WELCOME to Generate UK’s Festive Online Marketing Workshop.

Date: 9^th December 2009

Time: 9am-12.30pm

Venue: Donnington Grove Country Club – click here for directions

A workshop designed to help participants understand and embrace a number of key online marketing activities.

The workshop will be dynamic and focused on sharing experiences with clients, partners and each other providing the dos and don’ts when it come to implementing a proactive marketing strategy!

The workshop will discuss:

• The principles of SEO – what are they?
• Business Blogging – to blog or not to blog?
• An effective website – do you have one?
• Email marketing –does it work?

The workshop aims to be delivered in an informative yet relaxed atmosphere helping Marketers and business owners become more knowledgeable when looking to contribute to their online marketing strategy for 2010.

On top of this you’ll have a chance to network with industry professionals through an hour of speed networking! Plus you’ll be entered into a special draw to win a round of golf or dinner for two!

The workshop is limited in numbers so please register here to avoid disappointment or call 01635 550431 to book your space.

www.generateuk.co.uk

The Eight Bells is an attractive friendly pub that has been serving the local community for over 400 years.  The pub has gained a reputation as a great pub to enjoy a relaxing drink in beautiful surroundings. The menu at the Eight Bells is traditional home made pub food, which is locally sourced and produced wherever possible.

In recent time the Eight Bells have won awards for Real Ales; with the Cask Marque accreditation and also the Beautiful Beer Gold award. Recently, they were included in the Good Beer Guide 2010 and were awarded Aylesbury Vale’s Community pub of the year 2008

Unfortunately the old site did not represent the pubs great atmosphere, great service, excellent beer and pub food which it offered so they decided it was time for a change.

Generate UK worked with Helen, the owner of the Eight Bells to understand her exact requirements. Increasing traffic, improving the design and most importantly it was evident from the start that Helen required a content management system (CMS). This was to allow Helen and her team to update the website in the future with content changes, new menus, images etc

Whilst design was very important to Helen, to make sure the Pub was presented in the correct way the Eight Bells also wanted to focus on making their site highly visible within the search engines both locally and regionally.

Generate UK built a great new design and integrated it within the Generate CMS platform which now allows the Eight Bells to take full control of their own website.  Focusing on location, primary and secondary keywords i.e. pubs in Long Crendon was essential as this has now ensured that location based searches will present the Eight Bells pub high within the organic search engines.  The result of this will increase traffic and raise the venue’s profile locally throughout the surrounding counties.

This has already substantially increased the number of unique visitors to the website which has generated more visitors to the pub which in turn has delivered more business.

Helen Copleston, Proprietor of the Eight Bells Pub stated “A key challenge for any small business is finding the right company to work with who will give you honest advice and won’t charge the earth.  I found Generate UK brilliant to work with; they’ve built the Eight Bells a great new website and guided me through the whole process, advising me on keywords, design structure and even budget. They were very reasonable in cost and for what they have delivered I am over the moon!  We now have a future proof website that my team can amend as and when is needed and the content management system is really easy to use. The overall experience was great and as a result is generating more revenue, a great investment. Many thanks!”

Visit The Eight Bells Pub website

We believe that there are definitely good business opportunities for companies to create video content and post snippets of information of their services and products online.

From a business perspective, we believe this channel is underused. For a short time in 2008, You Tube took over the mantle as the second largest search engine, so this is certainly an area worth exploring.  If one Podcast or Video goes viral it could provide your company with the immediate impact and exposure it’s looking for.

Many of the world’s largest organisations operate their own network or belong to an affiliate one.  The main reason for this is that the cost to enter is minimal and the business method is simply that you pay based on performance. This means that as long as the affiliate meets your branding and quality criteria, you are in the beneficial position of only needing to pay once a sale has been completed.

There are two ways to approach affiliate marketing; either by joining a larger well established affiliate network, or by creating and managing your own program. Both have their merits and are worth considering in more detail.

Econsultancy.com recently predicted the UK market for affiliate marketing to grow to £4bn in online sales in 2009. This is an extraordinary figure and demonstrates the size of the channel available.

If you are considering an affiliate marketing scheme we would suggest:

• Create objectives for setting up an affiliate program.
• Identify products, services or solutions that could be used.
• Gap analysis on sales training material available and other sales tools.
• Explore your own affiliate network or join a larger established one.
• What are the rewards and criteria for being an affiliate?

It certainly helps your perceived leadership position within your industries and often information is forwarded on.   Within forums, most people have a user sign off and this is the opportunity where you can leave a link back to your website.

Do you have a forum? Do you ever post on relevent business forums? Have your say by posting a comment below.

Dance2Xtreme

Dance2Xtreme have traditionally sold from their shop in Maidenhead, they decided that they wanted to offer their products online as this would provide them with a new route to market. It also meant that they were able to extend their reach and sell to new customers outside of their traditional geography.

Selling products online was a new experience from Dance2Xtreme, so it was critical that their ecommerce system was easy to use and flexible. In particular adding new products, editing products and the fulfilment engine, which automatically creates emails and invoice information for their customers.

The other important factor for Dance2Xtreme was that they wanted to “future proof” their site and offer features that they may not use from day one; this included the ability to offer promotion codes/vouchers, gift wrap service, wish lists and customer reviews.

The Ecommerce system from Generate UK was the perfect fit. It is an advanced shopping cart system that was designed with the business owner in mind. It is very intuitive and runs via a simple control panel where you can manage every aspect of your store, right down to the customisation of your product variations such as size and colour.

The shopping cart scales to support an unlimited number of products and can quickly and easily be managed by anyone without HTML or other technical skills. It even integrates directly with Royal Mail for real time delivery prices, which can be rolled out across the store or changed per product.

The Dance2Xtreme website is an exciting next step for the proprietors; they are looking forward to marketing the website and welcoming new and existing customers to order online. In the future, new products and brands will be added to the store as well as a unique custom dancewear design area, where customers can work directly with Dance2Xtreme to design an exclusive piece of clothing.

What Dance2Xtreme had to say; Lin Sweeney, Director stated “Initially I was very nervous about the whole project until a friend recommended Generate UK. Their knowledge was amazing and they made the whole process easier than I thought it would be. They often went above and beyond what was needed and that I’d signed up for. The site looks great and really easy to operate, thank you for all you help! Lin Sweeney Owner – Dance2Xtreme “

Please click here to visit the Dance2Xtreme website

From an Off Page Optimisation or Search Engine Marketing purpose and by its nature a blog is usually about a specific topic and is regularly updated. This in turn encourages the search engine spiders to visit your site more frequently, once this happens you are more likely to appear in the organic search results, which means free and targeted traffic. The more experienced bloggers will target new keywords and phrases in order to rank well and manipulate the search engines. Because of the flexibility of a blog, it is very quick to launch a new post and therefore start to rank for different keywords relating to your business.

A blog provides you with a tool to form direct contact with people who are interested in your services. Most blogs provide an option for its readers to be able to subscribe to them, meaning that every post you go live with will be sent to your subscriber base. These are people who have proactively giving you and your content the virtual equivalent of the ‘thumbs up’. You should value your subscribers very highly and ensure that you continue to provide them with content and information they are interested in. Conversely, these are the people you can test new products, seek feedback and leverage to help your provide a better service or product.

There are many ways to use a blog to build your brand or even to support an existing brand. In fact a blog is the perfect vehicle to use to interact with your potential customers, advanced bloggers may also use video or viral campaigns to tease their audience into coming back.

A blog allows you to differentiate yourselves from your competitors! There are two questions to ask here; do your competitors have a blog and do they use it? And secondly, can you use your blog to add credibility to your services and solutions? For example, if you’re an IT company would it be good to have an interview with one of your customers on your blog? The answer is yes, as it adds to the credibility of your service. Likewise, you could include your views on new product launches or industry trends, all the time differentiating yourselves with other players in your market.

There’s an old adage in sales and marketing, “people buy from people”.  This has not changed and is probably even more apparent in tough economic times. A blog provides you with an opportunity to create and build relationships with clients and prospects. There is a current trend for large companies to have a “CEO Blog”, this is where the head of the company writes a blog article once a week, which is designed to bring them closer to their target audience. It provides the reader with a feeling of involvement and interaction, especially if they are able to leave comments and respond directly to the company head.

Most of the leading blog sites will have a Social Media aspect to them. They are normally visible via small graphical logos, which can be used by your readers to submit your blog post to other social media networks. The more well known Social Media sites are called Facebook, MySpace, Stumbleupon, Sphinn and Digg. However, the list grows by the day and each will be focused on its own niche market or have its own rules. From a blogging perspective, the reason to be aware of the social networks is because if your content is good then it is likely to be picked up by them. If this happens, it can mean a huge increase in targeted traffic.

The Internet has created some amazing opportunities for companies to market their products and services to a wider audience, however you could also argue that it has meant an increase in competition in almost all markets. This is why it is important as we’ve mentioned to differentiate yourself from your competitors; one way to do this is to establish yourself as the de facto expert in your area. If you are an expert, tell the world. Use your blog to communicate and showcase your expertise, in a competitive market, as this will do wonders for your sales.

Depending on your niche and your content, there is every chance that you may be contacted by either local or national press. This is a great position to be in and will help you with brand building, and of course, provide you with some free advertising. Usually this type of contact is born from the understanding that you are an expert in your field or the topic you are discussing is of interest to their publications.

Online reputation management is becoming big news and we advise our clients to be aware of it and proactively manage it. One of the ways to do this is by managing the content and using your blog to control what is being said. It is a little more complicated than just that; however it is better to be in control of the blog then letting someone else manage it for you.

On top of all the great business benefits associated with a blog, creating and maintaining a blog is very simple. Once it is set up and designed, your only challenge is creating the content and keeping it updated regularly. There are sites out there that post every day, whilst others do it once a week. We recommend that you find a happy medium that will result in a good flow of content to keep your readers happy, without it becoming a chore.

Last week I attended my first Speed Networking Event at Windsor Racecourse and thought that it was certainly worth a Blog post! Initially I was pretty sceptical and didn’t really know what to expect, but I have to say I was really impressed.

The event was hosted by Speed Networking Events who are committed to growing Speed Networking throughout the UK.

I really enjoyed the afternoon and left feeling pretty exhausted! The format involved 20 different companies and you literally had three minutes (one and a half minutes each!) to tell each other about yourself, your business and how you could potentially help each other. After only 5 mini meetings I had already met some really interesting people and a few potential business opportunities!

Whilst not all 19 meetings represented an interest for me, I did find it fascinating to hear about people’s views, hear their enthusiasm and understand their business pains, all within 90 seconds!

After 9 meetings we stopped for a break during which we received an excellent presentation from John Shenton who represented a company called BIA who helps companies improve business growth through people communications. After some tips from John as to how we should approach each of our mini meetings and some more light refreshments, people then entered into the second phase of meetings with renewed vigour.

The idea is a simple yet effective concept and the event was certainly a worthwhile exercise, it really opened my eyes to other businesses and I would recommend any person(s) who want to meet new people and engage with different businesses.

For more information about an event in your area visit Speed Networking Events

You’re currently reading Generate UK’s Top 20 Digital Marketing ideas. Over the course of the next month, we’ll be sharing our experience to help you marketed your business on the Internet.

Email marketing is now one of the most cost effective ways to market to your potential customers; as a result, it is no surprise that the UK market grew from a value of £221m in 2007 to an estimated £274m in 2008. Despite the economic doom and gloom, this growth is expected to rise further in 2009.

There are a number of reasons which are contributing to this continued rise:

• The economic climate is putting pressure on everyone’s marketing budgets, however at the same time there is a need for an increase in retention marketing, which email marketing is perfect for.
• There is an increased number of email service providers, which is bringing down the cost and adding value to the marketing department (in most cases anyway).
• We’re all beginning to see the benefit of email marketing from a return on investment perspective. This is certainly the case when measuring the cost of the campaign, however it’s fair to say that many businesses need to go one step further in terms of measuring their campaigns with the amount of business it produces.
• Most businesses recognise that they have to work harder for their slice of the cake and as a result there is a greater focus on building email lists and encouraging email sign ups from webmasters and marketing managers.
• Email marketing offers businesses the opportunity to send highly targeted and very relevant email correspondence.
• Businesses in the UK are beginning to understand the benefits of autoresponders and trigger emails.

Understanding how to send correct and effective communications is critical if this channel is going to work for you, so we would seriously advise anybody to understand this market thoroughly and carry out your research first. Seek advice from the professionals as delivering bad communications can seriously damage you brand.  Data, message, timing, creative, response, analytics….they all count!

If you’d like help with your next email marketing campaign, let us know. We’d be very happy to show you our system.

If you’re not currently book marking your online collateral we ask the question why not? It’s free and Social Bookmarking provides you with the opportunity to share your own website content and collateral with the public, through social bookmarking sites. The main one being Delicious.com

There are over 15 billion web pages published on the World Wide Web and this is growing daily. People are using sites like del.icio.us every day to bookmark their favourite pages and check out other peoples favourites. So, by bookmarking your own content, making it available to others, increases the opportunity for people to find it.

In terms of increasing your Internet Footprint, it is a no-brainer and will help to drive targeted traffic to your site. Why not click on the social media links below and investigate how it can help your business. Alternatively, we’d be very happy to have a conversation with you on 01635 550431.