Business is tough at the moment and small businesses have to think beyond their next piece of work. It’s interesting to hear directly from businesses about their challenges in terms of creating new business opportunities; which is why we’re pleased to hand over this blog post over to Christopher Eades, director of AA Eades and Son.

“We’re a small local building firm based in Newbury and for us having that steady flow of business coming in is vitally important. Over the years we have built a fantastic reputation locally for quality workmanship at competitive pricing.  Whilst business is still okay, with the downturn in economy I felt it was important to look at new ways to seek out new business rather than just rely on word of mouth.

I was discussing my situation with a friend who in the past has used email marketing and suggested that I tried it.  I was sceptical at first; could it really help me and directly bring me business?  I thought I would seek out a company to talk to and was recommended by another friend to speak to Generate UK. As you can tell I often go on recommendation!

I contacted Generate UK and sat down with them to look at the possible options available. We haven’t got a website, this is something that we are thinking about, and so I thought the online activity was limited in terms of where I could send people to so we opted for a direct response.

We decided to trial an email marketing campaign and as I mentioned after being pretty cynical I have to say I’ve been very pleased with the results. We invested in two thousand local contacts and Generate UK designed and sent out a personalised email campaign promoting our company and the services we offer with a promotion attached.

As a result we received 137 responses and 18 of these have turned into positive enquiries which we have quoted business for.  The great thing about the campaign is that Generate initially tested a batch of 50 to analyse how the message was received and the response it had. The initial message was tweaked only slightly and the main message was sent. It was a text based communication that was personalised with the recipients’ first name and signed off by me with my personal email address.

The campaign has more than paid for itself and I am teeing up another one in the near future.”

Christopher Eades – Director, AA Eades and Son

Thank you Generate UK!

Email marketing is now one of the most cost effective ways to market to your potential customers; as a result, it is no surprise that the UK market grew from a value of £221m in 2007 to an estimated £274m in 2008. Despite the economic doom and gloom, this growth is expected to rise further in 2009.

For more information on email marketing click here or to speak with one of Generate UK’s internet specialists about building a direct response campaign please call 01635 550431

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DIY Pest Control has been actively involved in urban and rural pest control since qualifying through the British Pest Control Association in 1991. In 2009 diy-pest-control.co.uk was launched, its aim is to provide the best advice and latest technology to help you to control pests in your home or office.

DIY Pest Control have noticed an increase in natural and organic pest control solutions, and alongside traditional pest control products wanted to support the new site launch by targeting traffic via Google Adwords.

Google Adwords is Google’s flagship advertising product; it offers pay per click (PPC) advertising and site-targeting advertising for customers. Advertisers specify the words that should trigger and present their adverts and specify the maximum amount that they are prepared on a cost per click basis.

PPC is certainly the best way to make an impact and to be visible on the search engines, especially if your organic listings are not quite there yet. We advise clients with new sites to carry out some form of PPC activity while their organic listings mature.

The objective of DIY Pest Controls campaign was to raise awareness, increase traffic and increase sales. It was also a great opportunity to learn and analyse the traffic trends and customer behaviour, as unfortunately this information was not available due to the website only just recently launching.

Initially, Generate UK worked with DIY Pest Control to establish the target keywords; these would be the keywords/phrases that would be bid for in order to attract targeted traffic. Once the keywords had been identified, they were put into relevant keyword families, each family focused on a small number of keywords/key phrases.

The campaign contributed to a huge increase in visits to the site, accounting for as much as 69% of total visits. The increased traffic also contributed to a growth in the number of sales of products, which in turn helped grow the DIY-Pest-Control.co.uk database. Using Google’s own Goals Overview system, it was possible to see how the sales funnel was performing and make informed improvements on the fly.

Rowland Park, Director at DIY-Pest-Control.co.uk stated “I approached Generate UK to help me understand and make sense of PPC as a whole and especially the keywords I needed to target, as I didn’t want to waste any of my PPC budget on words that weren’t going to deliver results. Generate UK showed me that people now search using two, three or even four words rather than just one. They helped me categorise my keywords into groups and structure my PPC approach taking the more generic words and creating more targeted phrases from them. The results were fantastic and the service and insight they provided helped me not only understand the whole process but also delivered me some well needed business, many thanks!”

Click to view the DIY Pest Control website

If you would like to discuss how Generate UK can help you achieve more from your next Pay Per Click campaign, please do not hesitate to  contact us on 01635 550431.

You’re currently reading Generate UK’s Top 20 Digital Marketing ideas. Over the course of the next month, we’ll be sharing our experience to help you marketed your business on the Internet.

We do advise any company to carry out a regular health check upon their website, although many businesses do struggle to find the time and resource to carry out this activity.  This is understandable due to the day to day pressures of running a company or a marketing team, however this exercise can be invaluable and is critical to understanding how your website is performing against a number of set criteria. These fall within a number of areas i.e. SEO - is your website performing within the search engines, locally and nationally? Usability - how long are people staying on your site? Navigation - are they finding the content they need? Design - does your website provide a good reflection of your business?  All these types of questions need to be asked and analysed on a regular basis.

Have your say… Do you agree with what we say, have we missed anything? Would you like to share anything with our readers; now is the chance to post your comments below.

Once you start to build a useful data base utilising it correctly is critical to managing your communications, both internally with your colleagues and externally with your prospects, customers and partners.   

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system will help with this process. Knowing which CRM system will suit your company in terms of requirements, functionality and budget is again a process you need to research. There are many CRM systems in the market place, built using different technology platforms offering a number of different business applications; some offering complete integration with marketing suites and data bases; some financially free and some very expensive.  Often this is dependent upon the number of users and the technology chosen?

This again is mission critical and should not be taken lightly, as it will determine how your business moves forward. If you choose the wrong path it can be a very costly exercise it terms of time, resource and money, however if you chose well it can make your company exceptionally effective and efficient.

If you would like to learn more about CRM tools in general, please feel free to contact Generate UK. We’d be happy to provide you with an overview of the market and some ideas about which tools could fit your needs.

Whilst data itself isn’t an activity, the collection of it is. Your Data is sacred and should be treated in this way. How you source and store your data is paramount to creating the base for your marketing activities and overall communication strategy.

There are many data companies/brokers within the market place offering clean data at exceptionally low prices. Having bought thousands upon thousands of data records from these companies, I would recommend that you: firstly know exactly where the list is sourced from; understand exactly what you are purchasing i.e. single use/multi use; what is the percentage bounce rate that they are offering, i.e. how clean are they stating the data is? And make sure you haggle over the price!

Other than buying data directly, we speak to many businesses who struggle to continually acquire new data; however there are many ways to address this.  Make sure your website is capturing data through downloads, newsfeeds, promotions and online forms. Incentivise your staff to find new data by making them aware of its importance.  Ensure that all of your marketing collateral gives the recipient the opportunity to respond with their details. The best form of data is the data you have collected yourself.

What do you think of our Digital Marketing Idea Top Tip number 20? Do you agree or disagree? Submit your comments below. What’s the worst that can happen?

During the course of the next month, we’re going to provide you with a countdown of what we think are the top 20 online marketing opportunities for companies in the UK. If you’re a regular reader of our blog, then you are most likely involved in Marketing in some shape or form? If so, I would imagine that you go through the daily rigors of trying to increase your brand and company’s visibility, through a multitude of different marketing channels, both Offline and Online. The Holy Grail is trying to figure out which one delivers the best results whilst tapping into the least amount of your marketing funds. 

Generate UK are an online marketing agency focused on finding the right environments to deliver targeted communications, using the best technologies to achieve maximum results. 

Why do we believe in online marketing?

• It’s measurable
• It’s quick
• It’s costs effective

The Top 20 Chart has been made up from our own commercial experiences, through our customers and partners’ knowing what has proven to be successful and what hasn’t.  We hope that our Top 20 Chart provides you with a number of useful ideas to put into practice and helps you strive towards an online strategy, which will take your online communication and website’s digital presence to that next level!  

We’re keen to hear from our readers, so please feel free to add your comments and own ideas below.

Pine and Oak Furniture is a Berkshire based furniture specialist with over 17 years experience in wood manufacturing, sales and finishing. The company trades from their four extensive showrooms offering customers excellent quality furniture, at a fair price, coupled with great service.

Pine and Oak recently decided to grow their business further by harnessing the power of the internet and launching a new ecommerce website. As a company, the operational structure was already in place to support an ecommerce site with good stock holding – offering customers immediate product availability, and a dedicated team of delivery staff and vehicles.

The challenge with the new site was to provide a system that was both customer friendly yet simple for Pine and Oak to administer. From a customer point of view, the site needed to have a design that was engaging, displayed the products clearly and offered a zoom facility. The ordering method needed to be swift, without a lengthily account sign-up procedure, ensuring that the whole process was as simple as possible.

And, for the Pine and Oak team, it was important to provide a system that was easy for non-technical staff to update the product catalogue, allow for seasonal promotions and track the order process.

The Generate Shopping Cart was the perfect solution to meet the needs of both the customer and Pine and Oak. The menu navigation and page structure are simple to use and the powerful search function allows customer to find exactly the product match they are looking for.

The website delivers advanced order and checkout features including single-page checkout, guest checkout and support for multiply payment types. The web-based control panel allows Pine and Oak to easily manage their product catalogue from any PC and allows the team to react quickly to market changes and promotions. The back-end features also provide all the tools necessary for the team to manage the website, delivering a professional ecommerce site.

The results are clear: a well designed and thought-out ecommerce website that allows customers to shop with complete confidence from the comfort of their own homes.

What Pine & Oak Furniture had to say; Daniel Hulett, Managing Director stated “The new site was an important way to grow my business particularly with lots of people now shopping online. We were also finding that customers visiting our showrooms were asking for our website details so they could browse our products at home.

Generate UK were immediately very friendly and approachable. Their relaxed attitude was in contrast to other agencies I had considered – they made conversations about technical aspects of the site easy to understand. I am extremely happy with the site design and the ecommerce system - Generate UK have delivered painlessly exactly what I needed!”

Please click here to visit the Pine and Oak Furniture Website.

If you would like to discuss how an ecommerce website could help your business please do not hesitate to contact us on 01635 550431. If you’re already selling products via the Internet, why not let Generate UK provide a free of charge Website Health Check.

As a typical male, I have never really seen the appeal of fighting with the rest of the world to get to the shops on a Saturday morning. The parking is always a nightmare, the shopping centres are crowded and by the time I actually find the men’s section, the last thing I want to do is rummage through rails and rails of clothing… This is the point at which I usually decide to hit the closest ‘watering hole’, feeling far less inclined to part with my shopping money.

Thank goodness for Internet shopping. It has changed all this for me. I can now shop from the comfort of my own home, choosing from thousands of retailers who are all trying to get me to spend my money on their site. The complete experience is one of ease and convenience (assuming the retailer has a decent ecommerce website!) and allows me to shop with speed, sitting back to await my delivery.

The growth of the online shopping sector has been impressive; in 2007 total sales grew by 35 per cent, and in 2008 growth was 25 per cent. Despite the current trading climate, this year we will see estimated web sales grow by 13 per cent exceeding the £20bn mark for the first time. Internet shopping will substantially outperform the high street, with an estimated sales decline of 0.6 per cent for 2009.

I’m sure not everyone suffers from my dislike of the ‘bricks and mortar’ shopping experience, so why else is internet shopping so popular?

The most commonly cited factor is that the Internet offers better value for money. The opportunity to buy low priced products from a huge choice of retailers is obviously appealing. Add to this the option to use comparison websites, cash back sites, discount codes and you can bring the item cost down to well below the price on the high street.

The shopping experience is also getting better and better. Ecommerce websites are advancing every day with new ideas and technologies. We’ve seen the introduction of 3D imagery, video content and even software that uses a series of interactive reality animations to provide realistic sensations for touch – one of the biggest limitations to buying on the internet.

The issue of trust has always been an interesting debate with concerns over personal security topping the list. The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) recently reported that for 2009 among those people who shop online, 54 per cent now feel it is as safe as shopping in store compared to 26 per cent in 2006. This improvement in trust will only grow, as more and more consumers improve their knowledge of the security in place and the protection that is available when shopping online.

So what next for the online retailer? The new challenge will be how to differentiate your business from the rest of the online market place as ecommerce sites become more and more prevalent. A well designed site, with an easy to use order and trusted checkout system may not be enough to keep your site outperforming your competitors!

Can Generate UK deliver your strategy? If you would like to talk about our services and how we can help your business, please do not hesitate to contact us on 01635 550431. Please feel free to post your comments.

Donnington Grove Country Club is one of Newbury’s ‘best kept secrets’; as well as offering a first-class golf course the venue also offers fantastic conference facilities, an intimate wedding venue, a beautiful hotel and a newly opened restaurant. 

The existing website did not do justice to the growing Donnington Grove business and therefore, Generate UK were tasked with delivering a fresh yet functional new site. 

It was important to Donnington Grove to have the flexibility to make regular changes to the site content to reflect new promotional activity, special offers and specific event information. These changes needed to be managed in-house whilst still maintaining the professionalism of the rest of the site and therefore the Generate UK Content Management System (CMS) was utilised. 

One of the biggest challenges with the Donnington Grove site was to deliver a design that show-cased each of the different business areas but was also easy to navigate. Equally, Donnington Grove had to manage the conflict between promoting their core golf business over and above the other areas of the company. 

The website has been launched and very well received by both customers and staff alike. The CMS has given Donnington Grove a very simple and user friendly interface that enables the team to make changes to any aspect of the content without the worry of inadvertently changing the site’s main structure. 

The CMS system provides a great platform for search engine optimisation through search engine friendly URLs, keywords, descriptions and page titles. This has enabled Donnington Grove to compete with other businesses for keywords that they were previously not listed for. 

The website analytics have shown an increase of 130% in the daily number of unique visitors to the site alongside an increase of 420% in the number of ‘sign-ups’ for the Donnington Grove Newsletter and special offers. In particular, new membership enquiries have increased and are25% of the number of new ‘sign-ups’. This has meant that Donnington Grove have been able to reduce their marketing spends in other areas. 

Oscar Inaraja, Deputy General Manager of Donnington Grove Country Club stated “The main challenge the new management team faced when they took over Donnington Grove was to make people aware that Donnington Grove existed and was open to the public. We are not just a golf venue, we have conference facilities, a wedding venue, a great restaurant; all of these services have a different set of target customers, which means that we had to adopt a flexible approach to marketing to ensure we were able to deliver the right messages to the right people.  

Generate UK have proven to be a great partner to work with, they have delivered more than what we agreed and are proactive and flexible in terms of helping us to identify new opportunities to increase the awareness of Donnington Grove. The new content managed website is the platform we needed to help promote our fantastic Golf Club.” 

Click here to visit the Donnington Grove website

If you would like to discuss how the Generate UK CMS could drive your website please do not hesitate to contact us on 01635 550431.

Newbury Flooring Centre is an independent flooring solutions provider who specialise in supplying quality flooring products from leading manufacturers.

Until very recently, Newbury Flooring Centre had a limited web presence.  They were keen to change this and invest in a new platform that would enable them to reach a wider target market, whilst allowing them the flexibility to introduce e-commerce to their site in the future.

The brief was simple; to provide a web site platform that encouraged more conversations with potential customers. Due to the size of the investment, the platform also had to support the future needs of Newbury Flooring Centre, such as the ability to take orders via the web site.

Newbury Flooring’s new web site has been built using the Generate Shopping Cart System; a powerful e-commerce platform that is designed for non technical users. Simplistic and effective, it offers complete search engine optimisation support, one page check out, full integration with payment engines, delivery agencies and Google.

One month after the launch of the new web site, Newbury Flooring had received search engine traffic for over 200 different keywords and phrases. The site was also quickly indexed by Google, creating an Internet Footprint of over 100 pages in the first month. These factors have enabled Newbury Flooring Centre to quickly compete with more established web sites in their market.

The project was delivered on schedule and is a great example of a local business driving sales by using the Internet effectively. Generate UK are delighted to be working with Newbury Flooring Centre as they build their online reputation.

Michael Robinson, Managing Director of Newbury Flooring Centre stated

“If it’s been on your mind to launch a new web site for your business, now is the time to act. In this day and age, I don’t think a company can survive without a site - it’s an integral part to every business. I would also recommend using a professional agency such as Generate UK who will deliver a site that provides commercial results. If you’re worried about your business, you can’t afford to sit back. Get your new site today.”

Click to view the Newbury Flooring Centre web site

If you would like to discuss how an ecommerce shopping cart could help your business please do not hesitate to contact us on 01635 550431. If you’re already selling products via the Internet, why not let Generate UK provide a free of charge web site health check.