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 “The UK is underinvested in IT –  and with advertising and consumer spending rapidly moving online and kit becoming out of date, some rise there is likely,” points out chief executive of the Centre for Economic and Social Research, Douglas McWilliams.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

We love ‘to be’ and ‘to get creative’ – here’s a design project that we’ve worked on recently. The brief was to create a stand out look and feel for a Women’s only networking group, aimed at management professionals and business owners. The organisers wanted a creative solution that would help them stand out in a busy market place. The design together with the positioning statement incorporates both the fun element of the group and its educational  purpose.

To date the concept has been used on their marketing collateral, email template, pull up banner stands and business cards.

To find out more about our Marketing Services click here.

If you’d like us to give you a fresh look  contact the Design Team at LexisClick on 01202 788333.

Fun Corner, Inspiration, Marketing General, Online Advertising, Online Marketing, Uncategorized, Web Design, design

If you’d like to refresh your brand, or want to inject new life into your marketing materials – give us a call!

Email marketing, Inspiration, LexisClick News, Marketing General, Online Advertising, Uncategorized, Web Design, design

More information about the producer can be found via the following link

http://blog.piajanebijkerk.com/WordPress/2011/03/18/giving-credit/

B2B Online Marketing, Blogging for business, Email marketing, Marketing General, Online Marketing, Uncategorized, Web Design

If you are responsible for your company’s website you should be aware of the recent changes to EU privacy rules governing websites and information they might save on users’ computers. The most common method used is cookies, that store information that your website can access on your website users’ computers, until they expire or are deleted.  If you have read the guidance from the ICO (Information Commissioners Office) you may well have come away feeling none the wiser about what you should be doing in regards to this new ruling. Well you won’t be alone; the guidance is woolly to say the least. So what do you do? Stick your head in the sand and hope for the best? Or make sure you are doing what you can to comply with the law, whilst making sure you aren’t giving up competitive advantage for your business and its website.

You may not even know whether your website is using cookies. A cookie is a common method used by web developers to temporarily save information from a website that can be accessed by the website as you move between pages, sites, or return to the site at a later date. It is commonly used by website analytics software and is also used by a number of online advertising networks to personalise advertising based on your browsing history. If you don’t know if you’re using cookies, then find out if you are using Google Analytics or Google Adwords conversion tracking. If you are using one of these common tools, then your website will be using cookies.

It might be tempting to wait and see what happens or perhaps hope it washes over, but one thing that the ICO guidance is clear on is that it will take a dim view if a business doesn’t have a clear plan on giving users the option to opt out of information being stored in regards to their use of its website.

To help Bournemouth based businesses understand the implications of this change in the law in regards to their website we have teamed up with Grid Law, a Bournemouth based legal firm, to offer a FREE assessment of your website and guidance on whether your website complies with this latest EU ruling and what you should do if it doesn’t.

For further information on how we can help you ensure that your website is complying with the law contact us on 01202 961336

B2B Online Marketing, Marketing General, Online Marketing, Web Design

Your potential customers are coming to your website to buy from you. You have about 50 milliseconds to impress them.

Give them the right first impression and you’ll significantly increase your chances of getting the sale. Give them the wrong impression and you’ll be facing an uphill battle to win their business.

Don’t underestimate the time, skill and experience it takes to create the right first impression. Read more…

Web Design colour, design, usability

The latest version of the Opera browser was announced yesterday. The browser Opera 10.0 named Peregrine, with its new Presto 2.2 rendering engine, was released in Alpha format for initial testing by its community of users. Opera traditionally doesn’t have much market share in comparison with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox. Now with the launch of Google Chrome it faces even more competition. However, the browser does have a loyal following and with its variety of market leading features it has led the field in terms of browser functionality for some time. Many of the features of the major browsers that have been launched with much fanfare over the last few years were in place sometime before in Opera.

The latest version of the Opera browser has been launched with a performance boost, 100/100 on the Acid3 test, and a variety of improvements to its built in Opera mail client.
Opera mail is a relatively unknown mail client, which boast some impressive features and is in many ways much quicker and easier to use than its Microsoft competitors.

It is unlikely to make much of a ripple in the Internet Explorer and Firefox pond, but is well worth a look if you are interested in alternative browser features.

Web Design

The W3C have recently released a draft literature review of web accessibility for older users. The paper makes for interesting reading for anyone designing web sites with a broad demographic or specifically for older users.

Whilst the paper questions what is an older user, it doesn’t come to a clear conclusion but indicates that it is any one over the age of 60. Exploring the number of users online over this age indicates that whilst the number of internet users declines steadily as age increases, there is still quite a large number of users in the older demographic.

The key is that web designers and businesses ignoring older users when designing their sites, run the risk of alienating an important section of their customer base.

Visit: http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-wai-age-literature-20080514/ to read the full paper.

Web Design

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) announced their latest test designed to expose flaws in the implementation of mature Web standards in Web browsers. The tests are designed to allow the manufacturers of Web browsers, to test their software and ensure it displays and functions correctly with today’s web pages and those of the future.

The Acid3 Test is designed to test specifications for Web 2.0, and exposes potential flaws in implementations of the public ECMAScript 262 and W3C Document Object Model 2 standards. Collectively known as DOM Scripting, it is these technologies that enable advanced page interactivity and power many advanced web applications such as web-based email and online office applications.

As a series of 100 mini-tests, Acid3 has already been found to expose flaws in all tested browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. WaSP hopes that Acid3 will prove useful to browser makers during the development of future versions of their products.

WaSP has a history of such initiatives. In 1997, emeritus member Todd Fahrner, together with a group of crack Web developers dubbed the “CSS Samurai,” created an “Acid Test” that highlighted shortcomings in browser support for CSS. The Acid Test was instrumental in moving the industry much closer to the goal of consistent rendering of Web pages in different browsers. This was followed by Acid2 in 2005, designed to expose flaws in the implementation of mature Web standards such as HTML, CSS, and PNG. Acid3 builds on and extends this legacy to web applications in 2008

Acid3 can be found online at http://www.webstandards.org/acid3/

Web Design