Provoke Design

Provoke's Online Marketing Insight, What Would You Like To Know About?

RealTime Search Explodes Everywhere – You Gotta Keep Up !

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The phenomenal growth of real time search has just made it easier and simpler for customers to find out what’s happening with your company and at your website – right now! Every day search enables even more of your target market to discover products and services, so staying visible and current across browser platforms is vital to brand identity!

Social networking and bookmarking sites are taking over business, social and personal! The instant you type your message, it’s shared almost as soon as you thought of it!

This means Realtime search provides the opportunity to able to look at material literally just published – in real time! It’s also important to remember that search engines strive to have the most up-to-date relevant content on the web, indexed and ready for display to word searchers.
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Website Design – Reminder of the Basic Essentials!

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Ability to access websites quickly and easily from laptop and netbook to smartphone and ebook via any number of new apps or social networks has become critical! Keeping up is important to business survival online but a reminder of website basics is essential to visitor experience and conversion.

Maintaining visibility, and attracting and retaining visitor traffic to deliver desired results is a key function of integrated website design and online marketing. The development of social media networks is driving the interactive communication channels that a website must now offer to create customer communities and precisely targeted, bespoke service supply.

Issues of wide reaching website accessibility can be critical in the current economic climate, where the competition for every enquiry, word search and site visitor in a given niche market, is keenly fought for.
Even though a reminder of the basic essentials may seem a retrograde step, in fact, it can prove valuable for tiny but important improvements that make all the difference :
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Email Marketing or Social Media – which way is best to reach your customers ?

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It’s getting complicated, isn’t it? With online users now using any number of different communication channels, just where do you target your marketing campaigns?

SME business owners in particular, are trying hard to know how best to get their company message out to their target audience. So many different means are now available that knowing the right ones for creating the right marketing strategies can be confusing.

The problem is that potential customers are not using just one medium to the exclusion of all others. Nor are they using many channels for the same purpose. Instead, each alternative method is selected for a particular purpose or plays a different role for the user.
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Email Used More Than Social Networking!

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While Social Media continues to explode around the planet, attracting all the attention and getting businesses keen to jump into the conversation, a recent survey reveals that for some groups, email is still their number one way of keeping in touch.

Doubtless, this finding will draw a smug, ‘I told you so’, from those businesses and organisations who doggedly stick with their fax machines, snail mail franking, IE6 browsers and dial up broadband!

But joking aside, social networking as an integrated social, business and personal communication tool is of course, not about to go away, more a case of email, having itself never really gone away, is reaffirmed as very much still here and booming, e.g. email marketing newsletters.
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Website Analytics – Avoid Click To Conversion Blame Game!

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Even in today’s nanosec web search world, a first click does not mean instant conversion. Service and product enquiries are subject to complex and time dependent cycles. Business owners may blame search providers for low conversions, but the key is going back to the website to find out why users aren’t converting.

It can be all too easy to simply assume that interpreting website analytics incorrectly leads to wrong decisions! Certainly, it can be annoying to discover that your latest online or email marketing campaign may not have been as informed, and as a consequence, less targeted as it could have been but the answer may not necessarily lie with reading and understanding the recent stats but more with knowing the right follow up course of action required!
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Website Success Equals Owner Plus Designer!

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Market leader websites succeed because both business owner and website designer understand and respect their individual roles and work together to make vision plus know-how generate the desired results.

The question a business owner should ask is not “What is the secret to a successful website?” but “How do I become a great website owner?” The answer is almost certainly that successful sites have a well-informed, passionate website owner listening to and delegating the required time and responsibility to the website design team and all content contributors.

Company heads and management chiefs need to recognise the complex and sophisticated processes employed in 2010 to create, build and maintain a successful website presence. Whilst a good website owner should have a clear vision and be capable of developing it over the long term, it will need to grow and evolve through the ongoing discussions among all the site’s stakeholders.
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Windows SmartPhone 7 Calls Up Website RealTime

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The launch of Microsoft’s latest version of its mobile phone operating system, Windows Phone 7, which pulls in real time content from websites and social networks, reaffirms that you must ensure your website is fully accessible with fresh content daily as the mobile internet gathers warp speed!

You know the score by now – “you gotta be in it to win it!” Like a week in politics, a web month, is a long time! The newest operating platforms channel social media laterally across ‘personal, social and business’, providing what we want, when we want it – and if you’re not on the grid, you don’t exist!
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Brand Identity Building Doesn’t Stop With Twitter and Facebook Logos!

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Some companies think that a social media strategy is little more than setting up the accounts to impress the marketplace with your cool and savvy understanding of how it works and ‘the business will come’. Wrong! Keeping your website active with frequent fresh content is how it actually works!

Dinosaur thinking dies hard!

As businesses become aware that something’s ‘going on’ out there, they think they can join in the conversation on a no cost basis when they have a free moment!
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GoogleBuzz puts Gmail on the Social Network grid!

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The lastest move from Google reinforces the rapidly evolving way we can now expect to engage online. Integrating Business, Personal and Social talk channels is where the buzz is – and where online presence drives traffic.

The revamping of email continues! Google’s e-mail service, Gmail, will now allow its regular users – currently around 170 million people – to post status updates, share content from other sites such as Twitter,YouTube, Flickr and Picassa, and read and comment on posts.

Buzz is aimed directly against rival networks such as Facebook – which last week rolled out a new site design for easier message search and chat – and has amassed nearly 400 million users since its launch in 2004. Meanwhile, Yahoo already offers a service that allows people to see updates from sites such as Twitter and Flickr from inside their Yahoo Mail page.
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Analytics – Set Your Sight on A Better Site!

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Knowing which site stats to focus on and those to ignore, analytics is key to really knowing what changes to make for increased conversions. By setting realistic goals you can determine whether or not you are achieving them. Analytics should be the basis of building your online campaigns to obtain better results and growing your business.

Improving site performance is integral to raising the bar on your entire online marketing gameplan. If you don’t know who you are addressing, what they need and how and why their requirements and site behaviour might change at each visit, then you will not succeed in driving sales.
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Online Marketing Spend To Overtake Print Media in 2010!

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If a recent econsultancy survey of over 1,000 companies around the globe is anything to go by, the marketing migration online surges forward, with results showing that in 2010 if you’re offline then you’re off grid too!

Web savvy companies and organisations are opting to up their budgets in favour of the big buzz promo activities of social media, mobile marketing, email marketing and SEO. Two in five (41%) of those businesses surveyed say they will decrease spending on print media during the year ahead.
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Email Management – mounting madness?

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Research carried out by the Universities of Glasgow and Paisley have discovered that one third of email users get stressed by the heavy volume of e-mails they receive. If marketing emails are to get read at all by stressed out recipients also bombarded by texts, Twitter, RSS and instant messaging, then timing your mailouts is critical!

Sometimes it appears that the earth is spinning out of control! Deskbound office behaviour regularly throws up reports of employees spending more time typing than talking to each other, i.e. sending e-mails to colleagues who were just one desk away, rather than actually speaking directly with them.
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