Facebook
Facebook is very much a different creature from Twitter. You don’t post one line sentences in Facebook and expect your message to be amplified, people on Facebook are more concerned about genuine relationship.
A recent report confirms that people are spending more time using Facebook than Google. This alone gives them the upper hand in advertising, and the “Like button” holds great promise, though not yet realized, in changing the marketing landscape in providing ads that we actually care about.The 55-65 female age group is the fasting growing community on Facebook.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn caters to the professionals. When you use this Social Media, you have to put on a different hat. If you want your brand taken seriously, forget about small talks and gossips. Leave the informalities to Facebook. Engage your audience in a professional manner

If you would like more information about a social marketing strategies please contact berry@armadillo-creative.com or visit www.armadillo-creative.com

Apple: Probably few remember the original Apple logo, which featured Sir Isaac Newton sitting under a tree with the inscription ‘“Newton … A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought … Alone.” Thankfully, within a year, Jobs was introduced to Rob Janoff, a young designer based in Palo Alto, California who was assigned to help market the clunky Apple II, a  far cry from today’s sleek MacBook. “For inspiration, the first thing I did was go to the supermarket, buy a bag of apples and slice them up,” recalled Janoff in an interview with Sync Magazine. “I just stared at the wedges for hours.” Eventually, Janoff created the polychromatic Apple logo which survived until 1998.

BP: Founded in 1909, British Petroleum’s (BP) original logo was designed by an amateur who submitted his emblem in a company-wide competition. “A Mr. AR Saunders from the purchasing department won an employee competition in 1920 to design the first BP mark, a boxy ‘B’ and ‘P’ with wings on their edges, set into the outline of a shield,” the company notes on its site. BP, which is now officially incorporated as BP p.l.c., updated its logo in 2000, incorporating green and yellow, perhaps as a means to associate a “green” mentality with the company. Lauded by marketing gurus at first, the logo was later scrutinized (and lampooned) in 2010, when BP became responsible for perhaps the world’s worst oil spill.

2. Yahoo collects around 10 Terabytes of data on its customers each day, which is roughly as much as Tesco collect from their Club Card customers in a year.

3. A recent survey showed surprisingly 44% of Twitter users were happy to be alerted about special offers and new products. 48% had responded to an advert they had received and most startlingly of all 44% had actually referred a product alert onto a friend.

4. 90% of adults use mobile phones, 73% use the internet and 89% watch digital television.

5. In a survey of the top 26 UK retailers, it was found that every £1 spent on online advertising yielded £3.44, a fantastic ROI. Television advertising yielded £2.15 per £1 spent.

6. Over 750 million photos were uploaded to Facebook over the New Year

7. There are 55 million tweets per day, approx 640 tweets per second

8. 10pm -11pm is the most active hour on Twitter

9. The average person spends 15 minutes on YouTube a day

10. The average time browsing via a mobile device is nearly 3 hours a day

In planning your mobile strategy, you’ll want to consider:

1. How will you deliver your mobile experience? Will you create a mobile-optimised version of your website, or offer an application for customers through application marketplaces for smartphones?

2. Will you offer the full functionality of your website, or focus on the critical elements for mobile commerce? 
Here are some considerations based on the feedback from current mobile users:
 UK users prefer to access the mobile internet using a browser rather than an application (70% for mobile versus 55% for application), according to a study by Orange.

3. Speed is more important than full-featured functionality. Faster m-commerce sites have better response rates when compared to more full-featured, but slower, sites. Users want a rich experience, but not at the sacrifice of speed.

If you would like to find out how we can help you contact us on 0191 257 8380 or visit www.armadillo-creative.com

Before diving into the possibilities for your eMarketing plan, let’s briefly touch on marketing plans in general. Not having a written marketing plan, regardless of the size of your business, is a plan to fail. Marketing plans must act as both a plan for the months to come (I prefer a 12 month plan) and a business intelligence tool to report on what’s worked, to what degree, and what should be changed.

Plans should include a healthy mix of marketing strategies that you know to work from past efforts and new strategies you are testing. They should list the pertinent details like:

• Strategy name

• Target market (demographic)

• Quantity

• Cost

• Measurables (website visits, calls, leads, conversions to sale – more granular levels allow more precise analysis and testing)

• Return on investment

Even marketing strategies known to work need to be reported on consistently, as you should be pushing the more successful strategies until you find the point of diminishing return.

Here are some of the top performing eMarketing strategies to consider. Don’t try to take on too many at the same time. Always try to add one or two strategies to your overall marketing plan at a time, testing them against existing strategies and eliminating weaker performing ones.

• Websites – this is a big category, and can include static websites, blogs, landing pages, squeeze pages, and more. A blog is likely your best addition if you don’t already have one. Blogs are well built for search engine optimising, easy to set up and use, and inexpensive to run.

• Article Marketing – writing quality original content and publishing it across the web is a powerful strategy for link building, which is critical for search engine optimisation (SEO) and traffic generation.

• Linkbuilding – building links from other sites to yours is the key to off site SEO.

• Social Media – social media is an important strategy because it gives you exposure to the hundreds of million users spending their time on the sites and also because it is a powerful tool for branding and engagement with your customers. Facebook and Twitter are the big players, but also watch the geolocation sites like Foursquare.

• Press Releases – don’t consider using press release sites as a way to send marketing messages, but if you have PR-worthy news, by all means utilize the cost-effective tools for submitting your press releases online.

If you wish to discuss E-Marketing in more depth contact: vaughan@armadillo-creative.com or call  0191 257 8380 or visit www.armadillo-creative.com

So why does this happen? Well it all revolves around the human desire to win. These high grossing games have detailed competitive multiplayer modes, each with it’s own idiosyncrasies that require hours of practise from the player to perfect. This means that even if a game drops in price from £50 to £20 after 3 months, the vast majority of players will still pay that £50 release day price tag just to get those few extra weeks practise. Thus ensuring they can get to their potential as quickly as possible and keep on winning.

Unfortunately, it is a trait that the film industry has no answer to. With the increasing number of plots being taken from the story lines of the latest ‘great read’. People are more than prepared to wait for prices to come down or take advantage of offers when going to see a film. They already know the story line so there is no desire to find everything out on day one. Waiting a few days ‘til Wednesday just to get 2 for 1 seems much more logical than paying double the price to see a film with a plot you already know.

Pages vs. Profiles

The first concept you need to understand is the difference between pages and profiles on Facebook.

A profile is for a person, and businesses cannot have profiles.

A page can be for a business (or a band, product, or about anything else).

Facebook also has groups, which can be set up by anybody for any purpose. These are nice if you want to restrict access, but are limited in functionality.

So to start creating a page, you’ll first need a profile. This could be an administrative contact or anybody in the company, but be sure the company doesn’t lose control of the page if the person with the profile leaves. The profile really doesn’t need to be used or filled out with every detail, it really acts as a user account which is necessary to set up pages.

Create Your Page

Once your profile is set up, you can create a page by going to Advertising -> Pages -> Create a Page or by using this link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Choose your category and make sure to fill out the form completely.

Set Up Your Page

Your page can be set up to operate much like any other web page, and can be enhanced with;

• Content you create elsewhere on the web (like feeds of RSS or Twitter)

• Custom FBML, Facebook Markup Language (patterned after HTML for websites)

• Facebook Applications – many useful and many distracting apps allow custom functionality, but don’t go crazy and keep your goals for the page in mind

You may want to focus as much on cleaning up the clutter around the page as adding to it. Then decide if you intend for the page to be an online representation of your business and way to contact you, a place to share content with your customers, or even a lead generation source (by embedding a ‘squeeze page’ in your page to collect emails).

Grab Your Username

The last step in setting up your page is to grab a custom URL for your page. Facebook will give you a URL for your page that looks like http://www.facebook.com/yourusername/. Get yours by going to: http://www.facebook.com/username/

If you would like to find out how we can help you contact us on 0191 257 8380 or visit www.armadillo-creative.com

Nearly 16,000 searches are conducted in the UK every minute, which is a huge opportunity to attract customers, who are already interested in your products or services, to your website. A recent Google study revealed that 88% of UK searches use Google, and only 7% of users go on to the third page of results. This highlights the importance of achieving the highest search engine placements possible. If your business has achieved the number one ranking on page one, 100% of your potential customers will find you, but if you are on page 3 only 7% of your potential customers will find you, dramatically decreasing your exposure.

Armadillo Creative offer dedicated SEO solutions which will help your business achieve the desired ranking and increase your site traffic and hopefully business.

If you would like to find out how we can help you contact us on 0191 257 8380 or visit www.armadillo-creative.com

• Average m-commerce spend is high, with an average transaction of £12.20.

• Mobile customers are spontaneous, with 31% reporting that their purpose was spontaneous or impulsive.

• 35% of mobile users that reported having not yet used m-commerce were simply unable because of limitations with their equipment. This number will decrease rapidly, as technology improves by the day.
The IAB’s Alex Kozloff goes on to appeal to businesses: “Whilst m-commerce is on the radar for many retailers, our research highlights the need for more urgency in terms of developing a mobile presence and ensuring the user experience is as smooth and secure as possible. Almost half of mobile users are making purchases, and of those who don’t, half again are certain they will in the future, so investment in a solid mobile retail presence is essential.”This echoes the findings by other industry experts that businesses are not moving fast enough to meet the demands of mobile consumers. This leaves huge opportunities to businesses willing to invest in their mobile presence.

If you would like to find out how we can help you contact us on: 0191 257 8380 or visit www.armadillo-creative.com

2. 51% of journalists read blogs for story ideas.

3. 77% of the online shoppers read consumer product reviews and ratings before purchasing a product.

4. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web

5. Time spent on blogs and other social media sites increased 210 percent year-over-year, and the average time spent per person increased 143 percent.

6. 88% of people in the world are aware of Facebook

7. 57% of people talk to people more online than they do in real life

8. 47% of youngsters said they find out about the news through Facebook

9. There are more women users than men on Facebook

10.47% of mobile users browse networking sites