Provoke Design

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

Online Budgets – Better Bangs For Your Buck!

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Faced with a bewildering complex of online ‘must-do’ actions every business owner is told he must take to maintain the competitive edge, where do you make the best spend for effective results?

As business owners wake up to a new decade, they are also forced to open their eyes and put their hands in their pockets! If you’re not continually investing in your online presence then you’re not going to be in business in 2010.

Look at your history of online marketing campaigns. Have they been a little limited to date, mostly involving tired-looking and repetitious email marketing that returns fewer results each time?
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Online Orders 2009 End Of Year Up by 50% on 2008!

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Year end surveys spotlighting a 50% online trading increase on 2008 clearly demonstrate the unassailable power of eCommerce and the vital importance of ensuring your business website is tuned daily for maximum visitor reception!

Findings show that online sellers in the SME market had put in an impressive performance with many weathering the recession and reporting healthy increases in both order volumes and revenue. Only time will tell if this was mainly attributable to customers trying to benefit from the 15% VAT rate before its return to 17.5% in January.
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SEO Scenarios To Avoid !

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Most businesses on the web try to achieve the holy grail of Google First Page rankings by using every SEO tactic they can think of or have heard will work. They actually reduce their visitor traffic by making those common mistakes we see all the time !

Search engine algorithms are programmed to recognise and index web content in endless different and complex permutations. There are no ‘clever’ shortcuts – outlawed ‘blackhat’ techniques – only long term ‘organic’ development of genuine ‘quality’ content sites, assisted by authentic and relevant SEO applications.
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Website loading – don’t keep your visitors waiting!

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The first rule of good ‘website experience’ is providing a fast loading site. In the age of superfast broadband, visitors expect instant access and will not wait, no matter how cool you think your site looks!

The route from ‘first click’ to ‘page access’ is now so fast, that a website has to load – with all its accompanying images, videos, banners and other wizzy content – in a nanosecond, or the impatient, rapid-clicking visitor will just not bother!
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Quality Website Design Keeps Your Visitors Happy!

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We are all aware of the rule of three. Site visitors take three seconds – or less – to decide if they like the look of your site or click away. If you want to do business on the web, your site has got to get the look, and that means quality design.

It has been repeated many times before but it’s important to keep on emphasising the fact that website behaviour is essentially all about immediacy, instant decision making – and impatience!
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Turn Your Landing Page Into A Closing page!

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When a potential customer clicks on a link, they want to go straight to the source – not your Home page or a landing page not designed to close the sale!

Business owners should know the drill by now! A fully integrated online marketing campaign means every step along the way must be an unbreakable link in the chain to bind your captive audience and lead them swiftly and smoothly through the entire process to sales conversion – with all thoughts of escape by mouse-click banished!
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Make Your Emails Perform As Social Media !

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As we gear up for the launch of GoogleWave and the belated joining of Email chat to the social media buzz, businesses will need to exploit the new opportunities for using email marketing to transform their customer communications.

Considered yesterday’s keyboard activity in the last couple of years, as social media platforms swept in to take over the role of our daily, instant reply channel – email is poised to make a big comeback.
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Is Your Business Missing Out On Local Customers?

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It may seem an urgent priority to keep putting out your message on the national grid, but you could be missing out on valuable local business too!

If you focus your online marketing too narrowly on large UK commercial targets, you ignore your local presence at your peril. It’s often the case that, whilst waiting to land the big contracts, you could be providing valuable goods or services to your local or regional area. Indeed, they may prove equally as lucrative!
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Online Christmas shopping predicted to be ding dong merrily on high!

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Consumer confidence in online shopping has achieved such colossal growth that it is predicted this year, a whopping 93% of shoppers – that’s a quarter more than 2008 – plan an online ‘cracker’ of Christmas gift buying, to leave high street retailers with cold pudding!

According to a new survey by eDigitalResearch and IMRG, the latest e-Customer Service Index (eCSI) reveals, that of 2,804 people asked about their shopping habits in the run up to Christmas, 71% were prepared to do half or more of their shopping online this year. Price will continue to dominate and competition for business will be fierce as 88% of people are expected to research and price-compare before they buy, almost 25% in-store or at home via their mobile phones.


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Is PageRank no longer the watchdog its clicked up to be?

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Because Google only updates its Toolbar PageRank once every 2 to 3 months, what you are seeing today may be quite different from what the actual PageRank is!

We all know that the more links you have pointing to your website, the higher your PageRank will be. Link building is the very foundation of online marketing, and the reason for the existence of SEO and the PPC system. Your site’s life is given relevance based on ‘quantity’ as the number of links you have pointing to your site and ‘quality’ as the PageRank of those links.
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SEO Vs PPC – how to choose what’s best for you!

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Many companies do both but some SMEs may only have a limited marketing campaign budget, then it can be a straight choice – so you need to know what’s going to work best for your business.

You have to attract and drive word search visitors to your website! This much you know. But you can’t afford to do everything all at once and you’ve heard or know that PPC campaigns can get great results – at a price! You think that SEO may be relatively inexpensive, and you could be right.
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Do You Know Who Your Website Visitors Are ?

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In the brave new, interactive online world, it’s the website visitor who now has control – you need to find out who they are and what they want!

Consumer communications across multi-digital platforms – think iphone, Twitter, Facebook – have exploded onto the ecommerce mainstream, in the last few years. ‘Real time’ technology has given the consumer a formidable capability to connect and exchange their views instantly on the brands they use, the sites they visit and the experience they receive.
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