So you’ve just built a spanking new website with your company brochure recreated in pixel form. Now you’ve just got to wait for visitors to arrive before the sales start rolling in, right? Wrong. Selling your products and services online presents unique hurdles compared to the bricks and mortar world. Your website has to be able to build trust and confidence with visitors before they’re going to buy.

Make your website ‘sticky’

People search the web for information. Not advertising. And using the marketing language and sales spiel from your corporate brochure isn’t going to cut it online. Web users have the attention spans of goldfish, and will swim away in fright at the first sign of a sales message. 

The average website visitor will leave within the first minute. They might have a browse around if you’ve got an attractive landing page. But they’ll quickly leave and look elsewhere if they can’t find the answers they’re looking for. 

So for your website to be an effective sales generating machine it has to be ‘sticky’ and keep hold of visitors for as long as possible. Because the longer they’re in your store the more time you’ve got to prove why you’re the answer to their problem.

Provide ‘social proof’

The best way to engage attention is with content of value, rather than marketing messages. Before a visitor is going to place an order or pick up the phone you have to be able to answer any questions blocking a sale and earn their trust. You can achieve this through your content.

Providing case studies, customer reviews and testimonials will help to demonstrate the ‘social proof’ of your product or service. The social proof is the real world evidence that your product does what it says on the tin. 

People are increasingly sceptical of marketing, but they do listen to each other. So make sure you’re providing plenty of content from third parties to give concrete to the claims on your landing page.

Build rapport with valuable content

The old adage ‘people like to do business with those they like and trust’ has never been truer than online. Until we’ve developed virtual salesmen to talk to prospects one-to-one, you can use your content to build rapport with prospects. A popular vehicle for doing this is to use a blog, which is in essence a content management system with added bells.

Rather than posting rants on who never gets the tea, provide useful articles commenting on industry news, offering advice on how to use your product or giving examples of how you’ve solved a customer’s problem. 

If you’re providing information of value then prospects will either subscribe to your blog or keep returning for updates. Few people are ready to buy the first time they visit your site. 

However, if you’re providing ongoing content of value then you can build trust and confidence in your expertise over time. And with the right strategy in place you can even try and position yourself as a knowledge leader in your industry.

Google loves regularly updated websites

If it’s regularly updated, Google and other search engines will love your blog as much as your readers. The search engines rate sites based on the frequency with which they’re updated and the links pointing to them from other sites. 

If you’re content offers value, rather than shallow sales messages, then other websites will naturally link to you over time and boost your natural search engine ranking. 

Valuable content is a competitive advantage

With broadband now in most UK homes and businesses, an effective sales generating website has never been more crucial. 

So whilst your competitors struggle with their static online brochures, turn your web presence into a channel for engaging prospects with valuable content, and convert more browsers into buyers.  

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) - real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

A great website that allows you to be anybody or be doing anything. Much like the seaside novelties where you put your face in a hole - but updated for the web. Very versatile and great results. You could spend hours on here.

FaceInHole.com

Earlier today Andy phoned in to say that the blog visual/HTML editor on our website wasn’t working properly for him. After unsuccessfully trying many different options that didn’t work we found the solution on this page, specifically the reply from ’selfobliged’ about TinyMCE Advanced plugin.

Thank you ’selfobliged’ - whoever you may be!

It’s easy to get excited about mobile marketing. The UK’s 43 million handsets offer an immediate, always on route to consumers. However, people have a different relationship with their mobiles compared to that with their PC. A mobile is a much more personal device, and permission to contact them on it is tightly guarded.

Unless you think users are eager to receive floods of texts and banner ads clogging up their shrunken screens, smart thinking is needed on how you gain permission to deliver your messages.

Mobile marketing is still in its infancy, and has a lot of growing up to do before it reaches maturity. And that applies to marketing tactics as much as it does to the technology.

Mobiles are more personal, which is what mobile marketing needs to be

Since Mr Jobs reeled off the iPhone’s features to rapturous whoops, manufacturers have been rushing to build the ultimate multi-functional mobile device. More than just a phone with added bells, mobiles will be appearing that provide access to the same services as on a home PC.
Whether it’s paying bills, online shopping or finding a local restaurant, mobiles will soon be an integral tool for how people manage their lives. It’s when the next gen mobile becomes the essential lifestyle device that we’ll see them emerging from pockets other than than those of the business or tech savvy user.

A mobile phone will become the ultimate, personalised lifestyle device for accessing the things people care about. Consequently, people’s relationship with their mobile will be even more personal than they are already. Permission to use them as a marketing channel will therefore be even more tightly guarded.

Whilst the personal relationship a prospect has with their mobile poses a challenge, it also offers marketers an opportunity.

Mobile marketing should be about relationship building

We’re already living in an age where strategies need to be smarter than just to ’spray and pray’ messages. Consumers are taking control of the content they want to receive. If you’re not offering them value then you’ll soon find your path blocked. This is the mobile marketer’s challenge: to build trust with ad weary prospects.

However, mobile also presents an enormous opportunity. It has the potential to be the superior relationship building medium (barring meeting every prospect one-to-one). It’s a platform for coaxing trust and loyalty by being of value to the consumer. The quickest way to ruin these feelings is to bombard them with messages as soon as they switch on their mobile.

The future lies in a mobile CRM strategy: building loyalty and dialogue through engaging with relevant, targeted offers and desirable, downloadable content. A mobile is a personal device. And as such users will reward loyalty to those who treat it with respect.  

The success of mobile marketing is not just a case of waiting for better data plans, coverage and handsets. But also for the right marketing mindset to mature.

Mass delivery of irrelevant messages is the quickest way to lose trust

The personal and immediate nature of mobile offers enormous potential for relationship building with valuable content. And as with the relationship between print and digital, your mobile strategy should be integrated into your wider campaign, with calls to action to initiate mobile included in your brochures and website.

So whilst some advertisers prepare to pepper mobile users with banner ads and text messages, remember that the quickest way to lose trust is with undesired, irrelevant content.

Start thinking about customised messages, downloadable videos and GPS targeted offers. Because to be successful in mobile marketing you’ll want to be a user’s valued and trusted friend, rather than a temporary intruder.  

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) - real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

First Apple brought us the Ipod, then came the Ipod Nano, followed by the Ipod Shuffle.
Each time the product got smaller. Now, Apple bring you something even smaller…

With eyeballs and attention focused on the web, rarely a day passes without someone heralding the death of print. It’s just the fashionable thing to say.

In a recent interview, it was Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s turn to hammer a nail into print’s coffin. He gave paper and ink a life expectancy of ten years before it gets binned forever, envisioning a world where all content is consumed on a Windows run machine. Whilst his prediction is music to the ears of Microsoft shareholders, we can’t see print fading away anytime soon.

It’s easy to jump on the ‘print is dead’ bandwagon based on the falling readership of newspapers and magazines. But in reality, print is merely evolving to accommodate digital and the changes in how content is consumed.

Whilst the mass market, one size fits all style of print publishing is slowly being ushered aside, new models are emerging that keep print firmly centre stage.

The debate is about change, not conflict

Readership of print has fallen dramatically in recent years, with ad revenues haemorrhaging as people switch to digital. Readers can now find breaking stories and articles of interest in a few mouse clicks. A daily newspaper or monthly magazine simply can’t compete with the immediacy of surfing the web.

However, people still like the physicality of browsing a printed publication. So there’s still a future for print if it can differentiate itself as a provider of comment, discussion and in depth analysis. If publishers want their print titles to stay profitable, they have to give readers something they can’t easily find online.

Printed newspapers and magazines need to evolve into a different type of beast altogether, one that can live in harmony, rather than conflict, with digital. Otherwise it risks becoming too costly for its masters to keep alive, and dying out altogether.

People still prefer print

When it comes to the marketing arena, if managed properly, print can continue to perform a starring role. The fact is that people still like to receive something they can touch and read at their leisure. A Pitney Bowes study found that 73% prefer to receive product announcements and offers in the mail, rather than read them on a monitor.

So with print still popular with prospects, the future lies in learning how to make best use of each medium. Every touch point needs to be integrated to deliver consistent branding, a unified message and a clearly directed sales path.

Print provides the ignition

Considering that people prefer to receive messages in print, well targeted direct mail can provide the ignition to an integrated campaign. Print’s role is to hook prospects and capture their interest before reeling them in to your branded website.

You can then use online tools to develop your message, such as video, background articles and interactive features. Once you’ve proven your credibility and won their email address, you can deliver further targeted messages and push them all the way to the end of the sales funnel.

From our Siemens campaign we experienced first hand how effective integrated campaigns can be, when both print and digital are working together to deliver a unified message.

Print’s survival depends on one factor

Whether print, in all its forms, is able to remain profitable and effective will rely on its ability to deliver the content people want in a way that’s relevant and useful.

The growth of digital is changing when people consume content, as well as how. Consumers are now in control of what messages they want to receive and when. As a result, websites are sprouting all over the web to discuss all manner of topics and to share information.

Markets are fragmenting into niches, in which people only want to receive messages that are relevant and match their interests. And that’s why the survival of print will be decided by a single factor: what people want.

Boxes full of literature piled high in your office?

Wasting marketing collateral because it’s full of old products and services?

Just think what that has cost you and the size of the footprint you are leaving…

Recycling may ease your green conscience, but why the need to recycle in the first place? - there is an alternative…

Print-on-demand (POD) solutions have been around since the late 90s and enable the production of exactly the right quantity of items, at exactly the right time, with no storage requirements and personalised (if required) to the recipient. Email and web (as we know it) have also been around since the late 90s and have dramatically changed how we communicate; so why oh why when the technology and capabilities are available, do we still do things the old way when it comes to printing documents?

Is it just because its the way we have always done it, are we just too scared to embrace the technology available, or is it still cost which is stopping us?

In the same way we can’t now do without the speed of digital print to hit fast approaching deadlines, I believe in a few years time we will also wonder how we managed our marketing collateral efficiently before POD. As production processes improve, technology speeds up, environmental pressures increase further and costs reduce even more this will become the norm, not the exception.

So go on get recognised as a innovator, POD is the future, get yourself involved in the action now!

This was the first time our boys (8 and 4 yrs old) have been to see a major band - and then they get to see six in one go. They’ve seen live bands before at motorcycle events, and while they’ve been impressed with the acts before nothing could prepare them for the performance from the Levellers et al.

The rain held off - we even had bouts of sunshine.

Here is a short run-down of the acts:

3 Daft Monkeys - a three-piece acoustic band that played, amongst other instruments, the fiddle, and guitars. Their set was very good and they impressed the crowd enough to ask for an encore (or two).
Chumbawamba - you may remember their ‘TubThumping’ single from a few years ago but they’ve been around a lot longer than that and they’ve played at a quite number of events since then. Their act was thought provoking and funny, even though they had a semi-political agenda.
Nathan & Quinn were, apparently, brought in at short notice - but you’d have never guessed it from the performance they gave. There set can best be explained as a brilliant acoustic folk guitar playing duo.
Seth Lakeman & his band. Mr Lakeman is an accomplished musician: he played the guitar and violin, and he sang well. They were good songs, delivered well, but he didn’t spark me off as the other acts did.
Dreadzone - Awesome, electric, brilliant, fun, cool (man). This group brought the event to it’s feet. Nearly everyone danced to the sound generated by this band - a mixture of dub, reggae, techno, and trance. I was so impressed I’ve now bought their second album ‘Second Light’.
The Levellers - after a short interval, while they prepared the stage after Dreadzone, the Levellers appeared and the headline act got the crowd back on their feet. For those that haven’t heard of them they are a folk rock band that play tunes that you can’t help singing (and dancing along to). During their encore they were rejoined back on stage by 3 Daft Monkeys to perform the final number.

This was all followed by a spectacular fireworks display.

All-in-all a brilliant days entertainment -
definitely ‘A Beautiful Day Out’.

So, call me a big kid (and many do) but watching cartoons and animations still ranks high on my enjoyment list.
So imagine my eyes, the size of the moon, as the trailer for Pixar’s new film Wall.e appeared.

The basis for the story is about a lonely robot on earth, cleaning up all the mess humans had left behind after migrating to a new planet.

What makes this interesting (apart from the gorgeous animation) is the fact that for first 45mins of the film, there is no dialogue. The creators tried to capture human emotions and transfer that to Wall.e through sounds and gestures.

Did they manage to accomplish this, I hear you ask? Well, why not take a peek at the trailer below and judge for yourself.

As BDA are a bunch of soup connoisseur’s, whats the UK’s favorite soup? answers?