Top Search Engines for December 2011

Marketing General, Online Advertising, Search Engine Optimisation Ask Jeeves, Bing, Google, Search Engine Optimisation, Yahoo!

Research conducted by the Design Council found that over a third of the UK’s fastest-growing businesses see design as integral or significant. Here at LexisClick we believe that any business that undervalues the importance of design may be missing out on vital opportunities.

Design can bring a range of commercial benefits if integrated across your business:

• a stronger identity for your business
• improved market position relative to your competitors
• increased sales of your products or services
• greater customer loyalty and fewer customer complaints

All businesses can benefit from an accessible and easy-to-use website, which comes out of good design. Online customers who find your website intuitive are much more likely to purchase from you and revisit your website in the future.

When planning your website, you should think about how your users will want to interact with your site. Attractive and accessible design, ease of navigation, well written content, clear ‘call to actions’ and well designed e-commerce functionality will all make a difference to how effective the site is. At LexisClick Online Marketing we can help you model different customer journeys for each of your target segments so that you use this insight to help define your site map, information and structure.

User-centred website development should include the following steps:

• Understanding your business objectives and how this will affect your website – for example, are there certain requirements that will have an impact on the usability of your website?
• Building ‘wireframe’ models of the website and other mock-ups that can be used to test the ‘look and feel’ of the website prior to full development
• Thinking about ‘persuasive design’ and how your website will support the customer to achieve certain goals on your website – eg a purchase or online registration
• Designing, building and testing – this should be an iterative process that moves towards more functional prototypes and the final ‘live’ website. At this stage, you should aim to use expert evaluation alongside further user testing to ensure your understanding of the user all the way up to launch

At LexisClick our Bournemouth team of web designers love producing sites that are good to look at and great to use. We put a lot of time and effort into planning the websites we design. We start with your target audiences and what they are looking for, then we look at the key messages you want to communicate. Only when this is planned and agreed, do we let our creative web designers loose on making your website look fantastic. When it comes to building your site, our team cover a range of technologies, including the latest content management systems, ecommerce systems and we specialise in building sites in php.

If you’d like us to help you design and build a website, that’s easy to find, a pleasure to use, the first to return to and regularly recommended – give us a call.

We’re a full service digital marketing company based in Bournemouth, Dorset specialising in helping ambitious businesses achieve their objectives, through effective online marketing. Our services include web design,  SEO services, advertising, email marketing,  design and social media marketing.  If you’d like more information feel free to take a wander round our site, contact us or call 01202  788333.

B2B Online Marketing, B2C Online marketing, Marketing General, Web Design, design business benefits, business benefits of design, business value, creative process, design, Web Design

This presentation will take you through how to build a marketing plan in 6 Easy Steps.

It’s ideal if you:

• have never been involved in marketing before and someone has asked you ‘to do’ some marketing

• you work alongside  a maketing department and would like to understand more about what they do
• are being told you need a marketing plan and need to know where to start.

Need more help… feel free to give us a call.

ps. at the moment we’re unable to post the presentation here, but if you’re interested please feel free to call me to request a copy – Janet 01202 788333

(Author – Janet Oglakci, BSc, MSc, MCIM, Chartered Marketeer – Marketing Manager LexisClick)

Marketing General business benefits, marketing measurement, marketing plan, marketing planning, Online Marketing, planning

We’re celebrating a great start to 2012 with the birth of our brand new website. The new site has a complete new look and reflects our  principle values in creating website that are a pleasure to use, the first to return to, and regularly recommended.

Stephen Bavister, MD at LexisClick says ‘The new site looks great, is fun to use and is easy to navigate. We’re a full service digital marketing agency so it was important to show case the breadth of our services  - and I think we’ve achieved this. The site has a fresh feel as it focuses on good design and the importance of the user experience, and the feedback so far has been excellent. ’

To celebrate the launch of our new website we’re offering 10% off any websites commissioned in January and February. We’re a full service digital marketing agency offering website design and build, SEO, Pay-per-Click, email marketing and social media marketing. If you’d like to take advantage of the 10% discount offer you can contact us here or call us on 01202 788333.

Uncategorized

Most companies use email marketing these days as it’s an extremely cost effective way to communicate with prospects and existing customers – and it’s easy to understand why.

To help you create an outstanding email marketing campaign, here are 5 top tips from the LexisClick E-marketing team:

1. Personalise your emails. By simply starting your email with “Hi [subscriber_name]” instead of the boring “Hi there”, you can increase both your reading and click-thru rates enormously. This way your subscribers feel like they already have a relationship with you as you’ve addressed them by their first name.
2. Include multiple calls to action. What is it you want people to do after reading your email – click on a link, visit your website?  Make sure all roads lead logically to your call to action. Remember, if you confuse them, you lose them.
3. Integrate your email marketing campaign with the rest of your online marketing activities. Include links to your social media sites as well as your blog. Your signature is a great place to do this. The more often you repeat your message the more powerful it becomes.
4. Write about one subject. People’s attention span online is short – about 8 seconds for the average email. Work this to your advantage by only writing about one subject. Put the most important thing first, get to the point and be brief!
5. The Preview pane.  Popular email clients such as MS Outlook show a preview of an email when it’s selected in your inbox. Always have some interesting content at the very top of your email, as this is the part that will show in the preview window of your subscribers’ email program. If it’s interesting enough, then your subscriber will open your email and continue reading.

At LexisClick we offer two levels of service for email marketing.  If you’re happy to manage your own marketing, we offer self service access to a market leading email marketing platform. Alternatively if you’d like to hand it over to someone else to manage we offer a fully managed campaign option for both your emails and e-newsletters.  A 12 month campaign starts from £19 per month, plus send rates.

Call us today on 01202 788333 for a chat to discuss how we can help you grow and develop your business.

B2B Online Marketing, Email marketing, Online Marketing

As it’s the first week in January, it’s crystal ball gazing time and not one to be left out we’ve taken a look at the many predictions around what will be the next big thing in Marketing in 2012. We’ve selected a few of what we think are the hottest trends. So read on to discover why the only place to be seen this year is on screen. And if you’re feeling downcast by tales of economic woe, how brands will be ready to divert your attention through gamification and interactive apps. Find out why your purse could soon become a collector’s item and community focused initiatives are set to capture the hearts of consumers.

Digital wallets
Contactless payment devices such as near-field communication (NFC) and QR codes will enter the mainstream in 2012. When used in smartphones, they encourage customers to merge their wallet with their mobile phones. Surveys suggest consumers are ready to embrace this trend. Two-thirds of UK shoppers say cash is inconvenient , according to 2011 surveys by Barclays and PayPal. According to Juniper Research, 300 million devices will be on offer to allow consumers to “tap and pay” through NFC by 2014. It is estimated the value of contactless payments and ticketing using NFC will reach $113bn (£72.4bn) per year by 2016 around the world. (Source: Stylus.com)

Welcome to the cloud
Businesses will invest large amounts of money in cloud computing and mobile technology next year. According to the report: IDC Predictions 2012: Competing for 2020, 2012 will see more money spent on mobiles and tablets than PCs and 80 per cent of commercial applications are set to be on cloud platforms. “The UK is underinvested in IT –  and with advertising and consumer spending rapidly moving online and kit becoming out of date, some rise there is likely,” points out chief executive of the Centre for Economic and Social Research, Douglas McWilliams. (Source: IDC.com, Insight.com)

Local marketing and partnerships
As the clean-up efforts following the London riots show, community love is on the rise. This year will see a resurgence of local marketing to tap into people’s collective devotion to their local community. While the internet by nature is international, there is a growing market for local websites and scope for businesses to tailor websites to specific localities. Brands are also set to tap into this trend for collective working as partnership marketing becomes more common. This will not just be about tactical value-based promotions but about strategic alliance with other brands. (Source:23red)

Screening
In 2012, if it is not on screen, it’s not worth seeing. Touchscreens and tablets have made it much more convenient for consumers to view online while they are on the move. UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s has tapped into this trend by partnering with television provider Sky, allowing shoppers to watch sports events while they shop using in-cart iPad docks and speakers. In 2012, video consumption will soar as brands increasingly use this channel to engage with customers. Video brochures, video newsletters, and regular video communications will become standard features on websites. According to Cisco, 80 per cent of all internet traffic will be driven by video by 2015. (Source: Trendwatching.com, Milwardbrown). Running in tandem with this is the prediction that mobile is set to overtake the desktop PC and laptop – which is why it’s more important than ever to ensure that you have responsive web design to allow for the multitude of devices that your potential customers can access your site via.

Playfulness
In a bid to escape from the grim news about the economy, consumers will become more responsive to entertainment and escapism. Big brands will become more playful, using gamification and other “funware” that use points, puzzles and level progression to attract and engage customers. Social tools and technologies that enable people to interact with TV programmes will explode in 2012. Viewers will be able to interact with TV and producers will draw on this data for creative inspiration. Services such as Bluefin Labs and GetGlue indicate traditional TV ratings may be bolstered by “social ratings” as advertisers start to take into account how a show is travelling beyond the TV audience. (Source: Milward Brown)

LexisClick is a full service digital marketing agency, we specialises in helping businesses grow by using the power of digital marketing, with services such as web design and build, SEO, PPC, email marketing, and social media.

To find out how we can ensure your marketing is on trend in 2012 take a look around our website www.lexisclick.com or give us a call on 01202 788333.

From the LexisClick Marketing Team

(Adapted from Trends for 2012 from The Marketer January 2012)

B2B Online Marketing, Blogging for business, Email marketing, Marketing General, Online Advertising, Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Design

The end is finally nigh for IE6. Microsoft announced Tuesday that Internet Explorer 6 usage in the U.S. has dropped below 1% and is at 7.7% worldwide.

“So as we kick off 2012, we call on the rest of the world – make it your new year’s resolution to end IE6 and move to a modern browser like IE8 or IE9,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post.

So keen is the software giant to move beyond Internet Explorer 6 that they’ve launched a website – ‘The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown’ that bears the slogan ‘Moving the world off Internet Explorer 6′.  On the website IE6Countdown.com Microsoft is making a concentrated effort to get users to move away from the decade-old browser with messages such as ‘it’s time to say goodbye’.

The goal of the website is to get Internet Explorer 6 usage to drop to less than 1% worldwide. Current UK usage is 1.4%.

If you’d like to join the campaign to encourage Internet Explorer 6 users to upgrade visit www.ie6Countdown.com.

Are you still using IE6 let us have your comments!

(Information  sourced via Mashable.com)

Marketing General, Online Marketing, Web Design