Gencia Blog - Online Marketing

2500 Participate in Gencia Violent Crime Campaign

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:20:00 +0100

A Mobile Marketing campaign developed by Gencia has resulted in almost 2500 people taking part in a survey focussed on sexual violence, rape and consent within just a few days of launch.

Commissioned by Wrexham Community Safety Partnership, the main focus of the campaign was to raise awareness of boundaries around consenting sex and offer victims more ways to access support.

Using i-Phones and specifically targeted male (www.he-says.net) and female (www.she-says.net) websites, young people were invited to test their knowledge of the law and attitudes towards 3 gender based scenarios.

Local newspapers, social media, radio and the BBC also reported the campaign, offering added awareness. A staggering one in five women and around 7% of men in the UK are affected by sexual violence at some point in their lives.

Community safety groups say research also shows a "lack of understanding by young people about consent for sex" and dispelling certain myths became one of the key objectives for the campaign.

Focussed mainly throughout Wrexham's Yale College, the campaign also offered 6 friends the opportunity to win a VIP night out if they answered all 3 questions.

Speaking about the early campaign statistics and general response, Domestic Abuse Co-ordinator within the Community Safety Team Christine Elmitt said:

"This is our second campaign with Gencia following a very successful alcohol awareness campaign before Christmas.

This campaign has raised the bar even further by not only delivering a critical sexual violence message and local support links to a large portion of young people within Wrexham, but in also offering us crucial information on attitudes and knowledge of young people in our area.

"We are absolutely delighted with the campaign results." Even more impressive was the timescale of the campaign - just 3 weeks from concept the completion.

Gencia MD Tony Braide commented:

"Educating young people on Sexual Violence is an extremely sensitive yet vital issue and mobile media has enabled us to reach more people in a private, engaging and measurable way.

"It was a challenge delivering such a serious campaign in the 3 week timescale we had and we're absolutely thrilled with the outcome."

Gencia help launch a new Asset Management business

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:25:00 +0100

Gencia created a new brand for the innovative new Asset Management business Verbatim. The pioneering new business also required a website that reflected their simple solution to a traditionally complex area of financial services. It was a challenge that the Gencia team relished. The launch site includes a large amount of streaming video content and Gencia employed the services of a professional actor to get the best out of a difficult script. The end result has received a great deal of praise from within the industry and prompted Verbatim's Managing Director to make the following comments to the Gencia Team:- "Looking over the website, brochure and videos I am absolutely stunned and excited by what you have produced. You have given us the very identity we aspired to and the production is of such high quality. I believe this will really set us apart from the competition as I have yet to find another site which comes close to what you have produced. Thank you to everyone who has put so much time, creativity and effort into producing applications and material of the highest quality. You really are such a talented bunch of people who I know work really hard to hit our almost impossible, at times, deadlines. Take a bow everyone and thank you sincerely for all your support." Matthew Timmins
Managing Director
Verbatim Asset Management

Google Breadcrumbs

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:54:00 +0100

Back before the New Year Google announced a possible change in the way it 'may' display the URL snippet within each search results. Google has always advocated 'Accessibility' and 'Usability'. Breadcrumbs (a means to keep track of a user location and/or hierarchy within a website), promotes both of these philosophies. Google has been experimenting with an improvement that replaces the standard website URL's in 'some' search results with a hierarchy showing the precise location of the page on the website.

My guess is not only will this reward sites using best practices, but aids usability and gets rid of the long and often unreadable URL's found deep within a sites hierarchy.

There is no way to say for sure if Google will prefer sites with breadcrumbs or even decided to use the 'location breadcrumbs', but it's good news for advocators of web standards like myself. It shows Google is indeed looking at websites with properly built navigation.

All SEO aside, good navigation and the use of breadcrumbs is much better for the user/customer experience anyway and it's going to be interesting to see how much Google uses this improvement over the next few months and how sites perform.

So What's in store for marketing in 2010?

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:30:00 +0100

Just when we were starting to get our heads around websites and emails, the naughties came along and challenged marketers to reach customers on previously unimaginable levels.

Who would have thought that terms search engine optimisation, blogging and social networking would take priority in marketing planning sessions that previously debated the combined merits of advertising, direct mail, PR and telesales?

Time to run with the beast…

If the past decade has taught us anything, it’s that marketing is an ever changing beast that should be embraced and not tamed.

Yes there will always be a time and a place for advertising and print, but the clever kids are staying ahead of the game by looking at the trends and getting there before their competitors.

So with this in mind, here are 5 things to embrace in 2010…

Social Media

Social Media got an old song to Christmas number one this year and maybe (just maybe…) marketers will finally now begin to build Social Networking into their communications plans.

In 2010 Social Networking will continue to dominate as the Facebooks, Twitters and Bebos up their games in a bid to fend off increasing competition from the emerging sites and the profile raising opportunities resulting from such exposure.

So how can you have a strategy for something so spontaneous you may ask? The answer lies in the ability to create time, budgets and topics that will resonate with the customer and drive positive outcomes – in fact the very reasons we have enjoyed so much success this year!

To discuss a social media strategy for your business, contact Tony on (0)161 214 5214

Microsites

If the question of the early naughties was “Does you company have a website?” the question of next decade will surely be “How many?”

The recession has challenged businesses to demonstrate their value, relevance and relative competitive advantage to the customer and a ‘catch all’ website simply doesn’t do it.

Let’s take a catch all IFA website offering services around Ethical Investments, General Investments, Retirement Planning, and Property Management against a company who appears to be focussed on Ethical Investments.

If I (the customer) am searching for Ethical Investments, who am I going to find first/contact first/choose to do business with first?

In summary if you have 3 or 4 key products for 3 or 4 key markets, then why not give yourself 3 or 4 bites at the cherry by exploring one or more microsites in 2010?

Mobile Marketing

The mobile phone has become our media companion of choice.

Mass, unsolicited and untargeted text messaging is likely to annoy and offend so marketers must be clever about how they interact and engage with their audience.

For the past 24 months, Gencia has harnessed the very best Bluetooth technology and married it with clever, engaging marketing campaigns designed to grip and tease recipients into wanting to request content.

Forget the hard sell with this media…It’s very much a value exchange… turn your Bluetooth on and receive 25% off or ‘who’s your perfect match?’ Download your free game now.

At Gencia we’re pushing the boundaries with Bluetooth and other types of mobile marketing campaigns and our clients are reaping the rewards!

To find out how mobile marketing could work for you, contact Gary on (0)161 214 5214

Mobile Apps

Apple’s line “there’s an App' for that” is now up there with the very best of them.

The rise of the app' and importantly, the sophistication of android technology and its ability to receive apps, presents a real marketing opportunity that should not be overlooked.

Gencia has itself become a specialist App' builder and experienced first hand the power of this media in the marketplace.

So if you looking to do something different in 2010 Gencia may well have an app' for that.

Social Norms

Social Norms is increasingly becoming the chosen way to educate, inform and challenge perceptions around young people and key subject matters, with the primary aim to positively and verifiably affect behaviours by revealing key facts from survey findings.

In simple terms, marketing messages will increasingly demonstrate relevant statistics to positively (or negatively) shatter misconceptions or alter perceptions, depending on the situation or intended purpose.

An alcohol awareness campaign that previously said:-

“Drinking under 16 can seriously damage your health” may now read

“77% of under 16’s don’t drink…stay in the majority.

At Gencia we’re passionate about Social Norms to the extent that we’re even developing our own website to help our clients to collate, analyse and promote their findings on higher reaching levels in 2010.

For more information about how we can help you with your campaigns, please contact gary@gencia.co.uk

PageRank, Hilltop and TrustRank does it really matter?

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:51:00 +0100

After a recent post I've had a few emails asking questions about PageRank, most making over exaggerate claims and misleading assumptions on its impact in relation to their search engine rankings.

The truth is many Webmasters often obsess over the importance of PageRank in relation to their Page Rank. Note two words, "Page Rank" not PageRank (PR), two different things. PR is just one of the many factors that Google uses to determine a page's actual Page Rank on their search result page (SERP) for a given search query.

So why does everyone bang on about PageRank? More than likely because it's the most visual algorithm of Google complex Page Ranking system. It's free to download the PR Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer but its open to misleading interpretations. It's also even easier to get pulled into an obsessive world of link building and SEO pitfalls. I once heard an SEO guru state PR is a way of making people look at one hand whilst the other hand does something else. I still think this is very true today.

This unhealthy obsession with PR is possibly being felt at Google HQ, as Google Chrome currently does not offer this visual PR tool and Matt Cutts as gone on record stating that he would like to remove the PageRank indicator altogether from the current Toolbar. So then does this mean PR is dying? Of course not, PR has just been given far too much focus in SEO community. My opinion is that Google shot themselves in the foot with PR helping to create an industry of link farms and PR advertising merchants they didn't want. Most of Google efforts and patents now seem to focus on eradicating this manufactured phenomenon.

It's important to remember that PR is just one of many algorithms Google uses to determine the relevancy of pages. There are many more publicly known algorithms known to us mere mortals such as Hilltop, TrustRank (used in PR) and Hypertext-Matching Analysis with it's many more algorithms.

To quote: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by the founders of Google Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. A paper if you have read this far you should read in full

"Google maintains much more information about web documents than typical search engines. Every hitlist includes position, font, and capitalization information. Additionally, we factor in hits from anchor text and the PageRank of the document. Combining all of this information into a rank is difficult. We designed our ranking function so that no particular factor can have too much influence."

Now I have that out of my system, to recap, PR is not the same as Page Rank, and PR is NOT the single most factor in Page Rank (two words). If I write the words PR I always mean PageRank I will explicitly say Page Rank when referring to how a page is ranked in the search engines. Think of it as ColdFusion, I actually mean the markup language CFML and not ColdFusion Server, does that make sense?

If you have not already heard of the two other algorithms I mentioned above Trust Rank and Hilltop, chances are you just Googled them, right? If not then you should. They are just as important as PR and one of them was actually invented because of a flaw found in PR and works along side it, but by no means the only factors in Page Rank (two words). If you cannot be bothered to Google them then here is summery

PageRank: The basic definition of PR is that PR determines the authority of a page in general.

Hilltop (patent in February 2003): determines the authority of page related to the search term used.

TrustRank: harder to explain in one sentence for me anyway, it's to do with links from a seeding page. It's not to be confused with Yahoo's Trust Rank so we are told Trust Rank Explained by Matt Cutts
Conclusion SEO is full of people that remind me of the Principles of Adaptive Behavior. Just because something changed for the better its attributive to just one factor or something you did different at one point in time. It's the blind leading the blind when it comes to SEO. I will never write or tell my clients I can get them top ranking results, if you do then you're lying to your customers. I can tell you what Google is looking for and its hard work not black magic, good content, updates and a site people want to visit. That's not what most clients wants to hear, and yes there are tricks you can use. I have done many of them myself. For example some years back .NET magazine asked me to get a site to the top of Google in six weeks and write about it. I did, not ethically and it did not say at the top for long. Something all webmasters should remember when saying links and PR is the most important factor in SEO, is not it's just one!

Daisy Communications website launched

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:16:00 +0100

Daisy PLC was named the UK’s 18th fastest growing technology company in the 2008 Deloitte Fast50 chart, the boast more than 200 staff and were able to report an annual turnover of £53m in the last financial year.

They chose Gencia to develop their new B2C eCommerce website which can be viewed by clicking on:

www.daisyplc.com

The website launch was also covered by How Do:

Daisy Communications and Gencia feature in How Do

Facebook vanity URL giveaway...

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:48:00 +0100

Facebook would look to be opening itself up to some potentially damaging lawsuits with the introduction of vanity URLS:

http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/912263/Facebook-tells-brands-touch-protect-trademarks/

With names being given out on a first come first serve basis, you can bet that there'll be far more opportunists setting up URLs as opposed to the real person/company. Although those who need to can register to protect their trademark, it's more than likely many will not simply down to not knowing about it.

Will be interesting to see how this one develops and which will be the first celebrity to sue....

Google Local Business Ranking Issues

Fri, 08 May 2009 11:54:00 +0100

It would appear that Google’s Local Business Centre is causing business owners around the world one or two headaches now that it’s started to combine listings and display incorrect results.

The issue appears to be that when company A and company B have a similar address they are being merged into one record, often with the business name for company A being displayed with the address for company B and the URL for A linking to B and so on.

I first noticed this when checking out the rankings for a number of our sites – from our office address in Manchester we have a listing for our Manchester Design Agency, Bluetooth advertising and email marketing services.

When performing a search for Bluetooth marketing I got the following results:

Whilst the address, URL displayed and link are all correct, the results are displaying the title tag for LiveWire Campaign, our email marketing tool. This is obviously a concern for us and we would like to see this issue resolved, however, fortunately I suppose the title tag is not displaying the name of one of our competitors, or worse displaying our title tag and linking through to a competitor, as these guys have found:

http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/hotels-in-ripon-google-local-mixup.html

The major issue here is that there doesn’t seem to be much you can do about it, other than remove your listing. From browsing the Google forums it would seem there are many people suffering from this issue:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/maps/thread?tid=6c515a66e1584e5e&hl=en

From working with Google Local Business in the past and subscribing to their group, it’s clear that it’s a service that is occasionally dealt with by their representatives who offer advice but it doesn’t appear to be a service that gets that much full time focus from them – which is a shame as it’s an extremely useful service that offers good ranking opportunities within local search, it's reputation will also be somewhat tainted if this issues persists for much longer.

Hopefully this issue will be resolved shortly, but in the mean time it’d be interesting to here from anyone who has suffered a drop in traffic levels and subsequently business as a result of this error.

Britain has got talent 2009... thanks to Cyprus!

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 02:07:00 +0100

This is the most hilarious video I have seen since Achmed The Dead Terrorist. What a great response from the judges, Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan and Amanda Holden!

Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gHvATmUsSg

The Gencia Blueprint to Search Engine Success

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 17:24:00 +0100

Gencia’s Blueprint offers you a proven strategy to increase natural traffic to your website. In fact, we guarantee if you follow your tailor made report, you will increase the traffic to your website by at least 50% or your money back*.

It is based on years of experience in designing and developing strategic business websites for leading UK organisations. We combine thorough research, analysis and marketing expertise and provide you with the right online model for your business and a strategy that you can implement.

We implement the same process for ourselves as we do for our clients.

What results have we seen?

Gencia ranks:

•#1 for “Manchester Marketing Agency” out of 330,000 results
•#1 for “Manchester Design Agency” out of 364,000 results

LiveWire Campaign, our email marketing tool, ranks:

•#1 for “free email marketing” out of 65,100,000 results
•#3 for “email marketing campaign” out of 16,100,000 results

What would 50% more website traffic mean to your business?

We are running a special promotion for April ONLY, apply for your Blueprint and receive a 25% discount.

Our normal price is £2000 + VAT but as long as we receive your Blueprint request before Thursday 30th April, you will only pay £1500 + VAT.

To request your Blueprint email management@gencia.co.uk or call the office on 0161 214 5214.

Also, we are holding a networking event at the Gencia Manchester office at the end of May to share marketing ideas, connect local businesses and meet you over a glass of champagne. If you are interested in attending email christina@gencia.co.uk

A good example of blogging and linkbait

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:40:00 +0100

Whilst pulling my hair out working on some CSS that I could just not get to work (min-width and IE6 anyone?) I came across the following website which raised a smile. Though not quite in line with the CSS I was working on, there have been many times in the past I've decided that maybe going backwards was the best way in going forwards:

http://giveupandusetables.com/

The more interesting thing I found with this site was the full story link at the footer which tells of how it came into existance and how in just one day it attracted over 35,000 visitors:

http://blog.goldencomm.com/2008/11/behind-an-internet-meme

Certainly makes you think about the power of linkbait and blogging!

Should I use broad, phrase or exact match?

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:17:00 +0100

When setting up a PPC campaign, it’s incredibly easy to stick in a whole load of keyword phrases and bid on broad because it sounds straightforward enough (and chosen by default) or bid on all three at once.

Many times we have seen PPC campaigns set up in this way with little ROI and a high bounce rate, particularly on high volume keyword phrases, so let’s look at why this might by looking at what the definitions mean.

Broad
The least “advanced” of the 3 types which also applies to variations of the keywords chosen. If you choose, for example, the keywords:

download music videos

Your ad would also be shown for:

music download videos
videos music download
download videos music

In some cases this may not be in an issue but in others, when re-arranged, can mean something completely different to what a person is searching for and therefore become untargeted.

Phrase
More targeted as it pinpoints the exact phrase, in that if you choose

“wii games online”

As you were in the business of selling console games online, it would also trigger:

buy wii games online
order wii games online
purchase wii games online

You do though run the risk of targeting unwanted terms such as

free wii games online
download wii games online

In this instance you would use the negative keywords feature and flag “free” and “download” so as not to appear for these terms.

Exact
The most targeted match where you set the exact keywords to trigger your ad. These tend to be more longtail and will generally have a better ROI. So returning to the first example, if you chose:

[download music videos]

Then only when that phrase is entered will your ad appear.

Generally I’d recommend always starting on “exact” with various keyword combinations, in particular the high volume keywords. In some cases, such as “buy football boots manchester”, you could probably just as easy start off on phrase match due to it’s lower volume and fact it includes the word “buy” but always be sure to keep a check of what traffic you get on your phrase matches to look out for any words you should be adding as negative keywords. Once you have the majority if your keywords covered by exact and phrase, use broad to cover the lower volume variations.

The key though is to continually check your logs and use these to develop other keyword phrases as well as a negative keyword list.

SEO Toolbar for Firefox launched

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:14:00 +0100

When carrying out SEO research there’s a number of application and websites out there that can assist you in your efforts – Google’s PageRank checker, Yahoo’s site explorer as well as multiple keyword research tools.

At the end of last week SEOBook launched a new extension for Firefox which aids the process by grouping a number of these key applications into one handy toolbar.

I have been using this for a few days now and the early signs are encouraging, it certainly makes the process of evaluating a site much quicker. Combine this with Firebug, which I find incredibly useful when assessing a site’s on site SEO efforts, and you have a whole range of key SEO tools all within the one browser – which certainly makes life a lot easier.

Try it out and let us know what you think. If you think there are other key SEO extensions / websites / applications out there that complement your SEO efforts, then share them with us via the comments below.

Is Social Media Marketing suitable for your company?

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:33:00 +0100

When many people think of Social Networking, they tend to think of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and the like in the sense that these sites are used by themselves and their friends/colleagues/children as ways of keeping in touch, tagging each other pictures of nights out, letting their mates know what they're up to and generally being social in an online world.

Sometimes it is very difficult for people to see how the growing popularity of Social Networking can be used as a key marketing tool for their business.

Essentially, Social Media Marketing is word of mouth advertising - and it's fair to say that most businesses have a product or brand they wish to promote - what you should then think about is which social networking platform is most suited towards your goals be it generating leads, driving sales, building awareness, increasing customer base etc

Still not convinced? Here are a few examples of Social Media Marketing adopted by some of the world’s leading brands:

Adobe – Delicious

They have used the social bookmarking service for tagging numerous independent online tutorials which show users how to make best use of their products.

delicious.com/adobe

British Airways – Twitter

BA use the microblogging service to keep followers updated with special offers and information on their most popular destinations.

twitter.com/BritishAirways

Nike / Apple – NikePlus Online Community

Nike and Apple teamed up to give runners a social edge to their pastime by developing a pedometer you place in your trainers which tracks running data via your iPod. I am personally a member of this community which allows me via the technology to track the time, distance and pace of all my runs, and then save this online whilst setting goals, challenges and plotting your runs using Google Maps all of which can also be shared with other runners.

www.nike.com/nikeplus

H&M – Facebook

H&M use Facebook to promote their brand via a Fan Page containing videos, photo albums, forums and special offers. With near over 700k fans they have direct contact with a large customer base within an extremely popular social network which undoubtedly makes this one of their most powerful direct marketing tools.

www.new.facebook.com/hm

IBM - Blogging

Whilst they make it clear that the thoughts expressed on their employee’s blogs are not necessarily those of IBM, they are more than happy for you to peruse the extensive collection of staff thoughts and expertise be it on their official IBM or personal blog.

www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/

What is the difference between bounce rate and exit rate?

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:34:00 +0100

When viewing your website analytics, it’s incredibly useful to know at what point visitors leave your site – both bounce and exit rate will tell you this, but they are both very different in the way they should be interpreted.
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