When talking to businesses about Social Media and Digital Marketing I always ask them what their main form of current marketing is? So many people pride themselves on Word of Mouth being their strongest marketing tool concluding that they don’t need to dedicate any time to Social Media. I think the main thing people are still not quite getting about Social Media is that it is a form of every day communication, just online. If you think about it, Social Media is about sharing knowledge, talking about companies, talking to people and listening to what others have to say. In short Social Media is an online form of Word of Mouth . . . but better.

As many marketers know, word of mouth is a powerful form of marketing. Personal recommendation has been shown to be the most influential medium because we trust our closest friends and acquaintances. This trust means that we are powerfully influenced by their recommendations or advice. Word of mouth also encourages the spread of you brand, product or service like a virus, one person tells his friends who then passes on the recommendation to their social circle and so on. So if so many marketers except the power that Word of Mouth has, why are they still reluctant to embrace Social Media?

Social Media has been seen to be a more powerful version of word of mouth. Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook allow users to share their experiences of brands and services quickly and easily. The fact that Social Media has recently gone mobile has made this sharing more instant; people can share information as they are having either a positive or negative experience. The other benefit of sharing experiences via Social Media is the size of the Social networks consumers have online. The average size of a users network on Facebook is around 200. The size of this network is far greater then someone spreading experiences via traditional word of mouth.

Many people think that platforms like Twitter and Social Media are full of hot air and pointless information with people talking about the weather and what not. However consider the fact that every one in five tweets mentions a brand, product or service. People are using social media as way of discussing, promoting and recommending their favourite brands and products.

So if you pride yourself on the fact that Word of Mouth is your number one form of marketing, maybe this article will help you re-think about using Social Media. Social Media is an online form of communication which incorporates all the aspects of Word of Mouth and amplifies it. Even if you don’t have any Social Media accounts it doesn’t mean that people aren’t already talking about you online.

If you need any help or advice on starting a Social Media campaign or enhancing your existing Social Media please feel free to get in contact. Generate UK help create and manage a range of different clients Social campaigns as well as also offering training to help your employees effectively use Social Media.

At Generate UK, we love to impart our knowledge. It helps other businesses with their online marketing and it demonstrates all of the great services that we provide.

June 30th saw us present yet another of our locally renowned seminars at the beautiful Donnington Grove Country Club, this time in the Kennet suite. Around fifty delegates from companies spanning a whole variety of industries attended, including people from CSC, Hyperbole, Verbatim and many, many more. We kicked off the seminar with some light refreshments and networking and with the excellent weather, the mood was fantastic. Once much of the coffee had disappeared, our attendees were ushered into our very own Mr Joe Baily’s introduction and presentation. Joe discussed the way in which we here at Generate UK operate and work with clients, as well as discussing the underlying foundations and technologies that should support a business’ online marketing activity. Will your CMS grow with your company, or will it stop working as soon as your growth explodes? Does your marketing roadmap include the latest social media platforms? Are you missing out on any key marketing activities, like e-mail marketing for example? This helped open some eyes and hopefully encouraged our attendees to look at the road ahead, why update your strategy now… When the wheels of the underlying vehicle will fall off in the near future? You might as well get both right now to save a lot of heart ache and expense in the long term!

Michael Robinson then took the reigns and went on to explain some of the jargon and terms commonly used in the Internet marketing industry. Many questions were asked and many were thusly enlightened on the subjects of ‘Black hat’ vs ‘White hat’ SEO techniques and ‘Google Bombing’ among many others. This demonstrated that in having knowledge of all the different SEO and Internet marketing approaches, we can better advise and improve upon our client s online activity. This put to rest many of the doubts our delegates had regarding things like Google AdSense, Pay Per Click, Keywords and link-building where they had bad experiences in the past when working with less experienced or ‘black hat’ agencies.

The seminar was then adjourned for another round of tea and coffee so that we could make our way around and speak to many of those who attended as possible. We found that our delegates had differing reasons for attending, but many were surprised by the planned scope of the event and were very much looking forward to seeing the rest of what we had to offer.

Having set high expectations with the first half of the event, it was then down to our guest speaker Mr Ian Summerfield from Optim IP to continue the trend. Ian presented on the subject of Cloud Computing, a technology that has been around for quite sometime, but is only just entering the mainstream. Ian certainly delivered; his presentation roused many questions as some of our attendees could not believe that they could compute with incredible power, on inexpensive devices through a service provided from half way across the globe. Ian illustrated that the use of Cloud Computing is not a question of if, but when. Microsoft is giving the cloud their full backing, and more and more charities rely on cloud computing as a cheaper, more flexible alternative to maintaining their own infrastructure. Not only this, but many other platforms will migrate to the cloud from film rental, to console gaming which will dramatically change the way businesses utilise their marketing channels and the way in which they manage their customer engagement. This gave our audience much to think about as they were about to be instructed on the use of design in marketing.

Matt Lewin and I presented on a number of related subjects that determine whether or not your website design is current. I began by introducing on-page SEO, navigation and web standards as well as their affects on accessibility and design. Many people do not give these points the consideration that they deserve and to illustrate their significance I showed how many larger organisations have been sued for ignoring these points. After all, in not adhering to these guidelines, you could be damaging your user experience for up to 48% of your audience.

I then handed the talk over to Matt so he could talk our audience through the importance of designing a website with their key marketing activity and priorities in mind as well as demonstrating how a company web page could be better built for user interaction through portals and social platforms.  The reason being that marketing is moving to a more integrated and interactive paradigm and some smaller companies are falling behind the trend and could potentially be losing business as a result. Matt also talked our delegates through the process of determining their site sizing and layout so that it engages the user in all the right ways, ultimately delivering better returns and conversions which should be a part of every businesses marketing strategy.

To top off an already brilliant event, our very own social media guru Mr Ian Fergusson began to convert our audience into becoming more social media savvy. Ian shocked our audience with impressive facts and creative figures on the sheer volume of social media users and then went on to tell us that if Facebook was a country, it would be the 4th biggest country in the world behind the US based on registered users alone! If that was not shocking enough, Facebook itself has seen a dramatic shift in demographic from 16-18 year olds to mainly 45-54 year olds! So it is certainly no longer a ‘kid’s thing’ which makes it a marketing tool to be considered much more seriously as part of an integrated marketing arsenal. This talk was well received all round with many delegates asking for training and tips on how to leverage these platforms properly themselves.

After the presentation, we took questions from the floor and explained some of our fields in more depth. We were then locked into deep marketing conversations with many of our delegates 1-on-1 to advise them on some of the marketing issues they had stumbled across quite recently. We talked these through with them and suggested ways they could perhaps revisit these activities and tweak their approach to better their results.

We love to help people and businesses with their online marketing and the feedback we received on the number of free tools we gave away and the advice we included in our seminar was astounding. So much so that we are currently planning another event to invite you all back to! If you would like to request access to the presentations from our great speakers, then please click here.
I look forward to seeing you all again in the future!

Kind regards,
John King.

The internet became increasingly popular in the late 1990s and turned into a mass marketing medium. The online advertising industry grew from nearly 1 billion in 1997 to a projected $147 Billion in 2012. Advertising through the internet has proved to be an effective marketing strategy for a lesser cost compared to the conventional ways of advertising. It revolutionised how businesses reach out to their potential customers as the number of internet users from around the globe continues to rise and connection speeds continue to go faster and faster.

Marketing online is a cost effective way to market efficiently and effectively. Some of these benefits can be seen right away while some tend to happen further down the line - benefits that build upon those that are already in place. Listed below are some of the benefits of online marketing;

1. One advantage of marketing online versus the traditional marketing such as placing advertisements on the television, radios, magazines and newspapers is that you can change them anytime. By keeping track of your ads’ progress, if it is effective or not, you can decide to change a part of the ad, any wording or graphic, or the whole ad altogether, without any problems.

2.  Marketing online gives you real time figures and statistics. This can help you in determining your marketing campaign’s performance to help you in making key decisions that could mean the success or failure of your business. Although there are ways to track performance of traditional marketing efforts, results could not be delivered real-time.

3. The internet is available 24/7. Your ads can be seen anytime, anywhere compared to the limited airtime available in televisions and radios and limited space in newspapers and other prints.

4. On the internet, there is a variety of methods to advertise. You can use email, audio, blog, video, social media and newsletters. You have so many options in just one venue – the internet. If you opt to use these methods in traditional marketing, you would have to select several different media outlets, which can be tedious and very costly.

5. Marketing online allows you to target specific demographics – gender, age, location. You can even target would-be customers from specific income levels, education levels and occupation. This can also be done in traditional marketing but it often requires more effort.

Increasing traffic in your website is essential for marketing online. The more that you are able to get those interested in your products and services to go to your website, the better your leads are to make sales. You will get to see additional benefits of internet marketing when your website stands out from the rest. If your customers find the information they need from your website and the website is easy for them to navigate.

If you have a website and are looking for advice on how to market it effectively then why not get in contact with one of our consultants. Generate UK are a commercially thinking online marketing agency. We advise our clients on the best online options to suit their business processes, resource and available budget.

How long are you prepared to wait for a website to load until you get impatient and click away? One second? Two? Google recently carried out an experiment where they intentionally decreased the speed of their own website from 100 milliseconds to 400 milliseconds. The results showed decreases in the average number of Google searches from 0.2% to 0.6%.  Users were turning their backs on Google as the time taken for search results to appear was too long. Even after Google returned their site to the original speed they found that searches continued to decline for the next five weeks!

It is because of this dramatic affect that speed has on user’s experience of a website, that Google has announced faster websites will be ranked higher. This is the first time that Google has officially announced that Speed does have a direct effect on Rankings. SEO guru’s have suspected this for a while and a fast website is always desired for usability reasons, but Google’s announcement has put any debate over this issue to rest.

Google uses its Googlebots to test how long a page takes to respond as well as Google toolbar to test page load times. Generate UK have invested a lot of time and money into our server capabilities. This means that the sites that we host on our server have quick and smooth load times. As demonstrated by the Google experiment speed not only judges your Google ranking but that the amount of users actually decreases with a slow website. This in turn will also have an effect on your conversion rate. With a slow running website traffic is less likely to stick around and ultimately not buy into your services or products.

A lot of people are concerned that this change will really only benefit larger organisations as they can afford to pay more for hosting. I believe this is a misconception. Small sites can often react and respond faster than larger corporations can to changes on the web.  Making small changes on a larger website can often be a slow process due to internal bureaucracy; whereas smaller sites can often make those small changes to help increase the speed of their website.

Currently less than 1% of search queries are effect by site speed according to Google. However Google have already released a list of tools to help test your sites speed. This could only be the beginning for the importance of site speed. Google’s passion for fast internet and dedication to releasing new tools demonstrates that this could be an extremely important signal for the future. Google have been using speed as a signal for several weeks now and there has been no dramatic change. But this simply could be the beginning of a bigger campaign for faster websites.

Generate UK has invested in a high performance server infrastructure for customers websites we host. We ensure that our server is fast, efficient and reliable. Google says that a 0.5 second delay in the page load speed of your website can reduce traffic by 20%. As a business can you afford to lose this amount of traffic? Generate UK servers deliver up to 35% more speed over traditional hardware, this is to ensure that your website does not suffer because of server speed restrictions.

On page content can also affect the speed of your website. Having a large number of images, flash files or Javascript can increase the time your page takes to load. There are tools that you can use to run reports on your websites speed which will tell you exactly how long each page takes to load as well as identifying areas that are slowing you website down. Follow this link to see which tools Google suggest you use. Alternatively there are other sites you can use such as websiteoptimisation.com.

It is important to remember that this is only one aspect or signal of SEO. Along with speed we still have to take into account on page and off page SEO. These are all areas of search engine optimisation that Generate UK specialises in. If you would like to get your website ranking higher in Google then why not talk to one of our SEO consultants. We can help advise you on areas of your site that may need improvement to benefit from higher rankings.

Sometimes it pays to take a break from conventional e-mail marketing wisdom. In a business environment where fancy HTML ‘one-to-many’ e-mails is the norm, there are a few people out there trying a range of clever, different and sometimes downright unorthodox approaches to get their e-mails noticed above everybody else. In this post I shall include and discuss a few interesting notions I’ve come across recently.

“You’ve got lower open rates? Well… It could be a good thing!”

As those e-mail savvy among you already know, many of the most popular e-mail hosts block images by default. Many of those businesses that go to the trouble of creating fantastic, artistic e-mail pieces may not be getting the message across.

As a result there are a number of e-mail marketers out there that have instead decided to optimise their e-mails for image blocking, making sure that all their Calls to Action and key selling points are still clear despite the lack of imagery by using plain text and image ‘alt’ tags. The advantage of this of course is that the recipient is more likely to have read and digested the e-mail despite the images being blocked. The fancy e-mails on the other hand, may well be displaying as tables full of the dreaded little red crosses and will likely be ignored.

So how does this relate to open rates? Well, if your image blocking optimised e-mail was able to get the message across with text alone… The recipient will have had no need to click the ‘unblock images’  button thus failing to trigger an e-mail ‘open’, the result being lower open rates.
So if you are one of those e-mail savvy marketers that have gone to the trouble of optimising your e-mails and you are experiencing low open rates; it could be because of irrelevant subject lines and weak content. Or it could just be that you are incredibly good at avoiding the image blocking problem! Remember, there are external factors that affect e-mail metrics so open rates aren’t everything! To truly understand the effectiveness of your e-mail campaigns you need to weigh up the metrics against the end results of the campaigns in question.

This can be quite difficult when you’re not used to dealing with complicated metrics. This however is something we at Generate UK are brilliant at.  Our e-mail marketing system provides in depth metrics that you can use in conjunction with our help to convert those stealthy e-mail ‘opens’ into tangible results… results like extra sales for example!

“HTML e-mails out-perform against text based emails e-mails. So use them”

It sounds odd doesn’t it? The use of HTML e-mails and the fancy imagery therein has been proven in some cases to increase clicks by up to 50%. So why would anyone want to use plain text e-mail?

The world and his dog are familiar with HTML marketing e-mails, be it a newsletter, printable voucher or a list of the latest and greatest offers. As a result people are becoming increasingly familiar to HTML e-mails as a ‘one-to-many’ marketing medium.
This is precisely the reason why a text-only e-mail could do the trick. Something that doesn’t look like a fancy HTML e-mail may just stand out.

Not only this, but many people who receive personal e-mails receive them in plain text, be it from work colleagues, friends or even as proof of an important online transaction. Therefore a great deal of importance is attached to these. This makes text only e-mail a great medium for those of you wishing to deliver a sincerely personal message or when trying to tackle a charitable or emotional topic.

Making a move like this is worth some thought however. If you are known for your fantastic e-mail aesthetics, you don’t want to put subscribers off by making it seem like you aren’t trying. Inconsistency and disruption, despite raising some eyebrows and breaking the norm in a good way, can also be damaging. If you are still confused however, talk to us. We can deliver an equally punchy impact without damaging your credibility.

“Getting users to use a scroll bar in an e-mail? Pull the other one!”

As an e-mail reader, would you go to the effort of using tiny scroll bars to access content? Probably not. Many e-mail marketers would hark back to the notion that “the harder the recipient has to work, the less like they are to do it”. Fair play to them, this is typically true. You and I don’t want to spend our evenings scrolling for miles to find the content we want in an e-mail. We want it easy, but if a company were to inject a bit of fun into scrolling… it may be worth an extra five minutes of our time. This requires a hint of creativity however,  LocalsKnow.ca, have just that.

Click here to see the email used by Canada Travel.

Loads of scrolling involved, but it wasn’t so bad was it? Sometimes thinking ‘outside the box’ as cliché as it sounds, can be just the ticket to those extra click-throughs and sign-ups. In addition to that, it wasn’t graphic heavy either which allows it to fit in with the points above.

Personally, I thought this was a particularly novel idea. You on the other hand might think differently, so although such an approach may generally awe your audience, you risk cutting out segments of your contacts list that aren’t so appreciative. Before you hit the drawing board to cook up something equally interesting, be sure you understand your audience and segment your contact lists beforehand. This way you avoid the risk of aggravating your more serious prospects with your creativity. We’re masters of segmentation and we’re great ideas people here at Generate UK so if you have a pressing need to shock and awe your contacts list, give us a call on 01635 550431.

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?