…. so rotate several marketing tactics and vary your approach. Your customers tune out after a while if you get repetitive. Not only that, YOU get can bored too. Marketing can be fun, so take advantage of the thousands of opportunities available for communicating your value to customers. Look at Blogs, e marketing, networking events, forums, direct mail, referrals, cold calls and cross selling.
But don’t be random about your selection. Bath Marketing suggests that you plan carefully. Always try and get feedback from customers and adapt your efforts accordingly.

Good luck!

After a very productive breakfast meeting at the Bath Business Club group (very early!) yesterday morning, I finally got around to putting into practice some of the things I preach about and have uploaded some client logos onto my website.

With your website acting like a shop window for the world to see, I think it is important that you show the world who you work with and preferably, what they say about you. Give people the chance to get to know you and your business; create a personality.

If you would like a one hour free audit of your businesses marketing activity, drop paul an email paul@bathmarketingconsultancy.co.uk

A recent post on Marketing Magazine’s website shows that Samsung is reviewing its £23m UK advertising account.
For those agencies that are interested, the electronics company’s UK marketing campaigns are increasingly being used for its global product launches. Martin-Cruz (the company’s Marketing Director) added that he was pushing for a ‘double-digit’ increase in the brand’s 2010 UK marketing budget.

Unfortunately, this account is a little out of reach for Bath Marketing Consultancy, but am more than happy to ride shotgun if required!

This entry is not a witch hunt. It is more about informing you of potential hurdels when working with external people so I thought it was worth sharing….

Anyway, one of these hurdles that I now have personal experience of is being appointed by a client to work with them and develop their online marketing and SEO and then finding that this client already had a very protective advertising agency who arranged their hosting and domain registration through an external third party.

This agency became incredibly juvenile and refused to grant me FTP access to this website despite being instructed to do so by the client on the grounds that they owned the hosting thus preventing the required work taking place. In addition, this agency then tried to enforce that the client in question source new hosting by threatening to take the website down despite the hosting not expiring until 2010.

This is illegal.

If you have paid for a website and its hosting, you own it and therefore have rights to give access to whoever you want, whenever you want.

Bath Marketing’s tips are that, whoever you work with for website design and online marketing, always ensure you have:

a) a back up copy of your website files including any databases
b) full FTP access details
c) full control of your domain name and DX records by making sure they are in your name NOT the person you are working with.

Good luck!!

Bath Marketing Consultancy have just started working with a local company in Vobster called Compact Tractors who had been slipping down the Google rankings despite regular attention from an SEO specialist company in Portsmouth.
As the company relies heavily on the performance of its website, the ability to be found in Google is paramount and, when you offer an exclusive product, the market needs to be able to find it easily via search.

After an extensive period of work, the company is already performing better for organic searches, climbing the organic listing positions and we will be taking over his Google adwords campaign in November and can already predict a cheaper cost per click.

This is the fifth company that we have worked with on their SEO with huge successes resulting in increased traffic, increased enquiries and increased business for our clients.

Give paul a call on 01373 814696 and see what we can do for your business.

A recent article I saw on Article Maker that pretty much sums up the 5 basic steps to getting your website in the best condition to be found on Google and other search engines. There is no single initiative that will tick all the SEO boxes and don\’t be fooled by anyone selling inbound links to your site from someone in India posting your domain name onto link building sites!

If you want the 5 ways look at relevant content, keyword optimisation, link popularity, link quality and article publishing.

Bath Marketing suggest that you work with your web designer and marketing people to lay the foundations for a conclusive online strategy.

Email paul@bathmarketingconsultancy.co.uk

A study by an American company called Epsilon found that email open rates in the US rose by 18.2 per cent during the second quarter of 2009 from 12 months earlier, while click rates remained stable at 5.9 per cent. What this means is that more recipients are opening their emails as apposed to hitting the delete button. What it also means is that there is even more emphasis placed on the actual content of the email or the ‘call to action’ so that these recipients actually click the link in the email.

Epsilon doesnt provide stats for the UK market, but recent figures from Econsultancy suggested that the UK’s email marketing sector is expected to grow by 15 per cent over the course of this year.

Bath Marketing can point you in the direction of free emarketing software, but our suggestion is not to use the design templates, but to outsource the actual design to a professional so that your email is unique and tailored to the recipient.

On 16th October, Gatormail are holding a dedicated seminar in Bristol on improving the effectivness of e marketing. Bath Marketing are attending so please give me a call on 01373 814696 and I will see if I can get you a place.

A recent article from equimedia caught my eye as it stated that, in the US, Google accounted for 71.08 per cent of searches during September, which is a rise of around one per cent from figures recorded in the previous month. This could reflect UK trends as Yahoo and Microsoft´s Bing engine both recorded a fall in searches, with the latter only managing to take less than nine per cent of the market share.

Although Ask.com enjoyed a rise in searches, it still accounts for less than per cent of the market. In addition, the study also highlighted searches of five to more than eight words in length also increasing by two per cent, while shorter alternatives remained stable on a month-to-month basis.

Are consumers becoming even more savvy about how they use the web? Bath Marketing’s answer is that consumers seem to be showing a trend towards knowing exactly what they want and using Google to find it. This in turn means that we MUST have optimised sites that are Google friendly and are 100% representative of what the company does or offers or risk getting the wrong traffic to our websites or, quite simply, none at all.

Isn’t it worth asking a professional to do a critique of your website to be sure? email me on paul@bathmarketingconsultancy.co.uk and I will take a look for free.