Content or Inbound Marketing is the practice of attracting highly qualified leads into your sales funnel rather than adopting a scatter gun approach as defined by most forms of ‘outbound’ marketing.

Traditionally outbound marketing depended on volume methods of drumming up business through media advertising, trade shows, cold calling, leafleting and cold calling. The theory was that if you played the numbers game –i.e. contacted or touched sufficient numbers of cold clients – one or two would pop their heads up over the parapet ready to be converted into customers.

This method of gaining customers is slow, ineffective and massively expensive, and when the credit crunch came along and purse strings were tightened (despite marketing being the last thing you should cut back on when the going gets tough!) the effectiveness and value for money of these practices was examined and found to be severely lacking.

Companies have suddenly woken up to the fact that old style marketing needed a shake-up and are now seeking efficient and affordable ways to acquire new leads.

The most commonly used forms of Inbound Marketing techniques are blogging, social media interaction, search engine optimisation, teleseminars and webinars, and companies are struggling to adapt to these new technologies because of an age-old problem.

Content

Since the early days of the internet, the adage ‘Content is King’ has been the defining factor. Good content to feed the search engines to drive traffic, to keep visitors engaged.

Given the algorithmic idiosyncracies of Google and its recent round of Panda updates that can have a significant effect on the search engine visibility of some websites, having good relevant content is the cornerstone of any inbound marketing campaign.
Google has announced a new Panda refresh on January 22nd 2013, making this version number 24.

This refresh has a noticeable impact 1.2% of English based queries according to Google. The previous confirmed update was 23 which impacted 1.3% of English queries on December 21, 2012. Prior to that was a Panda refresh on November 21st 2012 that impacted 0.8% of search queries. It seems like Google is now rolling out these updates every four weeks or so.
Industry experts Econsultancy & Outbrain report that 90% of marketers believe content marketing will become more important this year. Translating this into real figures means that over 24 million marketers worldwide agree with this proposition.

New software specific to content marketing has boomed; Flockler, GatherContent, InboundWriter and Curata are just a few of the new iterations.

But is it really new? I know our sister company Glass Frog has been providing these services for over a year in the North East, but given the slow rate of adoption and economic caution shown by companies in this geographic sector, take up has not been huge.

We have had greater success in Canada and the US where innovative solutions are expected as the norm. However what these inbound marketing agencies are doing extremely well  is to repackage existing offerings and appearing to offer something completely new. And as any marketer knows, NEW is a very effective sales tool.

Content marketing is very powerful, but does require talented exponents of the various crafts such as copywriting linked to strategic planning to make the necessary impact. These  talents are not normally found in the organisations that need them most.

Content marketing also requires the same labour-intensive attention that  Social Media Marketing demands.  To create great content requires a good strategy, good writers and constant attention.

Writing blog posts, creating informative ebooks and developing infographics  is a specialist area as are
the skills required to create engaging video and to distribute it effectively across the online media channels.

The new internet gold rush is on; just make sure you choose your tools wisely – and prospect in the areas that you know hold the potential for the biggest return.

Is it that time already?

Christmas is coming – unless you’re a Mayan anyway. On December 21st 2012, according to their calendar its the end. The end of what we aren’t quite sure, but for many it signifies the end of the year, the end of a major marketing push, the final tidy up before the excesses of Christmas and New Year take their toll.

The year hasn’t been a pretty one in economic and weather terms, with cuts here, floods there, EEC crises, 100 year storms, 50 year storms….. But hasn’t it also been an uplifting year? Magnificent Olympics of which I  felt privileged to attend, a glimmer of hope for the political future – I refer to Boris of course; who could be downcast when we have the potential of a mop-headed, charisma-driven country leader who has made the term gaffe a political plus!

There has been a lot of regrouping, resorting and restrategising at Images to find the elusive formula for success, but we think we have it sussed.

Out with the same old, same old and in with the proven results strategies backed by some powerful software systems; our biggest success so far this year was having so much traffic going to a website that it was banished by the hosting company to a super high capacity server. We will be repeating this success with another two of our clients by Christmas.

Do you need this kind of success story in your business?

Give us a call on 0191 516 6669 and we will see if we can wave some magic your way.

PS Don’t call on December 21st – we will be watching the end as it unfolds from the top of Mount Teide….

Very quick blog post that you may find useful:

LinkedIn was hacked, a fact confirmed by the company on June 6th 2012.

The LinkedIn  blog indicated that there had been a breach, and numerous individuals have confirmed that LinkedIn’s database has indeed been hacked.

If you have a LinkedIn account, we strongly suggest that you immediately:

Change your LinkedIn password
Check if you have re-used your LinkedIn password on any other websites and if so, change those passwords too.
There is an online tool available that will give you an indication that your account was one of those affected. It was developed by a company called LastPass and to access the tool, simply follow this link – https://lastpass.com/linkedin/

Check if you have re-used your LinkedIn password on any other websites and if so, change those passwords too.

On May 26th 2011 a new EU originated law came into effect that required website owners to make significant changes to their sites and may fundamentally change the whole web browsing and shopping experience for all UK businesses.
The EU Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive was modified in November 2009 to include an effort to regulate online cookies and local browser storage. According to the previous law, websites had to allow people to opt-out of cookies. However, the European Parliament decided that users should be asked to opt in before cookies are placed on their computers. The UK then imported the same wording of the directive into UK law in May 2011, but gave UK websites one year to comply with the law. The deadline for compliance with the law is 26 May 2012.

The Information Commissioner, head of the ICO, the body responsible for enforcing the new law stated in April  that businesses in the UK were in the ’11th hour’ of the grace period, and made it very clear that those site owners that continue to adopt a ‘wait and see what happens’ policy, are running a much higher risk of enforcement than anyone else.

The ICO also promised to take a hard-line approach to enforcement, with a proactive campaign rather than the reactive route the organisation has taken in the past. However with limited resources this indicates that the ICO will target high-profile, visitor –heavy sites rather than a mass scattergun approach.

This doesn’t mean that we should be complacent about compliance; every website owner should make some effort to at least move towards compliance. On May 26th, try to avoid being an easy target – sometimes the powers that be might want to have a sacrificial lamb to show how determined they are – or to meet Government targets.

You never know.
For our own website we have taken the stance that we alert users to the fact that cookies are used and explain how they are used, giving them the option to stay and have cookies on their computer or to leave the site and delete the cookies our site has placed should they so wish. If someone dismisses the message, their consent is deemed implicit.
The Government were far too quick to jump on this directive – the UK are only one of three of the 27 EU member states to sign up to it, and they now have to enforce something that is so vague that it could be more aptly described as the EU Sieve directive – lots of holes that nobody is sure how to plug.
Our earnings from the digital industry is enormous – but will this latest directive drive companies – and their taxable profits – to offshore havens whose privacy concerns are not taken to the extreme?

For example, the affiliate marketing industry — which relies on cookies to show on which sites people have seen brand promotions — could  be damaged to the cost of £80 million. The  decamping from the UK of the online gambling industry showed what happens when Governments get legislation-happy and the exodus of businesses to other territories to avoid the cost of compliance with the EU directive could cost the country as much as £2.922 billion in lost revenues.

Mobile Marketing – A Powerful Way to Promote Your Business, Brand or Product

Mobile Marketing – Ways To Reach Your Customers On Their Mobile Device

1.    SMS and MMS Marketing.

2.    Mobile Web Marketing

3.    Mobile Apps

4.    QR Codes

5.    User Controlled Means