Grab your eggnog, warm up the mince pies – it’s time for Christmas Charades… and you don’t have to act even if you get it right; we’ve taken care of all that for you! Bag yourself the chance of winning a camera and watch us and our finest acting skills; guess all 10 charades that we’ve prepared for your delight and delectation and we’ll enter you into the prize draw.
A recent study carried out by the web hosting company 1&1 showed that 46% of British consumers have cancelled plans to spend with a small business after finding a poor quality website.
From the study of over 1800 UK adults, 37% have walked away completely whilst a further 9% have chosen to spend less as a direct result. Many felt that small business websites today are mostly unattractive and often contain errors.
Just over a third of consumers surveyed thought that in general, the small business websites they use are “tired” and “unimpressive”. Commonly found problems included typos and broken URLs.
Research also found that although a third of consumers are willing to provide valuable feedback to business owners, half of the businesses questioned had never asked clients about their experiences using their website.
66% of companies surveyed admitted that they struggle to maintain an attractive website, with the most common problem being the sourcing of fresh content . 30% have been ‘reluctant’ or ‘embarrassed’ to recommend their website to their customers because they knew of faults.
With the advent of Twitter we’ve all become used to writing the most amount of content in the least amount of words. Adding a link to your Tweet or post on other social networking sites takes up valuable characters – enter URL shorteners such as tinyurl.com or bit.ly. Typing in the exact address tha tyou want people to visit and clicking a button generates a much shorter URL that you can add to your post – giving you more characters to play with.
A few URL shorteners have offered extra features: the ability to choose one or more keywords to your short link – making it more relevant; the ability to preview the page that a short link leads to, for example, giving higher security (stopping you from opening a spam link). However, a few months back Google launched their own URL shortener which we’ve been using and think beats others hands down:
Using goo.gl allows you to shorten your URL in much the same way as other sites. What goo.gl does over and above this, though, once logged in to your Google account, is to keep a list of each URL that you shorten comprehensively, allowing you to filter them by day, week, month and in total. More than that, though, they also provide a chronological graph of the clicks that your URL has received: you can see georgraphically who clicked, from which browser and from which operating system or platform.
What a great way to understand whether your URL is being clicked on by your target audience without having to trawl through your website analytics. Use a different goo.gl URL for each place that you list your link and, hey presto, you have measurable results!
We’re expecting a reaction to our alignment in the market. We had a big enough discussion ourselves about which way we were heading, so we can’t expect others not to question us.
After nearly 12 years in business we decided to look at what we do best. We realised that most marketing and creative companies rarely practice what they preach; taking a look at our contemporaries we discovered that they never hang their hats on what they really do. Sure, they were creative. Yup they came up with solutions. They were all very friendly (well most of them). But hardly any of them said who their actual target market were; who specifically they were aiming at.
We fell into that trap too – concerned that we would turn potential clients off using us if we dared to state who we were aiming at. We found ourselves in an ocean of ‘marketing specialists’.
But seriously, how can we pretend that we offer everything to everyone? We can’t. At different times and in different departments we can help many clients of all sizes, but the chances of CocaCola ringing us up and asking us to direct their next advertising campaign is slim.
Instead we looked at what we do, what we have done, and how we can best help our clients. And that’s when we realised: we work best with SMEs – more MEs than SEs but we never rule it out – we know how to create exciting campaigns and work that helps organisations to punch above their weight.
We add value when we’re an extension to our client’s team. We’re a full time resource that allows clients to call on us when they need to, and who can help support a small marketing team or a marketing manager without adding extra salaries.
We’re not alienating the big corporates, you only have to see the work that we’ve delivered for adidas – but, to a larger client, we’ll be a small cog in the corporate wheel; we’ll make a difference, but it will more than likely be on a project-by-project basis. With SMEs we can get to the heart of their objectives and help with delivering strong communications that can be the catalyst to deliver results.
Our experience with some of the most exciting teams and businesses allow us to think big, be creative but deliver to a budget. And who better to do that with than the world SMEs who can benefit from a different perspective? They bring their specialisms, we bring ours.
Still not sure? Have a look at our SME Marketing specialists – FAQ
Yep, and we’re really proud of it. We’re not excluding the big corporates; you only have to see the work that we’ve delivered for adidas, we’ve loved it. But, to a larger client, we’ll be a small cog in the corporate wheel; we’ll make a difference, but it is more likely to be on a project-by-project basis. With SMEs we can get to the heart of their objectives and help with delivering strong communications that can be the catalyst to deliver results.
We’ll continue to do this where we feel we can add creative and ROI value, but large corporates are not where we’re aiming our marketing focus right now.
We know that not all of our clients are small and we’re definitely not aiming at only small companies (see the next point). But we ultimately deliver more value to our clients, can be more creative (and so therefore go home with happy feelings), when we’re a part of a company’s success. When we’re involved in long-term planning. The companies we’re aiming at won’t all be small, but they will have a small marketing team that could benefit from having partners who can deliver creative solutions that get results. We’re always keen to chat ideas over a cup of tea, getting to know you is what works best for both of us.
No. Definitely not. In fact, it’s rare that we ever work with one man bands – although we don’t rule it out. Our remit is working with companies that are dedicated to seriously making a mark in their industry or region. We don’t limit anything by size, but we do only work with businesses that have a minimum yearly spend, and are serious about developing and moving forward.
Just like any enterprise if you have a marketing team that are committed to making a mark in your industry or area and you could benefit from a creative team that can support, develop and initiate creative ideas with strong ROI then we’re still the guys for you. We’ve had years of experience with working for Not-For-Profits on both campaign awareness, new member drives and change campaigns.
In a nutshell: a Small, Medium Enterprise.
In our mind it’s these gutsy companies that are the backbone to our economy’s future. They are trailblazers, challengers and entrepreneurs. They’re small enough to stay nimble, flexible enough to change to suit markets and yet innovative enough to take on the aging behemoths.
SMEs – we salute you.
We’ve spent years working with SMEs in one form or another; either as small companies or larger companies with small marketing teams. Throughout the years we’ve challenged the status quo. We don’t believe that because you’re smaller you can’t be innovative.
We challenge the standard approach to standard briefs; why do you need a brochure if 80% of your market is online? Why should you have a regular pop-up exhibition stand when you can have one that delivers 100 exhibition stands in 1?
We’re used to working with tight budgets. If we were artists we’d hang our work in a gallery. It’s not good enough to pay a designer to make something look pretty. As a creative agency we have to deliver results and we have to do that on time and within budget. We’ve got years of experience in delivering results, we’d love to share our successes with you, why not drop us a line?
