Provoke Design

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

How’s Social Media Being Used In Your Company?

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Summer’s over, the fourth quarter’s arrived – it’s Sales meetings all this week! Time to step hard on the online marketing pedal. The MD is again demanding that he wants to be Google No.1 – can you double the number of marketing tweets every 10 minutes, blah, blah…!

Sometimes, integrating social media into a company’s everyday marketing strategies can be a long journey into understanding the new rules of customer engagement! The MD has become fixated with his shiny new social media toy, thinking it’s the latest internet fast-track to eCommerce nirvana now that the website has Twitter and Facebook buttons.
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Google TV Is Coming!

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Rumours that Google is looking to go into broadcasting have been leaking through online over the last few months, with Autumn set for the first appearance of Google TV-powered devices. The exciting crossover opportunities for businesses of all sizes and how website design and online marketing will be transformed, lies tantalisingly just weeks ahead.

According to the world’s No.1 search engine, Google TV will be an “open platform”, aiming to unite search and browse capabilities, integrating web search results and TV content, side by side. Google TV will support Flash and make the “full internet” available through set-top boxes and “integrated” TV screens.
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Foursquare – What It’s For And Where!

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Have you checked in to Foursquare yet? The likelihood is that you’ve come across the term on the web recently, understood it’s some kind of game but not quite sure what it’s all about and why you should bother with it. Two million have bothered and business users are finding Foursquare a new online marketing opportunity.

Foursquare is a location-based game, which allows you to tell your friends and colleagues where you are at any given time and also gives you the option to share this through social media messaging networks, Facebook and Twitter. You also do have the option to keep your whereabouts secret but still play the game to win points.
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Website Visitor Feedback –Your Mission Is To Listen!

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Listening to what your website visitors have to say and the type of feedback they give is as much dependent on when you ask, how you ask and being trusted with a reply. Approaching at the right time in the right way is a crucial part of your online brand design.

Collecting visitor feedback is a delicate operation! Knowing how your visitors feel and respond to one or more aspects of the website experience offered is crucial. How they might view and possibly share their thoughts and feelings to their social media network communities can make or break perceptions of your brand identity – and consequent visitor traffic and ranking.
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Social Media – To Relate Is The State Of The Art.

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Some businesses still think that social media is just another selling tool! The ‘old skool’ proposition of really believing that by tweeting dozens of product messages at everyone on more platforms and channels everyday, they will increase enquiries! They don’t get social media, how to use it and what to expect from it!

There is a difference between marketing online and online marketing! Being online defines your activities rather than the other way around. The way to build brand identity and establish eCommerce viability through social media networking channels is to form credible, transparent and interactive relationships with your market audience niche.
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SEO For Human Friendly Website Design!

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Are you optimising your website for search engines or for people who use search engines? Many businesses tend to think of search engine optimisation as simply keyword crampons levered in to place to scale the PageRanks of Google mountain! But in fact human friendly sites are equally key to driving traffic and page indexing.

The application of SEO to careful campaigns of PPC and link building around the sites, blogs and social networks is there for one reason only – to attract human traffic to click onto your site, build your brand identity and ultimately convert from search visitor to paying customer and regular subscriber /newsfeed reader.
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Website Lite Or Home Page Heavy?

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The fear of leaving something out! The old problem of trying to say everything on a website will only show your visitor that screen skim and scan reading have not been understood! Faced with walls of print or a busy Home page, they will lose patience and promptly leave!

The art of website design is to successfully finish the online marketing process. Visitors have clicked on to your site Home page and expect to be able to see clearly how to navigate their way directly to one or more items of search interest, aided by clear ‘calls to action’. By removing non search urgent content, or demoting it to a much less prominent status, you focus visitors on what is important.
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Ten Tips To Tighten Up Your Email Marketing!

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There has been much talk lately of the continuing merits of email marketing and how it stands up well alongside social media messaging channels like Twitter. The big issue is that the web is awash with spam, making it difficult for genuine email messages to get noticed or read. So how do you optimise to improve your chances?

Email is still a standard message bearer for business applications, even in the age of SMS, Twitter feeds and Facebook updates. The emergence of the mobile internet boosts emailing rather than diminishes, so the incursion of online marketing into developing channels continues.
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Audit Your Website – Refresh Every Time!

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So you had your website ‘done’ a few months back! So you think that’s it? Google will not rank and your intended traffic won’t drive unless you ensure daily activity and updated content. You need to check performance and audit your website – refresh as well as engage, constantly.

Don’t assume you know how your visitors are really behaving on your website, so it’s essential that you make a periodic audit to check if your site pages really do meet customer needs, are not being abandoned and clicked away from, as well as engaging with them through social media and blogging.
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Email Still Competing With Social Media?

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It’s been said before – online marketing tools complement, not compete with each other! Reports always announce that one or the other is in the ascendency but in fact, social marketing helps draw attention to a company profile or product, whereas sales are likely to be generated when information is received by email!

Another report – based on a survey of over 1,400 so-called ‘representative’ consumers, – has just announced that email still beats social networks when it comes to marketing for eCommerce. Apparently, over a third of consumers are not using a social networking site, and online brand identity ‘fans’ are still in the minority!
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Google’s Changing Algorithm

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It is fairly common knowledge amongst many of the website design and marketing agencies, there have been recent changes to Google’s algorithm, influencing optimised content, link building, and ultimately, visitor search results. In short, Google looks at site pages for signals of human activity in the form of regular, fresh content of relevance, influence and authority.

After two decades, the web resembles Mount Everest. Countless explorers have visited, leaving behind a detritus littered landscape. There are simply thousands upon thousands of dead or automated websites left unattended or simply not being looked after and updated on a regular basis.
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Website Design Today – Two Page Types Required!

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Website design constantly adapts to the needs of consumer search – or so you would think! It’s remarkable how still many businesses online still view their sites as little no more than a virtual brochure with a visitor enquiries and info capture page.

For a website to succeed today and attract and retain regular traffic, it must offer multiple compelling content as a self publishing portal of niche industry sector news, information, interactive visitor engagement and social media conversation sharing.
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