Though the catch with a campaign is that you really have just one chance, one opportunity to come out the gates with a big bang to captivate and move your audience. Kind of makes you want to start rapping the intro to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” to yourself, huh? So let’s leave the catering, lighting and stage-setting to the other experts; what we’re here to discuss is how to guarantee a huge turnout and following with your online campaign website.

To add the professional insight of an individual who has had years of experience in running online campaigns, we connected with Anita International’s Director of eCommerce & Online Marketing, Howard Wyner. During our interview, we discussed specifically what led him to use Jupiter to launch a campaign that would celebrate the 130 year anniversary of Anita International. Howard ended up pointing out the most important factors he considered when planning and launching an online campaign website.

A 130-year Legacy Celebrating 130 Admirable Women

As the person on the listening and learning end of this conversation, the first thing that struck me while listening to Howard talk about the Anita Movement130 was one very simple, yet driving ingredient to every successful online campaign website. He and his team felt personally committed to the culture of Anita and were thrilled to be able to celebrate its customers. Howard kicked off our interview with an introduction to the Anita story. “Anita International is a family-owned German heritage brand. Their business started in 1886 manufacturing lingerie, bras and swimwear themselves and they’ve been doing that all, in house, for 130 years now in every market around the world including the U.S.”.

Well there’s no doubt that a family-owned business reaching 130 years is a commendable feat so Howard explained, “back in December, we wanted to celebrate not only the company reaching 130 years but the customers that make up the Anita family. The Anita customers are diverse, they’re courageous, beautiful and strong so we wanted to create a vehicle of sorts to showcase and celebrate the women that represent us. The term movement is very cool and chic right now so we wanted to attach that to the years that the company’s been in business hence the 130 movement.”

So what happens after you and your team decide to translate your campaign onto an online platform? Here, not only will Howard walk us through a few vital components that underpin every successful campaign, he’ll point out some shortcodes and features in Jupiter that can help increase that turnout to launch!

Getting Your Campaign from the Idea Stage to a Thriving Online Platform Fast and Without Breaking a Sweat

After the lightbulb moment your team has in deciding what the focus of your campaign will be, the last thing you’ll want is to lose momentum over the months and months that it’ll take for a developer to sketch out and build a website. Then there will be the back and forth of edits and changes you want to make because, after all, you want the site to reflect precisely the tone and culture of your company right? On top of that, you’ll be beholden to that developer any time you want to add new content to your site. Not only is this inefficient and expensive, but it’ll drive you bonkers. Find a website-building tool that hands you the keys to the car and you’ll be empowered to create a customized website that you can add to throughout your campaign and perfectly captures the essence of your movement.

Howard: “As an eCommerce person you’re always looking for websites and platforms that fit to the needs of your campaign or eCommerce site and looking at a lot of different platforms out there we thought that the Artbees themes were, first of all, tremendously developed and very into the details which meant on the development standpoint, not a lot of heavy lifting for us. The great thing about that is that when you’re getting involved with developers, short-term projects turn into long-term projects. What that ends up meaning is that changes and modifications you want to make, that take minutes to do with Artbees Themes, can take weeks or even over a month to happen with a developer.

The fact that it’s so user friendly allows changes or modifications to take moments so in the case with what we wanted to do which was to be able to make changes on the fly, add components and elements easily—Artbees was a perfect fit for us. Within just a few months of launching the site, the Movement130 was written up in many industry magazines and has been picking up a lot of momentum. Every campaign takes time to start catching on but because Artbees allowed us to go from ideation to executing a website in just weeks, we’ve been able to pick up speed and really get noticed quickly. We have a hashtag #whynotshowit because we love the uniqueness in every one of our members and this has been the perfect vehicle to show what every member is all about and spread our message and company culture.

Online Campaigns Take a Village

Running a campaign is absolutely a team effort. That being said, having just one person who knows the ins and outs of how to make modifications to your website will eventually end up being a big point of failure. So as an experienced eCommerce and online marketing expert, Howard already knew that his whole team would need to be able to easily learn how to make additions and tweaks to the Movement130 website. With Jupiter he was assured that anyone on his team would be able to make edits, add pages, and customize posts to the site without any troubles.

Howard: “I basically conducted a few little seminars to give my team an overview of how to use the services and elements in the back. I showed them the Visual Composer which is so intuitive—it was as simple as, ‘what are we looking for? An element. What element? Social—okay so you just type in Social and there you have a list of shortcodes you can use to integrate Social Media links. Then it’s just Drag n’ Drop!’ They were astounded at how easy the whole backend system was and very thankful that there was a very small learning curve. With that, it doesn’t take a lot for them to build out any type of page.

Initially, we built a home page and then we built a portfolio page. Mostly the portfolio pages are built for artists, architects or anyone who’s creating pieces. In our case, our portfolio was the showcase of our members. This way we could celebrate the individuals themselves and help them to promote their brand and sort of celebrate them. So all of the different elements from their pictures, what Anita means to them, their social activism, their charities—all of those components were just an easy and quick Click, Drag, Drop and Done.

Moving forward we were able to create templated portfolios so for example I just added two new members yesterday and it took me a little under ten minutes to curate and customize their portfolio posts and so by being able to quickly post their portfolios that allows our customers to be able to start celebrating being highlighted and they can tell their friends and get more of a following. That’s really how you start to create this type of “movement” atmosphere and make it larger and beyond just the members that we have.”

Appearances Are Everything! #whynotshowit

As we mentioned before, that first glimpse current and prospective customers get of your online campaign will be the deciding factor that either boosts participation or completely deflates your campaign. The landing page will be the face of your online campaign website so it needs to look professional, polished and captivate your audience. Oh and by the way the less you can spend on your website, the more you can spend on other forms of outreach and customer relations. If it sounds like we’re putting a lot of pressure on you to make sure your site launches without a hitch, it’s because we are. Why? Because we know that your initial launch will set the tone for the remainder of the campaign. Now the good news is if you choose a developed website builder that has comprehensive support and is easy to update and modify, you can pretty much guarantee a smooth ride.

Howard: “Think about it—we’re promoting this movement around the world so if it looks unprofessional or half-baked that would reflect poorly on us and also taint what we’re trying to do for these women that we’re showcasing. With Artbees you get a product that’s both cost-effective and incredibly polished and professional. We were able to create a forward-facing site that was really engaging and allowed us to put all of our marketing strategies into full force. Again, you can do that by having a platform that’s easy to use. Also, you know, we just launched a few months ago and we’re already seeing that our visibility is increasing and that we’re getting SEO-juice from using this platform. You have a big advocate over here!”

Building an Online Campaign Website with Jupiter WordPress Theme

So before you have to start orienting yourself with Jupiter shortcodes and features, Howard provided for his fellow campaign torch-holders a quick list of features he found to make a captivating visual impression on the Movement130 site. Take a look.

Howard: “I love the EdgeSlider. The thing about these templates is that all of the components you need are already there so you can Plug n’ Play. We’re just finishing up some video which we want to incorporate so the EdgeSlider will certainly come into play for that and video I think in these large sliders is so impactful and engaging and brings a different look and feel. It brings customers to the site and excited about this movement and many people have come forward because of how impressed they are by the format of these portfolios that they also want to share their own stories. Also since each of these members has their own social media profiles, Jupiter allows us to easily insert multiple social media accounts and GoogleMap pins without even slowing the page-loading down.

I have yet to not find anything on the Visual Composer that we can’t use. What’s really nice is that we may have some unique needs—for example we have a contact form to join the movement but we wanted to engage the customers a little bit more so we’re going to build out a contact form and to do that, we just had to submit a ticket to Artbees Care—the rates are extremely reasonable and we have our own Artbees expert to build out and customize an elements to fit our needs.”

Ready, Set, Launch!

You already have in mind the underlying inspiration that will fuel your campaign. Now as you start to sketch out the objectives of your campaign and what you hope to demonstrate to your target audience, don’t burden yourself with the task of finding a high-priced team of developers to build and maintain your site. As Howard has demonstrated, you and your colleagues are perfectly capable of building a customized, professional and polished site that will engage and captivate current and prospective customers. What’s more is that no one knows your product and company culture the way you do; having that personalized touch to capture the essence of your company on your site will