I know that it’s traditional to save these types of predictions for the turn of the year but to avoid competing with the year-end deluge of fortune tellers, I thought I’d share my predictions now.
2011
12
Jul
By Dan Hawtrey
I know that it’s traditional to save these types of predictions for the turn of the year but to avoid competing with the year-end deluge of fortune tellers, I thought I’d share my predictions now.
2011
28
Jun
By Dan Hawtrey
If you sell stuff direct through your website there’s an obvious metric that you and your boss will be obsessed about: revenue. Having revenue as your metric gives you a big, single focus when it comes to improving your site. There are all sorts of things you can do: you can optimises your checkout process to make it as quick and easy as possible; you can test various product combinations and hope to increase the size of the shopping basket; you can improve the descriptions of your products. The list is endless and there are loads of helpful articles all over the web to guide you on what to do. Read on…
2010
13
Dec
By Dan Hawtrey
Proving it works
So, you’re running monthly emails and collecting open and click-through data to present to your boss. If he knows his stuff, he should really be saying, “So what?”
Open and click-throughs are not an end in themselves, it is the conversion rate that is far more interesting and provides more useful data. For example, if a key objective of your email campaign and website is to generate online customer enquiries for sales staff, you should be measuring the rate at which email recipients are submitting a sales enquiry. This way you can say to your boss, “January’s email campaign went out to 5000 people and generated 50 enquiries”. You can then take that data, match it with end sales data and in turn calculate an ROI.
2010
11
Nov
By Dan Hawtrey
In the last supermarket retail hours of the day hoards of commuters can be found huddled around the reduced section looking for a discounted dinner time treat. You can eat like a King on less than a fiver, as long as you do not mind eating all you buy that day.
Banner space inevitably works in a very similar way enabling advertisers to get hold of cheap and unsold banner space from ad exchanges through bidding. Ad exchanges are platforms to help advertising companies buy and sell space online and are becoming more and more popular.
2010
21
Jul
By Dan Hawtrey
We’re proud of our own work but we also pay attention when we see examples of other people’s work in a similar space. This deck is a series of screen grabs from an advocacy campaign that launched recently in the UK.
The campaign is designed to promote word-of-mouth around a new beer product to hit the market: Home Draught. It’s an ideal product for WOM marketing – by its very nature it’s a social product, something you are likely to see at parties and share with friends.
2010
28
Jun
By Dan Hawtrey
Given our experience with word-of-mouth (WOM) campaigns, we’re always interested to see what other brands are doing. This presentation shows the anatomy of Clairol’s ‘Nice And Easy’ WOM campaign, which can be found at www.confidencetoshine.com.
2010
04
Jun
By Christian Taylor
Most organisations have woken up to the social media phenomena by now, although there’s still some confusion and debate around which platforms to use, and how to maximise participation and effectiveness of these feeds. Here’s some food for thought for those of you starting out, or considering embarking on a little ‘social media spring cleaning’.
What can social media do for me?
There are plenty of benefits to using social media:
- it can build closer relationships and increase engagement with your customers and stakeholders
- it can help you to gain further insight into what makes your customers tick
- it can get your customers talking to you and to each other
- should you need to give or receive information quickly, you have a receptive communication channel ready to go. Read on…
2010
14
May
By Christian Taylor
After a global recession, which put millions out of work, it seems that some jobseekers are having to come up with more innovative ways to stand out from the crowd. Not content to sit back and wait for the right role to be advertised, some are putting the internet to work for them in creative ways, and we could all learn a lot from how they’re doing it.
Alec Brownstein is a great example. In his quest for the perfect job he spent £4 ($6 USD) on Google adwords to reach five creative directors at major advertising and marketing firms: Scott Vitrone, Ian Reichenthal, Gerry Graf, Tony Granger, and David Droga. Basically he banked on the fact that these directors would be googling themselves at some point, and amongst the search results was his ad which simply read “Googling yourself is fun, hiring me is fun too.” He got four interviews, two job offers, and according to FastCompany.com, he’s now employed at Young & Rubicam. Definitely a slam dunk for Alec!
2010
30
Apr
By Hugh Fidgen
Last week, Facebook revealed their latest tool to help webmasters “Socialise” their sites – Facebook Open Graph.
Open Graph is Facebook’s latest foray into search engine functionality and if all else fails, it’s best to think of it simply as the first step towards a social search engine. Facebook is hoping that as people browse the web they will “like” pages by clicking a Facebook button which then informs their friends via Facebook.
Open Graph will enable sites which you’ve never been to before display recommendations and information tailored for your tastes based on what you or your friends have previously “liked”. At surface level then this is just a slightly more powerful version of those buttons you see around the web which enable you to share stuff you like with your friends. But the story of Open Graph is going to be so much more than that.
2010
12
Apr
By Dan Hawtrey
A client asked me the other day to provide a cost estimate for some creative work. He wanted a concept that clearly communicates the unique benefit of his product. Something simple, powerful and persuasive. Something like the old Araldite ad with the car stuck to a billboard (ok, we might not come up with something quite as iconic as this but who knows?).
This concept would be used on the website, on newsletters and potentially offline too. Nothing strange in that… but then I realised that this request was actually quite unusual.
The product in question was a medical device to help prevent deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in hospital patients. I thought I’d try and find some other examples of medical devices that use a creative concept to get across their USP. I found very little indeed (there’s a list of the best examples below). Most medical device websites launch straight into the product features, often ignoring the benefits. If you’re lucky, you might get a big photo of the product on the homepage.
