It’s that time of the year when all good marketers are looking at what’s coming up that we can tie our marketing activity into. And 2012 is packed full of opportunities:
- Golden Jubilee
- Extra Bank Holidays
- London 2012
- …
Top Posts of 2011
14/12/2011 By
2011 is drawing to a close, so we thought it would be the perfect time to pull together a list of our top 10 blog posts this year. Take a look and see what you think:
- What Hotmail’s latest upgrade means for email marketers
- Affiliate Marketing – Beyond Voucher Codes
- Google’s Encrypting SEO Keywords Results ‘Secure Search’
- Google+ a Quick Guide
- Fewer PPC Ads Above the Fold on Google
- The best of the summer sale emails
- Turn your Linkedin Profile into an Infographic CV
- PPC Brand Bidding – The effects of M&S vs Interflora
- What should I consider when selecting keywords for my homepage?
- Another 5 Great Homepages
How to Create a Simple, Effective Online Marketing Plan – ECMOD Presentation
08/12/2011 By
Last week I spoke at the ECMOD conference in London’s Business Design Centre.
My session was a practical run through of how to create a simple, effective online marketing plan. So we ran through:
- what an online marketing plan is
- how to audit your current activity
- how to work out what your “gap” is – the gap between what you think will happen with natural growth vs your objectives
- how to fill that gap (the really important bit!)
- and how to measure performance and change your strategy as you need to
You can find the full presentation here, including my little bonus of my top online marekting tactics you should be considering in 2012.
If you’d like to know more or have a chat about your online marketing plans please get in contact.
Chloe
New Google Analytics – what’s it all about?
28/11/2011 By
If you’ve logged into your Google Analytics account recently you’ll have seen it’s had a bit of a makeover. Well, it’s actually a bit more than that – so in this post I’m going to run through the best bits and how they can benefit you.
Before we delve into the new stuff though – they’ve also changed the navigation structure so if you can’t find something try switching tabs:
Within the “Home” tab you’ll find:
- The Dashboard – and you create new dashboards
- Intelligence Events – where you can set up alerts
- Real-Time (more on that below)
Within “Standard Reporting” you’ll find all the normal analytics stuff we all love:
- Visitors
- Traffic
- Content
- Conversions – which includes Ecommerce, Goals and Funnels.
- Advertising (where they’ve moved Adwords)
And “Custom Reporting” is now being encouraged as it’s got its own tab too.
New EU Regulations – Transactional Sites
23/11/2011 By
The new EU consumer rights directive has been formally adopted which will strengthen consumer rights throughout the EU – particularly online.
What are the changes?
We’ve taken a look and pulled out some of the main points for e-commerce sites and retailers.
- Banning of pre-ticked boxes
E-commerce sites will no longer be able to pre-tick “add-on” products at the checkout – for example, when signing up for a mobile phone contract, the retailer will not be able to pre-tick the “Please also give me insurance at £7.99 per month”.
This doesn’t affect data capture. - 14-day return period
A customer will have the option of returning their goods up to 14 days after purchase for any reason – this is currently 7 days. Additionally, the 14 day period will not start until the goods have been delivered – currently it starts at the point of contract (i.e. when they buy).
So that’s actually a relaxing of the rules. - Refund rights
Refunds must be carried out within 14 days – including delivery charges. If the retailer wishes for the customer to pay return costs, this must be clearly stated before purchase (along with a rough estimate of costs of doing so if they are bulky items). - Total costs must be displayed
This is basically one aimed at low cost airlines!
A full description can be seen at Europa press releases or you can view the full directive.
When will retailers have to act?
Once published the UK government will then have 2 years to implement the new rules. So, you’ve got 2 years to find out how our government will implement AND do something about it. But, as all of these are sensible ways to keep the customer happy there’s not much reason not to start looking at it now.
Another 5 Great Homepages
06/10/2011 By
Back in April last year, we blogged about 5 great homepages – take a look at what we loved back then. With 18 months having passed, we thought it was time we found another 5 great homepages for you.
So, in no particular order, here we go:
Red Bull Racing
http://www.redbullracing.com
Red Bull Racing are the preeminent force in Formula One having won both the drivers & constructors championships in 2010 and are most likely to achieve the same feat by the end of this year (if not this weekend!). A visit to their homepage brings you all you need to know about Red Bull Racing including twitter feeds, latest news, driver and constructor standings & a countdown to the next Formula One race.
Oscars
http://oscar.go.com
The most prestigious and sought after awards in the film industry, the The Academy Awards (or Oscars as they are popularly known) have a homepage to match. Logging on to the homepage takes you to their campaign Oscar Buzz, designed to build interest and conversation about the 84th Academy Awards, taking plac next year. They advertise their own hash tag (#OscarBuzz), invite users to tweet it as well as incorporating a live feed and stats on which actors, actresses and films are being talked about most on Twitter.
White House
http://www.whitehouse.gov
One of the most recogniseable buildings in the world, The White House houses arguably the world’s most powerful man – Barack Obama. It’s no suprise then, that when you visit the White House website’s homepage you are greeted with his image. The homepage is clear and concise, with the important information all appearing above the fold. The American Jobs Act (the key policy of President Obama’s re-election campaign) is also highlighted right at the top of the homepage.
The Times
http://www.thetimes.co.uk
As one of Britain’s largest newspapers, The Times & Sunday Times began charging for access to their websites in June 2010. As a result, the design of the websites changed massively. The homepage of The Times is impressively designed to mirror the style of a print newspaper and it looks great, is instantly recogniseable and is simple to navigate.
The Simpsons
http://www.thesimpsons.com
The Simpsons’ interactive homepage is set in a background of unmistakeable Simpsons yellow and is great fun for both children and adults. It can take a little while to load on slow connections, but once loaded runs smoothly and contains loads of information including character profiles, downloads and clips & full episodes. Different areas of the website are housed in different film sets involving many of the characters from one of the worlds most famous cartoons.
Etsy – a different kind of ecommerce
06/07/2011 By Leave a Comment
If you’ve not yet heard of Etsy you will. It’s quite a different approach to selling online that tackles a niche marketplace, and embraces all that the niche stands for – including the social / community side.
What is Etsy?
www.etsy.com is an online marketplace that facilitates the selling of craft and vintage goods by those who make / find them.
There’s quite a community on the site with over 7m users worldwide. And in 2010 sales revenue was $314m.
Anyone can buy or sell. Sellers create their own “shop” which they can merchandise and improve to their hearts content. There’s also a big focus on feedback and user recommendation – so you can “heart” (favourite) shops and individual pieces. Some shops are quite eclectic so it’s easy for the sellers to create seperate areas within one shop – one for designs, one for knitting, one for vintage etc.
The range of goods available is HUGE – basically anything that you might class as:
- Vintage
- Craft
- Art
- Supplies for art and craft (there’s a lot of wool and scrapbooking resources available)
With the supplies being the most eclectic – anything from old clock hands, to driftwood, to beads buttons and wool.
Whilst there are a lot of hobbists selling on Etsy there are also many people earning a living from it, and a few famous artists too. Including:
- Rob Ryan the UK paper cut artist, who reckons about 1/3 of his sales come through etsy
- Leonard Nimoy (yes – spock)
It’s such a popular community that it’s even created a spin-off site Regretsy. Regretsy is the “fail blog of hand crafts”, so basically it’s a place to post, laugh, share and moan about bad things on etsy – bad descriptions, bad craft, clearly commercially bought non-vintage sales etc etc.
Where did Etsy come from?
Etsy’s roots are firmly in the craft and art world. It was set up in 2005 by Robert Kalin (a frustrated furniture maker), Chris Maguire and Schoppik Haim. The aim being to give crafters somewhere else to sell their wares – not just via galleries and craft fairs.
The Etsy business model.
Very simple.
Etsy supply the difficult stuff (website, software, payment gateway etc), the sellers pay them 20 cents per listing, and 3.5% of any sale made (ex P&P).
So it’s a scale-game. So long as there are enough sales going through to cover the overheads of running the website then it’s going to work really well.
They really don’t rest on their laurels though. The site and its editorial content are set up to encourage 2 things:
- better selling
- wide range of purchases
There are MANY MANY resources available to both help the seller merchandise their goods, AND to encourage them to get better at their craft / try out new craft.
The navigation methods on the site are pretty original too. Whilst on any other ecommerce site you’d want to drive the customer to the most popular products / shops that’s not the case here. The secret of Etsy is the eclectic product range. So the navigation is designed to show case everything, rather than focus the buyers attention on the most popular. These methods include:
- A homepage that shows a really bizarre mixture of goods
- Shop by colour
- “pounce” – where you can either see a snapshot of shops that haven’t yet sold anything, or the shops that have most recently sold something (very wide ranging selection, and very addictive!)
- Treasury – other people’s lists of great stuff
- Time machine – for just listed items
- (all of these you can search geographically)
- Wide range of categories – including the intriguing “geekery”
Etsy the social media beast
In the offline craft/art world the community is king. So online Etsy have followed that idea.
Not only do they have very strong community fucntionality on the website itself, they’ve also embraced the other social media engines, including:
- facebook (including seperate pages for different languages)
- video & Youtube
- blogging
So what can we learn from Etsy?
- Understand your customers – create a site that brings them value
(Etsy helps sellers earn an income, and allows buyers to find unusual/hard-to-find goods) - Keep it simple
- Create the right navigation / site structure for your customers
- If you’re going to use social media – embrace it
How to get you own personalised URL Shortener
23/06/2011 By 1 Comment
With the growth of Twitter the URL shortener, pioneered by bitly, has become more and more widely used across the internet. Twitter’s 140 character limit made including a URL in a tweet difficult but tools such as bitly were created to shorten a URL to around 20 characters, taking up a lot less of your valuable tweeting space! Thanks to other features such as improved tracking from services such as bitly, URL shorteners popularity soared.
