Over the past few months, I have experienced the importance of high quality and relevant content to strengthen your brand awareness and visibility online. User-focused content marketing is on the rise and, especially after Google’s most recent algorithm updates Panda and Penguin, high quality and unique content creation should become an essential part of everyone’s online marketing strategy.
Like all internet-based companies, digital agencies such as ours “get” social media. We see it as a key part of our marketing mix and we encourage all our clients to do likewise. All of our team are encouraged to use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc during their working day, but should we insist they separate their work personas from their private ones?
The way we all behave and act at work is guided by our company’s values, contracts and policies and, ultimately, Employment Law. In addition, all businesses should have a policy to cover social networking, setting out when social media can be used at work and defining employees’ responsibilities regarding the company’s reputation and intellectual property, both while they are at work and in their private lives.
Digital agencies, however, have a further problem in that employees use social media at work on behalf of both the company and, sometimes, its clients. Who “owns” these accounts, who is responsible for them, who has access to them and what happens when employees leave? Read on
It’s better to hear recommendations from a third party so Econsultancy fulfils this role with its annual Buyers Guides which have featured SiteVisibility for some years.
Econsultancy produce these guides on a number of topics, including Paid Search Agencies Buyer’s Guide (May 2012) , the SEO Agencies Buyer’s Guide 2012 (March 2012) as well as Content Management Systems (CMS) Buyer’s Guide, Email Marketing Platforms Buyer’s Guide 2012 and E-commerce Platforms Buyer’s Guide among others.
Using interviews and survey data collected about leading agencies and individuals within the digital marketing community, Econsultancy has collated all the data into hugely valuable reports. The data includes costs, levels of expertise, and various other elements which paint quite an interesting picture of each of the various aspects of the digital marketing industry. Read on
Email Marketing is widely regarded as a hugely important and growing part of the digital marketing industry. Think about how many email you get each day: not only from friends and colleagues, but also from stops where you make purchases, grocery stores you have accounts with, and even your bank. Consider the following excerpt:
The UK market for email marketing platforms and services grew by an estimated 15.5% year-on-year to a value of £388 million by the end of 2011
I recently attended email marketing training course, given by the IAB and I wanted to share what I learned. This isn’t a “Dos and Don’ts” type post as we’ve done that, but more a top things to consider when creating an email campaign:
Acquiring and Managing Your Data: Read on
When looking for data on your target market and clients it can sometimes be hard for SME’s to find affordable sources of data. However, what you may not know is that there is a huge amount of data out there that is either low cost or sometimes even free! Gaining data is just one of the ways we can gauge whether we know our market better than it knows us.
It’s possible to find the future trends, market size and sometimes you can even get the profitability of the market and your competitors as a gauge of how you are doing. However, in this time of austerity many companies are just trying to survive and “don’t have the time or resources”. What most don’t seem to realise is that this data can provide real insight that will help you to achieve more, spot trends and increase your profitability.
For example, many people will go on Facebook to complain about a company to their friends – a marketing nightmare – but the best companies can identify that a customer has mentioned them and get in contact in order to solve their problem. This not only leaves you with a customer that can be 2/3 times more satisfied with their purchase, but also gets you seen by their friends as a company that genuinely cares. Read on
In this presentation, Graeme Benstead-Hume, Digital Insights Manager at SiteVisibility, and Steven Way, Principle at Collier Stevens Chartered Surveyors, are discussing a number of ways to efficiently track the return your digital marketing spend is having offline.
While Graeme demonstrates a number of tactics like surveys, QR codes, voucher codes and unique numbers, Steve is discussing the benefits he sees from using call tracking and gives a demonstration.
If you any questions about the benefits of any of these methods, or want to learn more about Call Beacon, our lead tracking solution, please get in touch.
You can watch the webinar here:
Slides can be accessed here:
If you’ve got any comments or questions, the conversation continues in our LinkedIn Group.
Cookies for Cookie Day
We are very excited to be launching our first fundraising activity to help us achieve our goal of raising £1600 for the NSPCC and we will be are raising funds for the NSPCC and awareness for the EU Cookie Law by baking homemade cookies for local Brighton businesses.
If you are based in Brighton and would like to show your support, and treat your office to some sweet treats on a Friday any donations are appreciated and will be going to an amazing cause.
The cookies are available in delicious chocolate chip, oatmeal, and sugar varieties, and 6 cookies will be available for a recommended donation of £10 for 6 and 12 for a recommended donation of £15. What better way to comply with the cookie law than to get some chocolate in your mouth at the end of the week!
Cookies will be sold by half dozen or dozen with all the money raised going to towards the goal of £1600 for NSPCC by the end of 2012. Please dig deep and help us make a difference!
If you would like to place an order or more more information, please email Jamila MacLean Homburg.
Orders must be in no later than Monday 21st May by 5pm to give us plenty of time to bake up a storm! Payments can be made through our Just Giving page: http://www.justgiving.com/sitevisibilityjustgiving.
Get your order in now to avoid disappointment!
SiteVisibility and Sustainability
SiteVisibility recognises the need for sustainable development in business and continually aims to improve the social and environmental impacts of our activities to underpin a healthy, profitable and successful business.
This is not something that just comes from the top down and everyone in the company is given one day per annum to participate in either company or personal volunteering or charity activities and this year we would like to see this happen with everyone working towards assisting with something they are passionate about.
On the 26th May 2011 the enforcement of DIRECTIVE 2002/58/EC was deferred for one year in the UK. Many of us wondered if it would all just go away… it didn’t, and Cookie Day* is almost upon us.
SiteVisibility has written a Privacy and Cookie policy which all site visitors should read.
The ‘Cookie Law’, a tastier synonym of DIRECTIVE 2002/58/EC, is aimed at protecting individuals against the hitherto unregulated use of user behaviour tracking online.
In short the law means that we must now ensure that users are not just aware of the tracking information, such as cookies, that we plan to store on their computers but also that they consent explicitly to us storing that information.
The controversy around this law stems from the fact that browser cookies are all but essential to the modern web experience, many sites simply wouldn’t function without cookies to remember certain information about the user, such as the contents of an e-commerce basket.
SiteVisibility has been busy in 2012; we’ve grown our customer base, published more SEO and Social Media case studies showing huge RoI for our customers, attracted more top Search talent into the SiteVisibility team, the Internet Marketing Podcast has reached 1 million downloads, BrightonSEO exceeded 1000 delegates for the first time and now we’ve opened up our office in England’s 2nd largest City.
SiteVisibilityKeane is a joint venture with one of the UK’s top creative marketing agencies, Keane Brands whose HQ is in Birmingham. The new venture combines the “digital brains” of SiteVisibility with the “beauty” offering of Keane Brands to provide a full suite of digital services to businesses in the Midlands and in particular to manufacturers and leisure sector operators.
It doesn’t matter about the age, size, or type of company/individual that you are, Online reputation management or ORM is becoming more and more important for everyone. There are a couple of reasons for this.
Firstly, the internet never forgets – it is like a big old wardrobe that stores any number of skeletons inside from personal skeletons, to negative skeletons.
