Here is the scenario, competitor #1 has a company name called Pepsi, you however have a fantastic new drink that you want to market – now given that we are in the 21st century and the thought of not having freedom of choice scares people so much they sit outside the houses of parliament starving themselves to make a point – why can’t you as a product developer / business legally target the same channels as your competitors.

Look at Harpers Bizarre as a prime example – as a design agency we have a few clients who are in the fashion industry, this is a prime candidate for this scenario – Armani perfume have a full page advert in the opening pages of this month’s edition, on the facing page is a another full page advert for Gaultier Perfumes – this is as basic of a marketing strategy as you could get; find your competitors and product place yourself alongside them for maximum exposure and more importantly, CUSTOMER CHOICE.

Okay the brands above are an extreme, and it’s highly unlikely that any of us have a company big enough to even dream about trying to take a cut from their profits, but we all accept that in this day and age.

This is where some companies, INCLUDING MARKETING COMPANIES can’t translate online marketing from “normal” advertising channels such as magazines, and instead of looking at this as a marketing strategy they will look at it as an underhanded strategy of stealing business… Its not underhanded in any form, underhanded marketing employs tactics like contacting your clients directly without your knowledge, what we are explaining is “piggy-backing placements” wich is simple marketing.

So as a design/marketing studio who runs online campaigns for its clients as well as ourselves, if we aim some of our Adwords at competitors, why shouldn’t we, we want to show people there are other options available to any potential clients, let’s call it virtual networking, like two or more design/marketing companies being at the same event – all companies then get to show their skill-sets, and we let the client choose who they want to use.

So putting this into the Adword world as long as you stay within Google’s guidelines then nothing is illegal, no trademarks have been breached and Google Adwords accepts this as a normal route of advertising – some say it’s not moral, but ask Lord Sugar how much he made from moral advertising! – and if we return to the Harper’s Bizarre scenario does your customer when choosing their perfume care about moral marketing techniques, definatly not,  they try both scents and choose the one they like.

So let’s see what is acceptable in the Adword guidelines.

your company runs an advert that is as follows:

 Mr. Wilsons Dandelion & Burdock

Organic Dandelion and Burdock, established in 1999 and brewed in Lancashire with real burdock

www.mrwilsons.co.uk

And this is triggered with the keyword Pepsi – There is nothing illegal in this instance, you are not in breach of a trademark, and you are within Google’s guidelines.

BUT if you was to make an advert like this:

Mr. Wilsons Dandelion and Burdock

The Alternative to Pepsi – Organic Dandelion and Burdock, established in 1999 and brewed in Lancashire with real burdock

www.mrwilsons.co.uk

Now I am sure you can see the trademark issues here, and the result would probably be a takedown notice by Pepsi and a removal of your advert by Google themselves

So what do you do to combat it, NOTHING, hopefully if a client likes your work more than your competitor you will be chosen for the project, if they prefer your competitors portfolio then the client wasn’t right for you.

It’s all about choice and as much as consumers have choice you as an advertiser have just as much choice – if you stay within the law – to advertise anywhere that sells advertising space – Google Adwords is exactly this.

I currently have a massive 20x20ft billboard for another design agency right outside my studio – I won’t say I wasn’t annoyed at first, but eventually you get over these things and realise that is the business world.

Everyone wants needs to get in front of clients.

2. Keep it simple. Many people cite overly complicated navigation or too many pages in the purchase path as reasons they don’t complete their online sale or abandon their shopping cart. Successful eCommerce sites simplify the checkout process and display clear pricing and shipping information. They also post clear return policies and access to customer service. Putting your brick and mortar store’s phone number in a visible place on your Web site is a good idea. Studies suggest that consumers feel more confident knowing you’re just a phone call away if they have a question or if there’s a problem with their order.

3. A picture really is worth a thousand words, so use photos of your products and go easy on the text. Online usability studies suggest that people do not read; they scan. It’s 25% harder to read on the Web, so keep these guidelines in mind for optimum readability: Headlines should be 8 words or less, shoot for 9-12 words on a line (people don’t want to read across the entire screen), keep sentences short (15-20 words) and try to keep summaries under 30 words and hold paragraphs to 40-70 words. In this way you can maintain compelling product descriptions alongside your product offerings.

4. Market your site once it’s live. It’s not enough to just build a Web site. You need to make an effort to market and promote your Web site to new and existing customers. Collect email addresses on your site to help you keep in touch with customers and consider creating a newsletter. Seek links from other sites that complement yours. Optimize your site’s content for relevance and submit it to the major search engines. You’ve got an incredible built-in marketing opportunity in that you can promote your products to millions of  customers. Take advantage of this capability to reach a whole new set of customers.

5. Make payment processing easy. Online shoppers need a way to give you money online. That’s easy these days. You can accept credit card payments with either a PayPal account or an online merchant account. PayPal is ideal for anyone trying out the eCommerce waters since there’s less of an upfront commitment, but you may end up paying more per transaction. If you know from the beginning you’re going to have strong sales and lots of online transactions each month, you may want to consider setting up an online merchant account. The thing to note about PayPal is that both the buyer and the seller need a PayPal account UNLESS you use the PayPal Payment Pro stystem that they offers, where this runs seamlessly into your eCommerce website like any other merchant account – all for a nominal fee per month. It’s so easy to create a PayPal account that more than 96 million consumer accounts have been created at PayPal since it was founded in 1998 and it’s estimated that PayPal has a 24% share of all U.S. online payments.

Generally speaking PPC Campaigns should be done in conjunction with an SEO campaign. They offer a virtually instant way of bringing targeted traffic to your website, albeit at a cost. In terms of general setup, most PPC campaigns are straightforward, but to run them properly and effectively does require ongoing analysis and constant monitoring.

If we consider adwords, get your account setup. Then you need to consider which keywords you want to target….this is can make or break a campaign. It is worth reading an early post done on keyword analysis and selection. Once you have your target words, you then need to start to think about how you want to display your ads ( search network and or display network), and what you want to put in your ads. The content of any ad should be as targeted and relevant as possible, this will help your click through rates (CTR). Don’t just do one ad, make sure you split your campaign into separate ads, this means you can have very specific ads for each group of related keywords.

Time to get started….and time to start monitoring. The key to running a good PPC campaign is to ensure that you always monitor it and make changes as required. As your competitors make changes to their campaigns, this can affect you, so you always need to be looking at what is working and what is not working. You also need to consider your ROI and your conversion rates…..is the amount it is costing you, worth paying given the amount of sales you receive? Monitoring this is vital to ensuring the campaign is worthwhile and effective.

Take your time setting up the campaign, ensure you have thought about the keywords you are targeting, you have set up specific ads for each group of keywords, and you have written the ads with CTRs in mind. Then monitor the effectiveness and start to fine tune your campaign, you won’t get it all right initially so you need to make changes as you go.

And if that’s all too overwhelming, then give the team a ring on 01254 672947

Offsite optimisation combines link building and social media marketing….both of these are a form of marketing, in terms of bringing traffic to your site, but they are also both forms of purely link building for the purposes of moving up the search engines.

Let’ start with standard link building. The thing to always keep in your head is pretty much common sense…..links all have different values in terms of SEO, with the most powerful links come from the most relevant and established websites. If you are selling shoes, then a link from a popular blog about shoes, is going to be worth a lot more than a link from an irrelevant blog that gets no traffic. You can judge the relevance yourself, it’s simply a case of making sure the content on the page, and preferably the whole site, is related to your site/product/service. The other thing to consider is the authority of the site; one way to judge this is the page rank (PR)….the higher the PR the more value the link has. PR is a useful tool, but it shouldn’t be relied on too heavily. Consider downloading the SEO Moz toolbar which gives you an alternative to the page rank.

It’s worth bearing in mind that google would rather people link to naturally, rather than you going out and building links yourself. The argument being that if you write good content then people will naturally link to it. This is an important thing to remember, make sure your content and site are worth linking to…..but it seems a bit naive, given the millions of sites, to presume that all good content will get naturally linked to.

….but where to I get these links from??? That’s the bit that takes hard work, there is no magic solution. Generally, the more valuable a link, the harder it will be to obtain. Directories are a good place to start, there are lists of free and paid directories that can be found by doing a simple search on google….remember the point above, choose the directories that are more relevant to your business. In terms of paying for listings in directories, it really depends on your business. Sites such as business.com and yahoo.com have well established directories that offer very powerful links, and if you have free budget then I would say go for it. There are plenty of other sites that will try and get you to pay for a submission, you just need to choose carefully, most of them are likely to be a waste of money.

Forums are another good source of links. Find relevant forums and start posting on there. Don’t trying whacking links in straightaway, make a few friends and then ask if people mind the odd link. If you are courteous most of the time people won’t mind.

Blogs…these offer multiple sources of links, guest blogging, blog rolls, permanent ads, blog comments. Again it takes time to find relevant blogs, and get in touch with these people. With persistence blogs offer a great source of relevant links.

Social media….like blogs these offer a variety of places for links. If you set up profiles then generally you put a link to your website. Social bookmarking is now very popular and again creates links back to your site.

All of the above takes hard work and a fair amount of time. If someone tries to sell you link building done on the ‘cheap’, then beware. The likely outcome of that is that you will get a load of links from crap, non-related sites…..and these will do very little for you.

The final tip to think about is to do some analysis on your competitor’s websites….see where they get links from, and copy them.

One thing i am yet to cover is ‘no follow’ links – google set these up so that no PR would be passed. In theory this makes the link less useful to you, however don’t avoid these links completely. It is good to have a mixture of follow and nofollow links…..focus more on the follow links but don’t worry too much about this, focus more the relevance and authority of the site.

For details of SEO / PPC make sure you check out our main website.

Bing have tied up with Facebook for a while now and the intention was fairly clear from the outset. Bing have been trying to break the dominance of google in the world of search, and the tie up with Facebook gives them a huge advantage. Facebook holds a huge amount of data about people, including their likes and dislikes. Combining this data with their search algorithms allows Bing to personal search results, which is the way all search engines are looking to progress. Google is now trying to play catch up in the social space and is likely to be bringing in some significant updates shortly.

To cut to the chase, this has big impacts for SEO. As the search engines alter their algorithms, SEO work also has to evolve. Social bookmarking is now increasingly important in terms of offsite optimisation. Having a presence on the main social media sites is important, but also tying these up with the main website and blogs is also important. Companies need to ensure they are up to date with the new functionality becoming available on the social sites; things such as the ‘like’ functionality within Facebook. Add a like button to your website and this will help build your popularity within those sites, and might be particularly useful as future developments come along.

Make sure you keep up to date with the developments in social media and there is no doubt that it will pay dividends for your website and business in the future.

Check out our SEO / PPC pages.

Sophie graduated in graphic design at a German collage which even after being told what its name is I wouldn’t even know where to start with spelling it.

She makes an excellent coffee and even more important is a good designer who fits well into the team.

If your passing pop in for a brew and say hi, or “hallo” as they say in Stuttgart.

They make amazing desktop wallpapers, and have even found themselves on canvases before now in galleries.

The process is simple, download the software from http://iographica.com/ run it on your PC for what ever duration you want, save it ( there is a save button in the software ) then upload it to http://www.iographs.com

Its amazing what art work you can make when processing an invoice, browsing facebook, designing a website or even deleting files from your wife.

Make sure you categorise the Iograph then you can see what other peoples artwork is like.

www.iographs.com

With movie executives such as Spielberg loving (and also using on their new productions) what you can get out of what is purely a photography camera with the capability of capturing Full 1080 HD movies we decided to take the plunge ourselves.

We love moving images as much as we love still ones, so we decided to spend all of five minutes putting this together to show you a behind the scenes look of the KP team.

If you want to enlarge the video, just click on the “Vimeo” logo in the bottom right.

We are looking for companies who require a corporate movie creating, so if you’re in the market for one, give the team a call on : 01254 672 947