Snap Marketing

because… it's all about getting your foot in the door

Getting what YOU want from your Graphic Design Agency

Use a good agency to do what they do best – to deliver great creative solutions. But give them a fighting chance to create some that makes the right (and hopefully lasting) impression on your target audience by doing some prep first! Give your agency a proper briefing, and you will find that not only will they produce some great work for you, it has the best chance of being ‘on message’ – and aligned to your business objectives. They should also come back with a couple of alternative executions for you to choose from.

The 5 things your Brand Guidelines MUST Cover

In a previous blog, “its all about the Brand stupid“, we discussed the necessity for a strong brand and stronger brand guidelines. In this blog we have a got a 5 point checklist for your brand guidelines document. 1. Core Brand Values The Core Brand Values are the words we use to describe the main [...]

The 5 Things your Brand Guidelines MUST Cover

In a previous blog, “its all about the Brand stupid“, we discussed the necessity for a strong brand and stronger brand guidelines. In this blog we have a got a 5 point checklist for your brand guidelines document. 1. Core Brand Values The Core Brand Values are the words we use to describe the main [...]

Its all about the Brand, stupid!

I learned much of what I know about branding and brand development from my time in marketing at Philips and Samsung, and for me they threw up some really interesting lessons that shaped my marketing thinking. In different ways they are both benchmark companies, full of strong ideas that typify how an organisation should be [...]

Get more business from your business card

Totally obsessed with website design, SEO and now social media, as modern-day graphic designers we often overlook traditional marketing materials such as print! The most fundamental form of printed material is the humble business card –but how powerful can they be? The answer is - they are really crucial: at business events, meeting clients face [...]

New Website Design for 2012? Seven tips for Success!

Posted by Matthew on January 4th, 2012

New year, new years resolutions for the business and a fresh start and you may be thinking that its time for that old site you had developed by those agency boys with the pony tails and black jeans ten years ago is time for a refresh. So given that you don’t change your website design very often, a bit like changing your living room TV, things will have changed over the years since you last looked at your site and the options available.

Marketing Brief

Firstly decide what the purpose of the site and for this you need to produce a proper brief. You want to get want YOU want from your website design agency – Many clients expect us marketing experts to come up with the creative solution, but the reality is that often the client does not have a clear idea of what it is they are trying to achieve before they start.

The poor old marketing agency is left to fill in the gaps and make certain assumptions – and as they say the word assume is made from – ‘ass’ ‘u’ and ‘ me’ – figure it out. What you (and your agency) need is a Marketing Brief. Here’s a previous blog post outlining 10 top tips to help you develop this.

Professional Website design

Your website is the foundation of all your outbound marketing and your brand and image building campaigns. Your great website design enables potential customers to find, understand and remember your business.

However, this will only happen only if your website is designed professional from the ground up or it will just another bad site that, (if you are lucky no one will find, or take notice of even when they do get there!) will put off more of those hard-earned prospects than it converts. Here’s a previous blog to give you some pointers on why you need professional website design

Website Design – Content Managed or Bespoke

The website design world has moved on from Dreamweaver and there are many ways a website can be developed and the plethora of new website technologies can be confusing – asp, php, html – Joomla, Drupal, WordPress – bespoke, content managed. But great news is that gone are the days of needing the agency to make a change for you at £200 a pop – now you know why those boys were all driving around in 911s! You want to be able to edit your site and our favourite system for most sites with the possible exception of e-commerce, is WordPress simply for the friendly interface and the array of plugins available that make it incredibly search engine and social media friendly.

Measure – set up targeted website metrics

If you are going to invest in new website design, then you must put in place some key measurement tools so that you can track how your prospects interact with with it. Check out my article here on using metrics to optimise your web-marketing.

Great Images

They say a picture is worth a thousand words – but in the ultra competitive world of marketing, where you have an instant to create an impression, your images need to be spot on in terms of resolution. Good images cost money – whether you buy them in from a library or if you get them shot yourself. So you will need to use them as much as you can to maximise your investment. Here’s some pointers about using graphics in marketing.

Setting the new website live – avoid killing your search engine rankings

Some clients are aware that there might be SEO issues, but some are blissfully ignorant. Going live with a fresh website design without considering the SEO implications first is like building a beautiful new house with no drive, no front gate and no front door! In other words no one will find it or be able to get in when they do!

With that in mind, here are 5 top SEO killers to avoid before your web designer puts pen to paper or the website developer even lays down a single line of code.

Get Social

Presence on social media is now really important and its impact on inbound marketing, SEO (search engine optimisation), even website design and the overall business is significant. So we thought about this and here’s our top 10 tips for social media.

Written by Matthew Simmons

5 Reasons why you should invest in SEO for your website

Posted by Matthew on December 11th, 2011

In marketing your business successfully these days, great website design is simply not enough, your website needs to be found by your customers.

You can invest in pay per click advertising, and there is no question that this works and will get you instant results, but to have lasting success you need to be at the top of the search engines all the time.

Here are five reasons that you need to consider investing in search engine optimisation (SEO).

When people are looking for information on the internet, to find out about services or products to buy, more than 80% of users (your potential customers) rely on search engines, not just surfing around at random.
Research indicates that over 80% of these internet searchers do not click on pay per click ads
Over 60% of websites that are displayed at the top of the search engine results get clicked on by internet users. In other words get to the top for something you offer, and you WILL get clicks. And more clicks than those below you.
If internet users find you naturally at the top (because of search engine optimisation – SEO – as opposed to paid ads) you will get more conversions. Research indicates that because of the authority you get from being top of the rankings, users have more confidence in your offering and you can expect to increase conversion ratios by up to 33%.
Over the 12 months, the costs of paid ads (PPC) costs have grown by nearly 40% and they continue to rise.

And as I said before, SEO will keep you at the top.
Written by Matthew Simmons

Ye haaaaa – Snap is No 1 on Google!

Posted by Matthew on November 24th, 2011

Website Design Reading

Snap just got to position number 1 on Google this afternoon for the key search phrase Website Design Reading!

Using the same search engine marketing techniques that we offer our clients, Snap Marketing has now reached number one for this search term as well as Marketing Berkshire.

As us how you can benefit from this expertise for your website we are happy to share the love! Contact us by email or call us on 0118 982 0717 to find out how we can do this for your site too.

Website Design – Snap Launches New Client Site

Posted by Deb on November 14th, 2011

Snap Marketing Launches new Website Design for Tutela Medical

Snap Marketing has developed a brand new Website Design to complement the recent re-branding, including Logo Design, of Tutela Medical with a fresh new look and easy to follow architecture.

The new website has been updated with much more detail about the latest wireless temperature monitoring products and web-based services offered by Tutela, and this will provide the support and information needed to answer our customer’s most common questions.

The website adds a news section and blog, together with a resources area which will allow downloads of study day materials and white papers. Social media buttons and an RSS feed allow customers to keep up to date with the latest news on products and updates as they emerge.

We hope you find the time to check it out – www.tutelamedical.com

Marketing not working? Here’s 5 Reasons why!

Posted by Deb on November 10th, 2011

5 Reasons why your Marketing doesn’t work

If we had a fiver for every prospect who told us that that “they had tried marketing once and it didn’t work”, Matthew and I would be driving around in Porsche Boxsters – or maybe a stretch limo!

But this statement will resonate with lots of businesses, and the trouble is, how can you tell if your marketing’s missing the mark and what can you do to make it effective?

Here are the five key insights that your marketing might need help.

Targeting

Your marketing isn’t targeted at the correct audience. If your marketing is not conceived without a specific audience in mind, it won’t appeal to your customers because it won’t grab them emotionally. Furthermore, it may not communicate in a language they understand or show any understanding of their problems. We try and refocus our clients on the customer pain and less about what they sell. See the product positioning post here. If you don’t communicate to the audience’s emotions, it’s a waste of your marketing investment and your target audiences will perceive it as a waste of their time too.

On Message

Your Marketing is in Marketing-Speak or Trade BS. If your marketing doesn’t sound like it has any relevance to a real people, you are removing any personality and it will miss the mark by a mile. Take website design or advertising – How often do you see advertising or receive marketing literature telling how wonderful the brand is or exceptional the product is featured – but in a secret language that means nothing to you? By removing any personality or empathy from your marketing messages, it will bore or worse irritate its intended readership. To work, and this means to stimulate some action by the target audience, your marketing message must be lively and understandable. We use the SO WHAT test here. If you underestimate the human aspect of your message, your readers won’t be able to relate to it.

Niche Marketing

Your offering is too broad. If you want to really get your marketing to cut through, your message needs to be specific. Its very easy, and appealing to believe that if you say you can offer every service in your competitive field, you become known as a jack of all trades and master of none. Far better to be know to be an expert in a niche or two and then up-sell and cross sell.

Be interesting

If your marketing is boring, you can have the most useful information in the world and your target audience won’t give it another look! Your customers are people first and consumers second – people respond to visual stimulus more than any other. Package your marketing in paragraphs of text with no photographs or great graphics won’t get the response you need to convert prospects into customers.

Promote Value

Your marketing is an constant stream of price promotions. This is the fastest way of killing your business ever devised by mankind. Especially if you are email marketing. Your prospect list will go down faster than an Italian politician’s trousers at a bunga-bunga party if you only promote on price – good customers get put off. And that will be the only type of customer you will recruit. And they will only be as loyal as your last great deal.

Top 10 Tips for a Social Media Strategy

Posted by Matthew on August 22nd, 2011

A colleague asked us the other day what would be our top 10 tips for using social media as a marketing tool and it occurred to us that we hadn’t blogged about social media for a while. Bob wanted to know why we felt social media was important and what its impact was on marketing, SEO (search engine optimisation), even website design and then the overall business. So we thought about this and here’s our top 10.

Social media needs commitment – time for authoring content and time for interacting. Don’t do it if you are not prepared to make time. Be totally objective. What do you want to achieve by using social media?
Join lots of social media sites, but focus efforts on only on a couple. For business I would suggest Twitter and Linked-In
Remember that everything you post is now in the public domain – permanently. Does your next client need to know how many pints of lager you consumed with your rugby curry boys on saturday?
Optimise your website and remember that social media is great for search engine optimization. This will focus you on the topics to blog/interact on and help you with important keywords. Google ranks sites now on social media authority – take advantage of this – and many will allow you links back to your website – don’t miss this opportunity and use anchor text if you can.
Be interesting – try and be an authority on what you do best. That way people will want to engage with you. Reply if people connect or comment on your posts.
Interact – ask questions. Find people with common business interests – engage – help them first.
Always keep your profile current and keyword rich – choose a great username that involves keywords if appropriate.
Use social media sites that can integrate. For example, FaceBook can link with Twitter so that any status update on FaceBook reflects as a tweet, or vica versa and Twitter can integrate with Linked in so any tweets update automatically on your LinkedIn profile.
You cannot manage it all without some automation – use Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to monitor important contacts and their social media activity. You can also schedule tweets.
Watch out for new social media sites. They might be the next Twitter or FaceBook.

Think Joined-up Sales and Marketing

Posted by Deb on August 15th, 2011

In this tough economy, resources are really tight. Not only is the marketing budget highly restricted but we are all finding resources – human ones – and as a direct result, personal time limited. So how can we compete, how do we get more business from existing customers and new business from prospects?

Remember the sales funnel?

We have to address each stage and think long term; as well as getting the short term fix that brings in this months mortgage! And that means being totally customer focused.

There are six critical tactics to identify great prospects and to convert them into happy paying customers:

Cease focusing on pushing product – engage a company-wide customer-centric approach – what to they want? – what are their real needs? Check out my “product positioning for duffers” article here.

Identify the most compelling value proposition in your offering that will satisfy those customer needs – this will resonate with the prospect and assist them in choosing you.

Deliver a totally consistent message in all your outbound communications based on this compelling value proposition – dominate your niche – be known for what you are really good at

Test your efforts – continuously. Analyse, modify and test again.

Adapt your offering to what is right now a constantly changing marketplace – evolve – don’t be a dinosaur - see my previous paper on this.

Sales and Marketing are jointly accountable for sales conversions – the 2 disciplines should be joined at the hip right now.

This are tough times – find out what your customers really want right now, evaluate their response and keep forward momentum on product development – and remember that services are all part of the product – for example terms, warranty, payment credit, support, training etc.

Specialist Engineering Contracts gets to page 1 of Google

Posted by Deb on July 25th, 2011

Following some intensive targeted off and on-page SEO, the Specialist Engineering Contracts website designed by Snap-Marketing, now ranks at the top of Google page one for a keyword – 2 more to go – watch this space!

The website was designed from the bottom up by Snap Marketing and we researched some interesting gaps in the market with the keywords we agreed with the client.

We love it when a plan comes together!

Your Website Meta Description is actually an Ad

Posted by Deb on June 16th, 2011

I was doing a presentation on SEO to the local BNI chapter yesterday – and was trying to explain the various elements of on-page optimisation in the context of website design in order to highlight the difference between on-page and off page SEO.

So I put up this screen grab of a typical site to show the keyword rich title tag, header tags body copy – we optimise this is all our website designs and re-redesigns. But today, reflecting on what I told the audience about how important the meta description in website design and SEO, it got me thinking.

The meta description of a web page is the text that appears under the title tag in the search engine results and basically describes that page. And I have been looking at it as an key SEO element, which it is. But hang on, the meta description for an important page on your site an advertisement – and it can and should invite the surfer to take action. For example a click through.
So a compelling meta description is an important part of making your site more visible on the Web but also a marketing tool in its own right.

But hang it – why not make it such a good ad that they don’t need to?
In the image below, we show results from Google for a search on Marketing Consultants Berkshire. The meta description for each web page is the black text below the link in blue. Get those keywords in there for the search engines but also make it strong enough to invoke as call to action – a click through or maybe a phone call.

You’ve got about 150 characters so make them count!

Yee Haaaa! Valued Client to the top of page 1 on Google

Posted by Matthew on June 6th, 2011

After on 4 months off and on-page SEO, the GL Print website, designed for SEO by Snap-Marketing, ranks at the top of Google page one for a keyword – 2 more to go – watch this space!

The website was designed from the bottom up with SEO in mind – with keyword research first, then website structure and navigation, then copy and then off page link building.

We love it when a plan comes together!