Facebook recently announced that they would begin removing overly promotional posts by pages from the news feed this year. The announcement, which is likely to have slipped under the radar of most Facebook users, said: “As part of an ongoing survey we asked hundreds of thousands of people how they feel about the content in their News Feeds. People told us they wanted to see more stories from friends and Pages they care about, and less promotional content.” According to people they surveyed...

We were approached by The Bay Tree Food Company to help them with a competition to celebrate 20 years in business. The brief was simple: design and build a website landing page where users could enter a competition to win a hamper full of goodies. The rustic landing page needed to be mobile optimised, have the functionality to capture entrants data and also integrated with Mailer, Cognique's very own email marketing system which The Bay Tree use on a regular basis. When a user enters the comp...

From January 2015 all online retailers selling digital products to consumers across the EU will need to pay VAT in the country of the purchaser. These changes affect all ecommerce businesses selling any kind of digital B2C product, whether or not they are registered for VAT in the UK. What does this mean, exactly? From the 1st of January 2015, new VAT place of supply rules come into place for business to consumer businesses selling ‘digital services’. When selling digital services, busine...

Put simply, digital marketing is the promotion of products or services by any electronic media, including computers, mobile phones, tablets and game consoles. However in the last few years it has become synonymous with marketing carried out via the internet, and most people now only think of digital marketing in this way rather than its original, much broader definition. With this in mind, this article focuses on using the internet to market your business. Why should you be doing digital market...

What do you know about the visitors to your website? Analytics tools like Google Analytics are useful to a point, but it’s difficult to get insight on the activity of individual visitors. This is where lead identification and tracking tools can be helpful. What is lead identification? Prospect or lead identification tools are software programs that can help you identify and track the activity of individual visitors. Here’s an example to illustrate why this might be useful. When someone fi...

Antony Lovedale founded Active Robots over 10 years ago as a catalogue and online reseller of robot parts and accessories to hobbyists and enthusiasts. But a recent expansion into higher value robots for use in education, academic research and corporate applications meant that Antony needed to create a separate business to address the needs of this rapidly growing market. Following a recommendation from a business contact, Antony met with Cognique and discussed his requirements. We quickly came...

This animated infographic video reveals some of the recent industry numbers behind digital marketing trends including websites, email marketing, content marketing, search marketing, marketing automation and social media. Enjoy!(In case you are wondering, it was created in Apple Keynote and exported as a Quicktime movie.)

Search marketing can be confusing - it’s a constantly changing field and you never know what Google has up its sleeve next. Through all these changes one thing has remained constant - keywords. Although Google now places emphasis on lots of other ranking factors, such as the quality of your content, until searchers stop typing words into search engines keywords will remain relevant. So how do you work out which keywords are right for your business? Through effective keyword research… Gett...

Vinyl aficionado Stephen Waldron approached Cognique to make a lifelong dream come true: to own his own record shop. He already had a brilliant name (Fuzzy Warbles Vinyl Records), the notion of selling niche genre vinyl online and an idea for how his logo should look. But what he needed was someone to help him deliver the whole package professionally, and within a few short weeks. Based on the business name we first developed an 'A Clockwork Orange' inspired identity: Once the identity was a...

Are you using LinkedIn for business? If not, why not? LinkedIn is used by over 15 million professionals in the UK and is often the first port of call for researching new business contacts. If you’re not using LinkedIn, you could be missing out on valuable business opportunities. What exactly is LinkedIn? LinkedIn is a professional social network where individuals can build a network of business connections and businesses can set up a company profile. Your personal LinkedIn profile Yo...

Cognique created a logo design for startup business Construction Certification Ltd. Working with SMEs in the construction sector, business owner Richard Shearwood-Porter approached us to create a logo that reflected his 'down to earth approach' combined with a 'plain language pitch'. Utilising pictorial elements from sister company HSQE, Cognique produced three concepts which were presented to the client. After a few minor colour tweaks and font variations the final logo design (which can be se...

Remarketing is exactly what is sounds like - the ability to market your products again to people who have previously visited your website. When people who have visited your site browse other sites on the web, you can re-target them with customised adverts.   How does remarketing work? When someone visits your website, a file called a ‘cookie’ is created, which stores information about their visit. This information can then be used to retarget specific visitors with online advertising late...

Remous Print, a family run company in Sherborne approached Cognique for a company rebrand. Their existing brand and identity had served them well over the past 30 years, but now they felt it was time for a change, time to re-position themselves in the print market and time to show the public what the could really do. The brief was simple, they wanted to be modern, stand out in the competitive print industry, and to portray the wide range of services they have to offer. They didn't just want to ...

Email marketing is an extremely effective marketing technique and the relatively low cost means it can deliver excellent return on investment. On average, every £1 spent on email marketing can see a return of over £40. Sounds good, doesn't it? Sadly it’s not quite as simple as putting an email together and sending it out to the world. In order to take advantage of the power of email, you need a strong email marketing list, and when it comes to email, quality is just as important as numbers....

Cognique have recently completed the new Swan Hotel brochure design. We have serviced the marketing needs of the award-winning Best Western Plus Swan Hotel Wells for over five years and the hotel prides itself on the quality of the website, graphic design (including newsletters, brochures and adverts) and email campaigns produced by Cognique that help the in-house marketing team to engage with their growing customer base. The text for the brochure was intentionally kept to a minimum, allowing t...

Google recently announced that they will be starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal in its search algorithms. Historically Google’s algorithm has taken into account many factors to determine what is shown in its search results, including inbound links, keywords and quality of content, but this is the first time that security has been used as a factor. What are secure websites? Secure websites transfer data over HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) as opposed to HTTP (Hypertext Trans...