it should still be you.

We can help with every aspect of this (and we have different copywriters for different tones of voice) and have created sites of all types and sizes - from a formal 250 page site for St Catherine's College to smaller sites for start ups.

And we don't stop there. We can maintain, constantly improve and, above all, market your site so it becomes the hub of your activity - whether marketing or recruitment.

The services we offer include:

Web design and development

Site maintenance/improvement

  • Content audit and strategy. Web Words Working (www.webwordsworking.co.uk) specialise in helping clients produce the best website content - from strategy to online language/tone/navigation audits to style guides. From simple but effective tips - e.g. "books don't remind you to 'turn the page now' so why have 'click here' on a web page?" - to complex content delivery and analysis, they offer a unique, major value-adding service.

    They audit our site every time it is upgraded. One reason why this, latest version attracted over 205,000 hits in the week after launch.

    As a price guide, the audit of our site cost £800.

  • Competitive Analysis. When we are developing websites, one of the most common "briefs" is a list of other sites the client likes, often because of look, while animation/flash is always popular. Unfortunately content is more important while animation often adds little (it simply proves your designers can animate. Can't we all?) and can be an irritant after the first visit.

    Which is why we offer a content benchmarking service. We will compare your site against a maximum of eight competitors, highlighting similarities - and differences - in structure, theme, content, tone and identifying best practice in your industry. The result is a practical guide to the best, worst, most common as well as any unique content in your industry. And then you (hopefully we) can build from there.

    Cost: £ 1,000.

Web site marketing

  • Search engine optimisation (SEO) — we all use search engines, particularly Google, to find what we need. Candidates are the same. We can make sure your site is optimised to take full advantage of this.

    Proof of the pudding? Go to www.google.co.uk and search under "recruitment advertising agencies London".

    Cost - £500 per month for a minimum of six months.
  • Search engine advertising - Pay-per-click advertising is another way of driving traffic to your site. We can organise and implement this for you. Click throughs can cost from as little as 4p to £1.50 each.

Blogging

"Marketers should look at blogs as a real-time cheat sheet on how to be relevant with customers. The name of the game is to be as conversational as possible vs. being static. It's a bonding technique with your consumer." Chief Marketing Officer, Fortune 500 company.

In the USA, employment blogs are a very popular way of communicating and interacting with the candidate audience. In the UK, Cadbury Schweppes has announced a blog is to be central to their graduate recruitment. IBM have just said they see blogging as the next big thing in marketing.

It's clearly the way forward.

For HR, a blog will let you post messages, add photos and spread news about your company and jobs on offer, giving you a web presence independent of your I.T. Department.

If word of mouth is the best form of advertising (it is) and if testimonials about you are, as a result, more believable than anything you say about yourself (they are) why not combine the two with an employee blog - regular online word of mouth testimonials about your company from the people who really know? If your company is value-driven, what's more believable? A long list of the values you say you have? Or tales from people who work for you that embody the values in action and how they influence behaviours or decisions?

While free blogs are available, our blog programme can be tailored and incorporated into your site. Cost £750.

On-line recruitment advertising

On-line is now a £120 million market - around 11% of the total annual recruitment throughout this site, apart from:

  • Copywriting - you wouldn't take your press advert and plonk it on TV, so it's best to be careful about simply replicating your press advert on a job board. The main difference is text, which should be written to account for the way job boards offer "key word searches"; for example, litter your text with "C++" rather than "exciting IT opportunities".
  • Media - there's a lot of clutter out there, many quite happy to call clients directly, often with success because they are relatively inexpensive. But this means you are doing work we can do for you at no extra cost and may be flying blind. Because we work with sites all the time and monitor the market, see, for example, www.hitwise.co.uk, we know what sites generally work best. And we are objective.

Our overall view is that, once your site is right, recruitment advertising is all about driving traffic to it. However that is achieved - SEO/banners on selected sites/presence on job boards - it must be better than a single text advert on a job site with thousands of others.

So we can not only help you with getting your basic online advertising right, we can also devise and implement your overall online strategy.

Other new media services

Banners, microsites for specific campaigns, e-mail marketing design and production, tailored single web pages, texting. We can do — and are happy to quote for — them all where they are, or may be relevant. Simply contact us.

Research

We have a researcher who constantly keeps us up-to-date with web trends. This is why we started blogging, why we have just included a pricing section on our site, why we are kept up-to-date with articles like these:

www.sitepronews.com/archives/2005/jan/14.phpl

www.sitepronews.com/archives/2005/oct/14.phpl

As a Giraffe client, you will have access to all of this.

"Your site is beyond legendary. Especially your www.thewholeofthemoon.co.uk site. I and my partner were howling with laughter at some parts of it. Just by going on your site and by its general feel, I am quite eager for us to work together, as you all seem to be the kind of people capable of doing what we want, and delivering the style we are trying to achieve." Ashley Hawkins — Pine River , August 2005

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