Provoke Design

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

New Search Roads To Different Social Locations

No Comments

Is social media networking just about Facebook and Twitter or are there alternatives for businesses to try and engage with their consumer audiences in the social space? Voices questioning why journeys on the growing multichannel must inevitably be restricted to travelling down the twin pathways of either networking site to count in the eyes of socially retuned algorithms are not unusual. So, just what are the options for a liberated, multi disciplinary marketing approach?

Once online marketing was quite clear cut, it was all about PPC ads, SEO keywords and gaining long term organic ranking. While all the above still holds true for building site authority and viable visitor traffic, the appearance of Facebook in 2004 and Twitter two years later has been a bit of a gamechanger!
Read more

Keyword Search With Different Strokes For Social Folks

No Comments

Search and social may be converging but their individual goals and language still differ. User behaviour changes according to whether a search is being made on Google or a message is being sent via a social network. Site owners should be aware of the difference between optimised search language and social conversation!

Over half of all searches are now longtail – three words at least – and to the point! This contrasts with the informal, often abbreviated and slang-ridden messages found on the social networks. The challenge for eCommerce is to find the right voice to more successfully engage with the niche audience on each channel.
Read more

Social Websites For Meaningful Meet Ups!

No Comments

The way to create a socially savvy website is not difficult to understand! The problem for some site owners is to comprehend search and social as the way genuine marketing has always behaved when reaching out to potential customers in the offline world. Friendly, responsive and helpful from enquiry, along the sales funnel journey to final transaction. The ROI on social is measured in reputation advocacy.

Trusted, credible presence, rich customer experience and website accessibility on vital channel and platform touchpoints are the coordinates by which consumers set their shopping compass! In the age of the multichannel and always-on technology platforms, access, engagement and exchange are the online social lube that smoothes the way to eCommerce relationships.
Read more

Google To Kick The Click And Roll With The Scroll?

No Comments

Recent observations of Google testing a new design concept for its’ search results page could replace the ‘Google No.1’ mentality, which has constantly obsessed eCommerce site owners, mostly to the exclusion of all else in the last twenty years. In the age of the smartphone and tablet, it’s the scroll and the flick-thru’ rather than the clunky click that gets the speedy search result. Seems Google, mindful of search and social remodelling the landscape around itself, is going scrolling…

In other words … Google is testing the idea of an infinite scroll of web search results. It appears that the top search box, navigation bar and the left-hand side panel will be retained while the user scrolls through results, producing a page sequence matching the current Google experience. While a click is still needed to go to the next page to see more results, the possibility for infinite scrolling in web search results, as deployed in Google Image Search, could be a real boost to future online marketing campaigns and improved traffic performance from selected SEO keywords.
Read more

One Channel Marketing Misses The Boat!

No Comments

As multi channel search and social becomes the online/offline journey today’s consumer expects to take, one can only marvel at some site owners still asking ten year old questions about whether to do organic and paid search! As the UK gears up for NFC mobile data scan and pay, and tablet surfing on the move becomes the norm, many businesses are just getting hopelessly left behind.

With latest predictions of global smartphone sales reaching one billion every year by 2016 as low cost mobiles mushroom and retail prices fall, online search really is now at everyone’s fingertips whenever, wherever …
Read more

Corporates Get Vocal As Google Goes Social!

No Comments

The launch of Google+1 by the planet’s biggest search engine, hereby, declares the age of search and social is officially open! What’s important now is not only to ‘do SEO’ but also to ‘say hello’. The word on cyberstreet is that SEO has become social engine optimisation. To ‘like’ is as important as to ‘link’ and to be ‘human’ is to have real site authority. Even the big boys are doing it now!

A newly published study reveals that in the first six months of 2011, the number of FTSE 100 companies on Facebook rose by more than 50 per cent, and over half also opened a corporate Twitter account, an increase of 40 per cent since last year. Amongst the top performing social media users in the FTSE 100 are Aviva, Centrica, BP, Shell, Marks & Spencer and Tesco, although the UK, inevitably, lags behind the US!
Read more

Counting Single Click Through Rates Is So Very Out Of Date!

No Comments

Traffic results can give a misleading impression on the multi channel. What that means is that because of the many channels and possible shared cross-connections in existence today, metrics may not give the whole story of the entire traffic journey from original source to sitepage landing.

With social networking now a factor and online to offline behaviour often hard to quantify, time frames are changing – so it’s time to stop obsessing over click through rates!

Site traffic no longer simply comes directly from PPC ads. The nice and simple paying by Cost Per Click as an easily understood and measurable way of online marketing may be producing ever diminishing traffic returns and low conversion results.
Read more

Doing Social Media Is Not Blog Standard!

No Comments

The day that a business owner decides to ‘do’ social media is the day that the office staff might dread! They’re the ones who will be expected to tweet and blog and send to Facebook! After all, aren’t they the Y or Z generation with eyes glued to their smartphones, while the MD still has to ask someone how to open a strange file attached to an email? All they wanna do is play Angry Birds …

Hopefully, it’s not that bad but simply thinking that jumping on the social media bandwagon by tweeting and blogging will instantly lead to lots of juicy new enquiries is to completely misunderstand search and social. The first comments you’re likely to receive on a blog are those saying your post is just so great they will use it for their thesis and by the way, how can they create one for themselves!
Read more

Thank Your Lucky PageRank It Doesn’t Mean A Thing!

No Comments

Does your PageRank actually drive more traffic to your site? Will a high PageRank improve your real ranking? Some site owners may be smiling and thinking what kind of nonsense is this! Except of course, the myths of Google have long been set in stone for business owners to religiously follow. PageRank is, really – just a very naughty boy!

Business always looks for certainty. If something appears to work – just keep on doing it! Whether or not it is the actual reason for a successful online marketing campaign can be beside the point – just keep on believing! In the daily anxiety of checking if a site page has gone up or down for competing SEO keywords, PageRank has become an obsessive, neurotic symbol for the very existence and meaning of an entire enterprise. If you’re not Google No.1, you’re site is not worth anything …!
Read more

How To Get Around In Social Town

No Comments

Businesses owners going social! Really? Or is it that site owners just think a tweet once or twice a week about their latest cool product is a cheap, easy way to advertise their brand and find new customers? Many site owners use social media as simply another selling opportunity and wonder why it doesn’t work!

On the other hand, a significant number of thoughtful SMEs and their savvy, mid-sized counterparts have ‘got it’ and are focused on building trust by ‘soft’ online marketing to their social community of followers. They let their niche audiences know by the content they offer that they wish to engage by being engaging themselves!
Read more

Paid Search Basics Needed To Optimise Sites

No Comments

As search and social continue to swoop across the online landscape, the original twin propellors of organic and paid search still fire up the SEO cylinders for driving visitor traffic to site. Yet some twenty five years after first taking off, some site owners still haven’t understood the need to chart a basic route to page conversion.

That’s if SEO keywords are even used at all on a website! Surveys still show that a significant number of sites are still not optimised for any kind of search engine indexing and yet their owners grumble that they’re not getting the page hits, ranking or customer enquiries! Just having a website was never enough and in the age of interactive engagement, online marketing has evolved into a search and social hybrid optimising across multiple channels and platforms.
Read more

To Do Social Means Knowing How To Be Social!

No Comments

“Social media doesn’t work!” is the often heard refrain from business owners who have just dipped their toes for the first time into the whirlpool of relentless human noise, otherwise known as the online conversation. They’ve only been doing it for a month or two! Looking closer at those who have clambered aboard the search and social express, it’s easy to see why they’re not getting the results they see elsewhere …

The problem is whether or not the business owner ‘gets it’ and can intuitively understand the human engagement process of search and social. The truth is that for many site owners, attitudes are firmly entrenched in a corporate silo that separates ‘us and them’ – company and customer.
Read more