2009 October | Norfolk-web-marketing-blog

Archive for October, 2009

How (not) to win clients or ‘a tale of 2 banner printing companies’

Friday, October 16th, 2009

So we’re exhibiting at the All About Business expo in Norwich next Thursday. Now normally we’re ahead of the game and totally organised but we were offered the stand at the last minute and so needed to organise our banner and media at the last minute. Fortunately we’re in the right business design wise to get things going but reliant on others to get things printed.

This blog is the story of one supplier that messed up, was given the chance to rectify but decided they didn’t want to play ball and one supplier who knows about customer service and has potentially won more than a one banner order. When everything goes right it’s fine, it’s not until things go wrong do you really get to know how good someone’s customer service is.

12th October
So we enquired with our regular banner supplier about the price of a vinyl roller banner (see email) it’s quite clear what we wanted. We got an invoice to pay by bacs and duly paid for it the invoice said ‘vinyl banner’ and it went unnoticed that this is in fact not a vinyl roller banner. Maybe presumptuous on our part but when you ask for something then you kind of expect that you are buying what you what you ordered, no?

14th October 10.00
Knock on the door and it’s the courier with a banner – wow that was quick. Opens tube to discover a rolled up vinyl banner with eyelets in the corner. It’s the sort of thing you string up between 2 trees outdoors. I open it anyway and the thing has streaks & scratches down it and is patchy to say the least. It’s not fit for purpose.

12:45
After talking to our graphic designer to confirm we ordered correctly I email the printers to tell them what has happened and give them opportunity to correct the mistake, still got plenty of time to get sorted for next Thursday.

15th October 10:00
No reply or call or anything. I phone the printers roughly 10am and the phone rings and rings and rings and rings then a guy picks up the phone and says they have 100’s of emails to go through and anyway he’s the printer it’s not his problem I need to speak to admin. I ask to be put through to admin but they are on the phone so I ask for a call back. I remind the printer that it’s time critical so could they call back asap so we can get it all sorted.

13:30
Still no call back so I call them back. Phone rings and rings and rings and guess what… it rings and rings and no one answers

14:10
Email arrives form printers basically saying we ordered wrong it’s our problem and no reference to the shoddy goods is mentioned. Unbelievable, talk about not interested in solving or proving that they can deal with the problem. Not very happy!

14:13
I reply to their email with something a little stronger making it quite clear they need to get this sorted or we’ll go elsewhere:

I start looking for an alternative supplier and put a post out on twitter for a Norfolk based banner printer who prints on-site so I can collect. Within minutes I have 5 replies with local recommended suppliers of what I need and start looking at who’s nearest to me. I call one and get an immediate response and an offer to email me the technical sheet and all information. Email arrives within seconds. Now this seems more like it.

After exchanging a few more emails we talk abotu trade accounts and prices and confirmations I can collect in time for the expo next thursday no problem. The day ends and no reply from the original printers (Image Makers Ltd in Essex).

16th October 9:48
Our Graphic designer (Colin, he was off the day before so had to catch up) also emails Image makers to ask what’s going on. In this time he has the artwork to the new printers and they exchange a couple of emails all replied to within minutes I may add.

11:08
We get an email back from Image Makers as follows:

The staff member keen to get the last word in and still no mention about the bad quality banner that was produced. By now of course it’s too late we’ve gone elsewhere and have been looked after well with our new banner printing people.

As it turns out we have 3 more banners to order of which that order will be going to our new found printing company OTW Imaging not far down the road because they seem to understand good professional customer service. I am thankful the banner was coming to us and not to a client

Posted in Company Information, Creospace Friends, Graphic Design, Norfolk, Social Media, Social Networking | No Comments »

The Importance of Branding

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

market website series In business today the importance of branding and direct marketing throughout your daily activities is something of a must. If you aren’t already you should be using branding to promote your strong and resilient business as today’s climate is, lets say, slightly wobbly or perhaps difficult to predict!

If you are already using branding to promote your company message then you are helping to form a ‘seal’ and a quality business and increase value in your business. A brand can help to promote a more solid company that your clients, past present and future, can put their trust in which in the current economic business climate and most certainly screams of importance in the success of your business.

Avoid De-Valuing Your Business
Many businesses are unknowingly de-valuing themselves as they feel reducing prices on products and services is the best way to help attract clients in the recession, in fact it can work in the opposite way and lead to dire times for companies that have not done their homework. The importance of branding means that its critical for you to hold your business head up and carry on until the recession is over and by delivering some consistent and solid messages through the use of direct marketing you can keep your head above water and take the company through the bad times and out the other end without breaking the budget.

Logo Branding
From the start, carrying out direct marketing in ecommerce businesses should always carry a subtle mark, your logo brand. It’s vital to the success of your business in a number of ways, the first being that by using the branding or logo that you have used for years in new marketing projects, upon success the logo becomes more recognised and forms a quality seal for your business.

It’s rather important also that your domain name carries your seal – branding your website using your favourite name is fine if that name is used throughout your business as is well regarded within your industry. Choosing the domain name as the name of your business is fine but create your branding and logo around that and mention it wherever and whenever you conduct direct marketing projects. Building brand recognition in whatever you do is key to gaining clients and being recognised in today’s competitive business sectors.

How to Carry out Business Branding for New Business
We’ve added some good marketing and branding pointers in our next article (How to Carry out Business Branding) that should help if you have a new business or simply want to revamp your old business and turn it into a quality business which is reliable, resilient and trustworthy.

Posted in Branding, Graphic Design, Web Marketing | No Comments »

Marketing Using Social Networking – Twitter an Introduction

Friday, October 9th, 2009

Some companies have announced recently superb gains and additional revenue that has been generated using social networking sites like Twitter. With lots having not been too involved yet with Twitter – it’s a fairly new phenomenon to most of us – we are slowly gaining confidence in its ability in enhancing profit, especially with news like this being announced more and more.

There are some great ways to hop onto its popularity and becoming a company tweeter you can also increase revenue and profit. We wrote this article to provide you with a brief overview of how Twitter works and to start improving your chances of enhancing profit using this fabulous social networking site.

Choose to Follow and Select Followers Carefully
After setting up your Twitter profile using your own name for a more personal approach, perhaps using a company logo and company colours on the page too so that although your profile has an individual voice it also whispers your corporate branding too.

By getting the right followers and following active members you stand a chance of increasing the amount of relevance your Twitter has so select and target your followers so that they are also following you too.

Update Twitter and Post News
Keep your twitter up to date and reply to anyone who tweets you. Retweet people’s tweets that you think others will find interesting, at least for the first few months. Chances are you will build up a good following which then means it becomes fairly hard to retweet everybody on your list. The point is to retweet randomly, or occasionally, and do so politely so that your tweet remains active and your followers know that you make personal replies and do read your tweets, this will help make you more popular and also less likely for people to stop following you.

Like blogging members of Twitter need to aim to gain a following and logging in regularly – a few times a day – you aren’t spending too much of your valuable time but regularly updating your Twitter. We link to our Twitter from our website and have a healthy number of followers that we interact and chat with daily ensuring we are on top of our game and increasing our chances of gaining custom through Twitter. You can get great tools to help manage your twittering and to maximise use of time, we use www.tweetdeck.com.

Interact with your followers in other ways by coming up with advice and news releases and also by involving yourself in discussion. You can do this by adding links to helpful websites, back to your blog or to other Twitters of interest. By sticking to a general subject or theme though not being strict – ie if you are a journalist only tweeting about yourself could be a little boring, however tweeting about your job, the people you meet and the events of the day could be more desirable than talking about your own opinions on your job or ‘bigging up’ your company by trying to sell it. Make it sound interesting by writing what tweeters want to read rather than what you want to write.

Twitter is a massive subject and this brief article can’t cover all the angles so we plan to dedicate more time to publishing more twitter specific articles later.

Posted in Social Media, Social Networking, Web Marketing | No Comments »

Marketing A Website – SEM and SEO

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

market website series Search engine marketing (SEM) or promotion bears huge importance on small business websites as there’s very little reason to have a website that can’t be found! The internet helps your business to reach out to local areas, regions, a country or the whole world and it is hard work to nudge your website up to a ‘top’ spot – it should be found on the first few pages of results when a search is made on a search engine (Google, Yahoo! Etc), many of us don’t even click past the first page of results so the chances of being found if you are not marketing your website and not doing it right can see your site being banned from some search engines all together.

SEM uses anticipation and past factual information to determine words or key phrases people enter into a search engine to find something they want. As an example, if you are in Norfolk and you want to find someone to help you in marketing your website you might enter a phrase like “ Norfolk website marketing company ” at the time of writing there are 124,000 results in the UK alone!

You can see that we have used a key phrase above that was used to help popularity of this page though is also used in the context required in this advice article.

The aim of Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is to engineer and modify a website and its content, sometimes only very slightly, to manipulate and work with the search engines in order to improve the websites chance of being found however the main thing that must be avoided is to incorporate ‘spam’ and using information on the site as a valuable resource of information for your visitors.

Marketing a website can be difficult to inexperienced people as it involves putting together a good balance of lots of content that your visitors find interesting and informative but also a reason for people to visit your website in the first place and to hopefully get them to return again. Search engines ‘rank’ a website based on how popular it is and how relevant its pages are to each other, they also use ‘linking’ out from and into your website to rank it.

Good research is imperative when marketing a website and the person conducting the work has to be able to write great content to publish on the site as well as being able to use their knowledge of search engine promotion and expertise in implementing and updating new content without causing the sites current rankings to drop, the code that your site is written in also should be modified to include SEO changes and before all this a list of keywords should be created as a basis to work from. Longer term issues when marketing a website may cover linking from other websites and promoting by way of blogs, social networking and email marketing.

Tiring and difficult work if you don’t know where to star which is why marketing a website is usually carried out by a professional website marketing company or individual who can conduct the ideal research on your business, your website and who then can complete updates and increase your ranking in the major search engines and in turn increase potential business and visitors coming to your site instead of your competitors – marketing a website is no easy task but one we take on with delight !

Posted in Web Marketing | 1 Comment »

The perfect pie found only in Norfolk

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

perfectpie We always said we’ll try and do some local stuff on our blog and never really got round to it so I’m starting afresh with a little plug and review for a local business (well 2 actually) hear in North Norfolk called Brays Cottage Pork Pies.

Now I’ve always been a big fan of the humble Melton Mowbray (boo hiss I hear) so when I heard about a local baker of pork pies and read lots of rave reviews I had to give them a go. I managed to buy one from Back To The Garden (second plug) on the other side of Holt, a localish organic food shop that grows all their own veg and whilst I was there picked up a cracking bottle of BBQ sauce from TipTree.

There’s a choice of pies but after pondering for 5 I got the chilli pie. I’m always cautious with chilli varieties of anything because as a lover all capsicums spicy chillies are fairly new to this country and most people are not quite ofay with their usage. You either get a single flake or it blows your head off and you can’t taste anything.

So the proof of the pudding is in the eating, what was it like?
The pastry was really nice, a perfect pie pastry that is in no doubt really short and crunchy, just the way I like it. The texture of the filling was light and crumbly, very unusual for a pie so delicately constructed but then I guess that’s what makes it a perfect pie, not compressed like a supermarket pie likened to a powerball wrapped in cardboard. The taste was kind of indescribable, the home-reared Saddleback rare breed pork was very nice indeed and the pie filling had this kind of citrus taste that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, nor my wife but we both noticed it and liked it, maybe that’s the onion marmalade?

So the chillies. Well I think probably a little understated, can afford to turn up the heat just a bit without alienating any customers. Most people who buy chilli variety products expect a little bite and you wouldn’t loose any of that wonderful flavour with a 1000 more scoviles or so, but this is probably nit picking.

By the way the price was nigh on £6 (not sure if that’s RRP or not) which maybe seems high but it was undoubtedly a whole lot of pie, it lasted well and was filling and it’s one of those semi luxuries that you go ‘wow’ at and forget about the price, bit like the cheesecakes from cheesecake.co.uk that cost £25 a shot but are absolutely gorgeous. Not something I’d buy every day but as a treat definitely and when perhaps we were doing a posh buffet for guests as it’s a thing that people would talk about and ask ‘where did you get this pie?’, no doubt about it.

So a Norfolk business plug and a product thumbs up too!

More info www.perfectpie.co.uk

PS: If your something to do with Norfolk and want a plug and link then give us a shout and we’ll sort something out, if you write the article then even better!

Posted in Norfolk | 1 Comment »