At a loss for words? Use a copywriter

Posted on April 26, 2013 by admin

We are all able to write to a greater or lesser degree. So why would you choose to pay for the services of a copywriter employed by a marketing agency?

Well, when making the right impression is essential, an experienced writer will have the ability to put across what you want to say more articulately, introducing your company to the world at its very best.

Of course, you know your company better than anyone else, far better than any writer could ever do so. But are you able to remove yourself enough to be able to present the key information your readers need to know? A professional copywriter is able to pinpoint the right messages you should convey and present the advantages of using your company in a way that will ring true with potential customers. They will also know how to point out your better features in an effective way, preventing your message come across as clichéd marketing diatribe.

Some may write off making an investment in a copywriter, deeming it a needless luxury - but can you cope with to losing the man hours required by someone in-house to do the job?

The potential negative impact of introducing content which contains spelling and grammatical mistakes cannot be ignored. Copy presented in less-than-perfect English has the potential to work against you rather than for you. Look at it from the viewpoint of a prospective customer: If your writing is poor, is your service likely to suffer from the same lack of attention to detail?

A good copywriter will take a the time and energy and effort to fathom exactly what it is you wish to say, and present you with content that is written to a high standard and you can be confident will impress.

Spring clean your marketing

Posted on March 20, 2013 by admin

Spring – the weather gets warmer, the days become longer and plants and flowers come into bloom. Our moods lift and we get a new lease of life – hence our new-found productivity and desire to undertake a bit of spring cleaning!

Why not apply this vigour to getting the marketing for your IT support company in shape? It could be just what your company needs to give it some fresh appeal and hone in on its strategy. It’s time to dust the cobwebs off your website and de-clutter your data.

1. Clean your data

Reviewing your contact lists is essential to get the most from your campaigns. Add any new contacts you’ve acquired. Look at ways in which you can attract more subscribers – perhaps you could offer an incentive for current subscribers to forward emails to friends, or get people to give you their email address at your next conference or event.

Remove inactive, incorrect or duplicate emails. Alternatively, you could sign up to an email marketing platform which will automatically do this for you.

2. Manage your online profile

Make sure your directory listings are up-to-date. If contact details have changed recently, correct them so potential customers can get in touch.

Do you know what your online reputation is like? Try doing a quick search for your company name on Google and see what comes up. You may have received reviews, both good and bad. Take some time to reply to the good reviews to thank them for their compliments; acknowledge less favourable reviews, perhaps offering a solution or a promise to review any issues that have prompted their concern. This will show you as open to feedback and willing to use it to improve your products or services.

3. Website

How long is it since you reviewed your website? Give it a new lease of life with some new content – add some news, some blog posts and perhaps some new photos. Remove any out-of-date vouchers as a matter of importance.

4. Social media

These days, social media is one of the larger platforms for business marketing. If you haven’t already, now’s the time to get on the likes of Facebook and Twitter. It’s an inexpensive way of marketing. Why not link your accounts? Doing this will, for example, allow anything you post on Twitter to automatically post to Facebook as well.

5. Try new marketing strategies

Why not take the opportunity to try out new methods? Remarketing is a way of targeting advertisements at people based on what they are already interested in. This is done based on their browsing history. You could also consider pay per click (PPC), also known as search engine marketing (SEM) – this is a way of having adverts placed at the side in search engines based upon keywords you supply, guaranteeing prominence. You are charged for every time someone clicks on this link to visit your website. This can be a great way of attracting new visitors to your site who are already looking for the products or service you provide.

Budget-proofing your marketing

Posted on March 19, 2013 by admin

Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, presents his Spring Budget tomorrow. With the country still in the midst of a recession, it’s expected Osborne will be making cutbacks in an attempt to lessen the national debt.

In these hard times, companies looking at their own budgets may be looking to pull in the reins on marketing spend, seeing this as a luxury that is surplus to requirements. However, marketing is a necessity for any business that wishes to prosper during a financial downturn.

In fact, figures released at the beginning of 2013 suggest companies are starting to recognise the value of investment in marketing as a means of weathering the economic storm. Institute of Practitioners in Advertising’s quarterly bellwether survey saw a net 1.1 per cent of UK businesses having increased their marketing spend in the preceding three months – the highest figures since the end of 2011.

It has been well documented, in fact, that those who increase their marketing spend during a recession, whilst their competitors are making cutbacks, can attain a greater market share and return on investment at lower costs.

So, rather than neglecting marketing activity, the key to making your outlay pay dividends is to be more savvy in your planning – to adapt your marketing strategy rather than cut it.

1. Understand your customers

Market research will be central to determining how you will market and who to. Undergoing an investigation into who your next customers are more likely to be will allow you to use your budget to target a more receptive ear, as opposed to taking a “shot in the dark” approach.You simply can’t afford to assume that a one-size-fits-all approach will suffice in this climate. You simply can’t afford to assume that a one-size-fits-all approach will suffice in this climate. Understanding what they want will help you tailor your campaigns to appeal to them.

2. Feed to the cost conscious

When times are hard, people look more than ever to get value for money – they are still keen to spend, but want a bargain, and will shop around to get it. Review the pricing of your products and/or services, comparing it to that of your competitors. Consider running special offers as opposed to dropping huge price cuts, so they really feel they are getting a great deal. You may wish to look at offering better deals for longer term
contracts or bulk buys which represent better value to them.

3. Don’t neglect your current customers

Just because you have them on your customer list already doesn’t mean you should stop marketing to them. Your existing customers list is one you should make the most of. If they are using you already, chances are they are happy with the service they’ve received and would be a good base to target with other products and services which may be of relevance to them.

4. Explore more different marketing methods

Try increasing the use of direct marketing, which gives more immediate sales impact. Email marketing is still a very popular strategy, and can be very cost-effective. You can also see results i.e. you can see who has viewed your campaigns and clicked on links within it. You can monitor the effectiveness of each campaign to gauge what works and use this information to adjust future campaigns.

5. Don’t take customer loyalty for granted

Research has shown that people are less likely to stick to a preferred brand during a recession. They will change to one which represents better value for money. Whilst this again underlines the importance of keeping your current customers sweet, it also offers companies an opportunity to tap into market share – say all the right things and those currently using another company are more likely to come across to you now than at other times.

Start planning your website

Posted on March 18, 2013 by admin

These days, most companies understand they need a website. With more and more people online, the internet is often a potential customer’s first port of call when looking for a supplier of a product or service.

So, if you don’t have a website, you could be missing out on their custom. But it doesn’t end there. You also have to ensure that it conveys the right image and information that will make visitors choose to do business with you over your competitors.

A good website only comes together after careful planning and you should give these points due consideration:

1. Set out your objectives. What purpose is your website to serve? Are you looking to gain more customers, or provide more information to existing ones? What about functionality? Are you looking to provide a service through your website or sell products online?

2. Think about structure. Before your website begins to be built, you should have a clear idea of what should go where and how visitors will navigate the site. Produce a sitemap outlining the pages you need and their format.

3. Build your website. This should be both functional and visually appealing. Entrusting a web design company for this purpose will ensure you achieve a great result.

4. Publish your site. You’ll need a web hosting service to get your website online.

Your website should be easy to use, making sure your visitors can easily find the information they are looking for.

Make sure menus and navigation bars and buttons are clear and simple to use.

1. Keep it simple – design should be uncluttered, focusing on what visitors want.

2. Ensure pages load quickly – a slow website leads to a frustrating user experience.

3. Think about a responsive layout – i.e. one that adjusts to display as well on smartphones and tablets as it does on a PC monitor.

Prepare your marketing for the festive season

Posted on October 3, 2012 by admin

We don’t wish to set you off on a panic, but Christmas is fast approaching. While it might only be October, the Olympics have now finished, summer has been and gone (all too briefly in our opinion) and the nights are drawing in. To ease you into the festive season we’ve put together a few handy tips to help make your email marketing a success this Christmas.

1) Analyse last year’s email campaigns.
To give you an idea of where you should start with this year’s campaigns, go back to emails you sent last year and see how they performed. What tactics yielded the best results? Which products or services were most popular with your subscribers?

2) Competitors.
If you are struggling for inspiration, have a look at what your competitors are doing this Christmas. Sign up to mailing lists, visit websites, see what offers other businesses in your field are running. How does their approach compare to your own?

3) Subject lines.
It is common knowledge that the festive season is a competitive time for email marketers. Your subscribers’ inboxes will be full of offers and updates and you will have to be prepared to compete for attention. Subject line is a key factor in whether a recipient will even open your email, so make it punchy, unique and intriguing enough to get those opens.

4) Design.
So you’ve got your subscribers’ attention with your subject line – now what? Make sure that when they open your email it looks fantastic. There is a selection of free festive email templates ready and available to use within our very own email marketing platform, CyanMailer. Check out the website, request a free trial or call 01268 778555 to discuss further.

But don’t forget, here at Cyan, we can also take care of it all for you. We offer two festive bundles for electronic Christmas messages, the eco-friendly alternative to the traditional greetings card. So if you’re dreaming of a green Christmas this year, call us today to discuss our standard and personalised packages. And in keeping with the season of goodwill, Cyan will also make a donation to a charity of your choice when you place your Christmas order with us.

5) Email content.
As you know, Christmas is a busy time for the inbox. You’ve got as far as getting your subscribers to look at your email which is excellent, but now make sure you’ve got some good stuff to tell them. Make your offers enticing and your updates exciting. Keep links obvious and relevant, with strategic use of images to keep the content interesting and varied. Also try personalising your email to make it a little more friendly and improve your relationships with your readers.

Your business opening hours over the Christmas period is useful information to your customers. You might like to consider including these details within your festive marketing.

6) Campaign length.
A vital thing to consider when putting together a campaign is its length. Don’t make your email too long or wordy as there is a strong possibility that recipients will simply not read it all! If you have a lot to say on a topic, provide an appealing summary or caption along with a link to where people can read more if they want to.

7) Social networking.
If your business does not have a Facebook page or a Twitter account then it is missing out on some serious public exposure. Utilising social networking is becoming more and more vital in this age of digital marketing and you don’t want to miss out!

8) Don’t bombard your subscribers.
It is tempting to send out tons of campaigns at this time of year in order to maximise the exposure your company receives. Do this, however, and you run the risk of irritating your subscribers to the point where they no longer want to hear from you at all and unsubscribe. This is bad news, so be strategic with your campaign schedule, not too much, but not too little either.

9) Remind subscribers why you are contacting them.
If you have not been in contact with your subscribers for a while, they may have forgotten who you are and that they opted in to hear from you. It can be a good idea to include in your campaign a brief explanation of where you obtained their contact details or a reminder of any other brand names you trade under.

10) Attention to detail.
In my opinion there’s nothing worse than receiving an email with a spelling mistake, missing word, grammatical error, broken link or missing image. It looks sloppy and doesn’t reflect well on your company. Take the time to check your campaign and then get someone else to check it as well. A few minutes spent before your send can eliminate embarrassing mistakes.

Hopefully these tips will get you off to a great start with your Christmas email marketing. Be sure to allow yourself enough time to send the best that you can.

Send and deliver – don’t let anyone hold up your email campaign

Posted on September 18, 2012 by admin

When sending email marketing campaigns, you want to get your voice heard. That means you’ll want to ensure your message is getting to your audience’s inboxes without any problems.

One way of enhancing the deliverability of your campaigns is to set up an SPF record. Follow these simple instructions.

A quick introduction to Sender ID and SPF

What is Sender ID/SPF? Sender ID and SPF (SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework) are ways that people receiving email can verify that the person sending the message is allowed to send email from that domain name. They are slightly different versions of the concept.

What is the difference between Sender ID and SPF? SPF validates the originating email address of a message. This is not always the same as the ‘From’ address as it relates to the actual server sending the message.

Sender ID validates the actual ‘From’ address of the email. In order to set up a Sender ID record you will need to add the Sender ID information to your domain name – see below for details.

Why is Sender ID important? Sender ID adds an extra layer of security to email – it makes it much more difficult to send email from forged addresses, a favourite trick of spammers and scammers. By adopting Sender ID legitimate email can be more easily separated from junk.

How does Sender ID affect me? If you’re using email marketing, Sender ID affects you! Major ISPs like Hotmail and Gmail use Sender ID to screen emails – if an email is received which does not have a Sender ID record set then the user is alerted to this – at the moment nothing else happens but in the near future this may change and result in your message being classed as spam.

If an email is received from an address with a Sender ID record but from a system that is not listed in the record, it is sent to the junk folder.

If you are sending email from an email marketing system like CyanMailer you need to ensure that the system is listed in the Sender ID record for your domain name, this will help to maximise the delivery rate of your campaign.

How does Sender ID work? A Sender ID record is a small piece of text that is stored in the DNS record of your domain name. You can generate this text using the online tools available at http://www.anti-spamtools.org/SenderIDEmailPolicyTool/Default.aspx. This text explains which servers are allowed to send email on your behalf. When a system receives email from you it looks up this record and checks it against the details of the server that sent your message. As only the owner of a domain name can alter its DNS record this is a fairly secure way to manage this information.

How do I create a Sender ID record? Firstly, you need to have access to the DNS record of your domain name. This will usually be through the company you registered your domain name with, or your web hosting/design company. You need to check that this company supports creating a TXT record in your DNS. If it doesn’t you will need to move your DNS to another provider like http://zoneedit.com – this doesn’t mean that you will need to change your web host, just your DNS provider.

Once you have access to this you need to go to http://www.anti-spamtools.org/SenderIDEmailPolicyTool/Default.aspx and use its wizard to create a record for your domain. You will need to know where you send email from, or set your record to allow any server to send email from your domain name (this is not advised!) If using CyanMailerto you must add CyanMailer in the ‘Outsourced Domains’ box – this allows us to send email on your behalf.

When you have completed the wizard you will be given the text that you need to add into your DNS record. Once you have added this in you can check it by using the wizard again – it should detect that you have a record set. Note that in some cases it may take 24-48 hours before your new record shows up.

I don’t have my own domain name, can I still use Sender ID? No – you have to control the domain name to set the Sender ID. As such you cannot send out emails from free email addresses (hotmail.com etc.) through systems like CyanMailer.

Find out more about Sender ID: http://www.microsoft.com/senderid/

Content is key. But fresh content is the skeleton key!

Posted on June 7, 2012 by admin

Google has evolved no end over the past year, which has sent us all SEO scraping to conform with the new techniques.

Most notably the latest change came in the utilisation of geolocation, and the preference for newer content over older content. This is costing major online companies a small fortune, as they have been forced to employ teams of individuals to further maintain their websites.

These changes have also helped modernise the web, driving businesses to use CMS systems such as WordPress and Joomla to compile their sites. The beauty of content management systems is their ability to keep content fresh in a variety of ways whether this be via blog posts, press releases or portfolios.

WordPress, in particular, has stormed ahead of the other CMS platforms in the last couple of years due to the flexibility of its post system. This system has successfully managed to manipulate this content creation method into a variety of customised applications such as shopping features, testimonials, portfolios and much more.

By updating your content and using dynamic content sections to pull these articles onto your homepage, adding a new post/press release now has the joint effect of keeping your landing page looking fresh and keeping Google happy. After all, search engines will always look for the newest content in order to ensure the Internet remains the superb source of up-to-the-minute information and technology that it is today.

The importance of running an SEO campaign for your website

Posted on June 7, 2012 by admin

Many of you will have learned the hard way that simply having a website is not enough to attract the new online prospects you so long for.

You painstakingly design rich content and attractive graphics only to find that fewer than 10 visitors a week seek them out and more than half of those bounce within seconds of arriving on your landing page. This is the reality that many business owners have had to face up to – the fact that a professionally designed website is only half of what is required to compete online today.

Addressing the SEO performance of your website

So why is your site not being found by potential clients? The answer is simple. It’s not well enough known by Google and the other search engines. Without search engine optimisation you are eternally dammed to the dregs of the search engine results pages – rarely being listed for any relevant search within your sector.

So what SEO services do you need in order to compete?

For a start, you will need to focus your websites content at the services you offer, making sure your ‘key words’ or ‘key phrases’ such as ‘website design Essex’ or ‘SEO services in London’ are displayed within the SE’s most looked at areas. These include locations such as:

Page title
Leading header
Leading paragraph
Image alt tags
Meta tags

This is just the beginning. By focussing your keywords, you increase your ‘link relevance’ to those specific keywords and phrases heightening the chance of the search engines ranking you higher for those search terms.

Of course, there are many more tricks you can employ to rev up your site’s SEO performance such as:

Interlinking
Ensuring you have an image on every page
Trying to keep your content relevant ( e.g. moving unrelated content off a page you want visitors to come to)
Regularly adding new content to keep things fresh

Keeping track of these aspects of SEO you will see a notable change not only in terms of visitor numbers but in reduced bounce rates. This is because now you are attracting the right kind of traffic, since visitors who were looking for something you provide were able to successfully find it via your content and keywords.

Cookie compliance tool by ‘end of month’

Posted on May 8, 2012 by admin

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is to release a cookie reporting tool that will allow web users to report non-compliant websites by the “end of the month”.

The move comes as UK companies gear up for an overhaul of how cookies should make their presence known to web users, reports V3.co.uk.

From May 26, the so-called Cookie Law will require websites to gain the consent of Internet surfers before they can serve them cookies – small pieces of tracking data used to observe a user’s history, or save their preferences on individual sites.

However, recent research suggests that as many as 95 per cent of EU websites aren’t compliant with the new law (KPMG research via wired.co.uk), leading to the ICO’s new tool.

“We will be giving individuals the chance to raise concerns with cookies being used on websites in an easy way, so they can explain what the issues are. If we see a picture building up from numerous reports that will help us interrogate these sites,” explained David Evans, group manager for business and industry at the ICO.

Evans went on to say that users can report their concerns using the reporting tools hosted on the ICO’s website. He hopes that other sites will follow suit with the ICO’s lead.

“As sites get better at informing users about cookies and what they do, it will become second nature to users to expect this information and this will help them identify sites that don’t offer similar information,” he said.