In 2019 it is estimated there will be 2.77 billion social media users worldwide. Social media marketing is recognised as a highly effective means to build brand awareness, demonstrate expertise and build engagement with existing and potential customers. The immediacy of social media requires social media channels to be nurtured with engaging content carefully created for them. Unfortunately, this takes time. With day-to-day operational business needs often taking priority over social medi...

Whilst bloggers have been promoting goods and services since the early 1990’s, the emergence of professional Influencers has been a more recent event. Professional Influencers do exactly what it says on the tin, they influence! Typically they post pictures and videos of their day to day life on their social media channels, sometimes focused around a specific subject (e.g. make up, fitness, parenting etc.) whilst growing their follower base. These followers are then, at times, influenced by the...

Good graphic design is an often underrated part of the marketing mix, but as designers and marketers, we’ve seen first hand the impact of graphic design on marketing results. Invest in design to supercharge your marketing activity in these five ways... 1. Make your marketing more memorable Impactful design is the key to making your marketing more memorable. If no one remembers your message, your marketing spend is as good as wasted. 2. Differentiate your business from your competitors ...

There are many things that can stand between a good marketing campaign and growing your business. Here's a few common reasons (and their solutions) that marketing fails. Lack of in-house knowledge and skills Over half (57%) of businesses say they don’t have the right people in their team to manage successful marketing campaigns. Solution: Try outsourcing – it's more cost effective and you can access a wider range of skills. Bad branding You could have the best marketing campaign in the ...

Wondering how much you should spend on marketing your business? In short, there’s no definitive answer. It’s often recommended that you spend 10% of your turnover on marketing if you're planning for growth. Here’s what that would look like for businesses with a...Turnover of £120,000 = £12,000 marketing budget Turnover of £500,000 = £50,000 marketing budget Turnover of £3,000,000 = £300,000 marketing budgetIn reality, the 10% figure is far from gospel. If you search the...

B2C and B2B marketing used to be worlds apart. Now that both business to business and business to consumer businesses are doing more digital marketing, they are more similar than ever before. But there are still some big differences.B2B marketers focus on content marketing and marketing automation A recent report by Salesforce revealed that B2B marketers were most likely to be increasing marketing spend on content marketing and marketing automation.These findings were also supported by oth...

Not all marketing activity is successful. In our experience there are four main reasons why marketing fails: 1. It wasn't targeted enough There are too many people in the world to target everyone, plus it’s impossible to have universal appeal. Consequently, an un-targeted “spray and pray” approach rarely gets results. 2. It used the wrong channels It can be easy to get sucked into using a channel that doesn’t fit your customer base. For example advertising on a website that isn’t a goo...

Marketing tends to attract a lot of unnecessary jargon, so it is easy to lose sight of what marketing is and why businesses need to do it. In the simplest terms, marketing is how you make people aware of your business and communicate the value of your products and services. It's also important to understand that marketing is different from sales. While marketing can help increase awareness of your business and create a desire for a purchase, in most cases, you will still need some form of person...

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the process of identifying, testing and improving areas of your website which are preventing visitors from converting. A conversion is whatever action you want your website visitors to take, this could be:Purchasing a product or service Purchasing a higher value product or service Signing up for an email newsletter Downloading a white paper Getting in touch.Why is conversion rate optimisation important? CRO can help increase the performance of...

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...