Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

« Older Entries

The Heineken Social Christmas Tree

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

Is your Christmas tree social? We don’t mean the family getting together to decorate the tree with ball balls, we’re talking about the worlds most social tree ever created: The Heineken Social Christmas Tree. Singapore’s Clarke Quay will be the venue for the 11 meter tall digital art installation incorporating 48 LCD TV screens all connected to Facebook designed by Iris Worldwide. Consumers can add their own photos, friends, custom messages, animation and music via the Facebook App. The tree along with it’s social digital content will all be displayed 17th-26th of December.

Heineken is no stranger to social media, they have a long line of successful campaigns including the beer keg campaign. This is a company that knows how to connect digital, social media and real world art installations to promote their brand and to create enjoyable and memorable experiences.


Tags: , , ,
Posted in Digital, Marketing, Social Media |

Building your Email Marketing Funnel

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

Capturing email names and addresses of prospects who visit your website or blog should be high on your online marketing agenda. For most, this is the entry point to your marketing and sales funnel.

email campaign

People don’t easily give up their email addresses anymore so you need to think about the perceived value of your newsletter or ‘carrot’. If you are offering a service you can turn your expertise into a PDF guide, video or audio content based on your industry. If it is a product you’re selling you could offer a demo or a sample.

Email marketing helps remind your prospects, customers and clients that your business exists. It is much more preferable to provide them with valuable content and to build a relationship based on trust rather than a stream of sales pitches  – this will help enormously towards the success of this relationship.

Another aspect of your system you’ll want is automation. You’d certainly want the process to be automatic when someone opts in and receives your thank you/welcome email.

Not only that, but imagine a sequence of emails delivered to your subscriber, through an autoresponder, on a weekly or monthly basis all carefully tailored to engage and build trust. This whole email marketing funnel can all be set up in advance. You could do a years’ worth of newsletters if you wanted.

When you do your email marketing campaigns you need to make sure you do NOT spam people. This means that they have given you permission to email them (through opting in, networking or in some other way). You certainly will want to use a system that automatically unsubscribes anyone who no longer wants to receive your emails.

 email worldviewWith Code 9 Campaign the email marketing process is a joy to use, giving you the ability to capture emails and deliver your incentives, newsletters and email campaigns very easily.

You will have full access to data, email opens, autoresponders, automatic unsubscribes, link click activity and a lot more as standard.

You can also see your subscribers open their emails and share your content in realtime with our Worldview feature!

 

>> To find out more about eCampaign click here

Tags: , ,
Posted in Marketing |

Code 9 launch Code 9 Marketing

Monday, June 13th, 2011
Code 9 MarketingWe’ve recently launched a sister website to Code 9 Design to highlight and promote our online marketing services such as SEO, PPC, Social Media and Email Marketing. Code 9 Marketing Director Jerry Holliday explains, “We felt that our existing online marketing services needed some room to breath away from our main web design and branding services website.” “The Internet is changing at a rapid pace and businesses with a web presence really need to implement a coherent online strategy to stay ahead of the competition. Code 9 Marketing will continue to help our clients in this area.” Code 9 Marketing can help with website planning, design and build through to content marketing, search engine optimisation, pay per click campaigns, social media marketing and email database capture and reader engagement. Click here to have a look around the website! Contact Us if you’d like to chat about your online marketing. (No obligations or hard selling here)

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Code 9 News, Marketing |

Getting Social with SEO

Friday, May 13th, 2011
socialseoWith the announcement of Bing Social last year and now with the recent launch of the Google +1 button to challenge the famous Facebook ‘Like’ button, it is crystal clear that Social and SEO are on the same course. With Google’s +1 button users will be able to vote up search results, and pretty soon search results will be recommended to you based on whether any of your contacts have +1ed a webpage. Admin will show Activity stats such as who has +1′d your site as well as age and sex and location. Facebook’s social tools such as commenting, like buttons and the recent addition of Share buttons are quickly spreading across the web. So do they have an effect on your SEO? Well not in Google, as they cannot read Facebook data, therefore cannot see how many ‘likes’ your webpage has, for example. But Bing can thanks to their exclusive deal with Facebook. Both Google and Bing have confirmed that Tweets now impact rankings. Twitter should certainly now be considered part of your SEO strategy. However the real impact will be when you actually get Tweeted and Retweeted by “influencers” on Twitter. Both search engines look at the social authority of the person Tweeting, so someone with a lot more followers than they follow themselves carry a lot more weight. Whilst traditional SEO methods aren’t suddenly disappearing – going Social should be top of your list.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Marketing, Social Media |

Using QR codes for business

Friday, March 11th, 2011

qrcode So what are QR codes? You have probably seen them on physical product packaging, TV or websites: In fact, because they can be any size, you might also find them on billboards, business cards, park benches, clothing – in fact any object that could possibly have further information available.

QR codes can be created by a variety of free QR code generating sites, such as Kaywa, allowing you to link to a URL or that can contain a set amount of information (up to a max of 4,296 alpha-numeric characters).

This can then be opened by any user with a QR code reader or a smart-phone with a QR reader app installed. So how can you use them for your business? Well you really are only limited only by your imagination.

Let’s look at some examples of what businesses could use and are already using them for:

Website Visits: Use a QR codes on your marketing materials to drive more traffic from mobile users to your website. Discount coupons or rewards: Put a special offer QR code on your advertising, offline and online for customers to grab a secret deal.
Point of Sale: Use QR Codes on menus, price lists, and other promotional materials so your customers can scan, click, and order online.
Maps: Help your customers and prospects get to your shop with a QR code that links to an online map, leading a path to your door!

Viral In Japan a advertising screen displayed a QR code with no explanation, so naturally people checked it out of curiosity.

Expect to see a lot more of this kind of advertising. QR codes are a brilliant way of offering something special and extra to your prospects, customers and clients, so why not spend some time coming up with some promotional ideas for your QR code?

Tags: , ,
Posted in Marketing |

Improving your Basic SEO

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

If your website is not ranking as high as you’d like it for your targeted keywords it might be a case of just re-looking at the SEO basics of your website. Firstly you need to sure there is a solid foundation in place that capitalises on any external links that are directed to your pages. If pages or posts are not properly optimised then this can have a dilution effect on any external SEO work, which is ultimately the big juice factor in ranking your site. SEO Basics There are 3 stages to assessing the SEO of an existing or new website

Stage 1 – Keyword Research Keyword research is all about understanding the competitiveness of the keywords you are trying to rank for.

If your target keyword phrase is highly competitive then it may take months of concerted effort and work to rank, so assessing this early on is highly recommended. Phrase matching your keyword phrase in “quotation marks” in Google will give you an indication of time needed to rank – so for example a phrase that delivers 30,000 competing pages may be possible to rank on page 1 within a few months or sooner.

Up to 100,000 then a ballpark might be up to 6 months and so on. Unfortunately SEO is not an exact science, as there are so many different factors involved, but this hopefully gives a few pointers. It is also vital to know the traffic potential of a keyword phrase. Working hard to rank #1 could be a waste of time if there are very few searches for that phrase (unless of course it’s a highly focused high value niche).

Stage 2 – On Page or Local SEO A big ranking factor is including the keyword phrase within the domain name or URL. If your website name is generic then name the pages /your-keyword-phrase.html Meta data. Although meta data isn’t a major factor in ranking by a long shot anymore, the meta title and descriptions are still displayed in search results, therefore still considered essential. In your web pages you’ll want to make sure the titles or H tags reflect the keyword phrases you are targeting. Some other SEO checks:

  • Ensure keyword phrase is in the tags of a post if your site is blog based.
  • Keywords should appear in the first paragraph of content, be in bold, italicised or underlined.
  • Keyword phrase is used as the anchor text of a link within the page or post
  • Phrase is the alt text and title tag as well as the image name within the page.

Stage 3 – External or Off-page SEO If your web project is completely new, than this would be part of stage 1. Firstly you’ll want to assess the backlink network size of your competition to see how yours compare. It’s a simple matter of having more quality backlinks to your pages than your competitors if everything else is in place. Links pointing to your website from another with a higher page rank (PR measured 0-10) will carry a lot more weight and hence the Google juice will rub off on your site.

So any links from ‘authority’ sites such as high ranking business directories and other search engines, .org or .gov domains or any site that is popular in your marketplace will be beneficial for you. When you provide incoming links you want the anchor text to be the keyword phrase that you are targeting.

For example in the html code it would look like this: <a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com”>Your Keyword Phrase (Anchor Text) </a> Backlinks from websites on .org, .gov, .edu domains (which generally are a higher PR) will carry a lot more weight in the eyes of the search engines, so are well worth pursuing.

For a SEO consultation and assessment please contact us or phone me directly: Jerry Holliday (Marketing Director) on 0750 248 6012

Tags: , ,
Posted in Marketing |

« Older Entries