This is just a short post and update to the details of our upcoming event on the 11th August in Birmingham:

“Turn Your Website into a Sales and Marketing Machine”

We have decided this month that we will be donating half the money from the tickets to Barnardos. They are an awesome charity (in our opinion), running 415 projects across the UK.

Whatever the issue from drug misuse to disability; youth crime to mental health; sexual abuse to domestic violence; poverty to homelessness; Barnardo’s believes we can bring out the best in every child.

So we thought, as a business, let’s get more exposure and money to them so they can do more of what they do best.

We hope to see you at the event if you can make it.

BOOK HERE… http://www.eventelephant.com/onlinemarketingevent

We all love animals (aside: I don’t) and we all think that using them in advertising to win the ‘cute’ vote is a good idea (aside:I don’t think that either) but sometimes you can take it too far as a Russian company did this week when they thought a parasailing donkey would win them friends. Read the rest of this entry »

We haven’t really spoke about Social Proof too much in this blog. But it’s a very powerful addition to your marketing arsenal.

For those of you that have never heard of Social Proof before, here’s an example.

We’ve all seen the cards placed in hotel bathrooms about the environmental benefits of reusing your towels. Research showed that about 40% of guests reused their towels at least once. When they changed the message on the cards to “The majority of guests who stay in our hotel reuse their towels”. An additional 26% of guests reused towels in response to the revised message.

That’s a very simple example, but show that social proof is a powerful influence. When people see that others like them are doing it, there’s powerful influence for them to do it too.

The reason I tell you all this, is that you really should be getting client testimonials on your website.

If you do a great job for people, which I know you do, then get your clients and customers to tell your audience about it.

It’s even better if you can do it by video. Here’s one of our customers talking of his experience:

There seemed to be a frenzy on a few weeks ago for the new iPhone …

This has caused some queuing outside the O2 shops across the UK. Apple seem to be quite clever in the way they use scarcity to build their brand and there’s some kind of assumption that it must be amazing because it’s hard to get hold of one.

Doesn’t really work on me, I just carried on walking past the queue. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in 2007 Prince upset a lot of traditional media outlets by giving away his album “Planet Earth” for free on the front of the Mail on Sunday. At the time there were predictions that this could seriously backfire and lead to his albums being pulled from stores as people simply stopped buying them. You could see their point – traditional music outlets were and still are being ravaged by the popularity of music downloads, but did it hit Prince in the pocket?

Read the rest of this entry »