Social media marketing is no longer just a nice to have. For many brands it has quickly become ‘the’ marketing channel, rather than an addition to other media choices.

For consumer brands this is an easy fit. Consumers are now accustomed to proactively seeking out what they need via online channels, rather than being ‘sold to’. The trick is to provide the destinations and content for them to find. And engage with.

It’s no longer enough to simply have a website; it needs to be seen as your most effective lead generation tool. Then Once there were spoken stories. Then there were books and magazines.  Then recordings and radio. Then cinema and TV. Now there’s all of the above plus the internet. But in communication terms the [...]

Was Mark Lawrenson right to stand up this morning and say he thought the racism penalty bestowed on Suarez was ‘somewhat harsh’? Surely as a BBC pundit this is verging on the Jonathon Ross, Ron Atkinson debacles? When will high profile figures learn how important communication is? We say to our clients all the time that [...]

It’s an exciting moment. You’ve comissioned some creative fireworks and you’ve launched your communication. Your expectations are sky high. At InTouch marketing we talk about ‘audience, message, media’, and lastly ‘measure’. Most businesses follow the route down the first three avenues but for some reason never make it back home via the ‘measure’ road. Hopefully [...]

Google has now made its social networking site Google+ available to everyone following a 12 week invitation-only trial. With an estimated 20 million members already, Google+ has undoubtedly been quicker off the mark than Facebook was, but I can’t help thinking that the old ‘tortoise and hare’ adage might ring true in this case. Google [...]

I won’t bore you with how long I’ve worked in this industry but let’s just say that I remember when the first Apple Mac appeared in the studio. Before the advent of the computer ideas were sketched out with paper and pen, visuals skilfully hand rendered and coloured in with markers, and copy marked up [...]

Facebook’s main aim is to attract one billion users worldwide but with numbers already nearing 700 million, the social networking site is said to have suffered a second slump in users during May 2011. In January, Facebook saw its first drop in UK users since July 2006, as numbers fell 5% from 8.9 million in [...]

Last month we ran a short survey about what communication channels businesses were using more or less of compared to last year. The results showed a shift towards electronic media such as email, social media and web. It also indicated that most other channels were being utilised at about the same level or even slightly [...]

It’s a common question. But the benefits of running a good scheme can reach far beyond the cost, and it can become a vital communication tool to help raise awareness of your business’s goals. People create the profit for any business (not just the sales force, of course). However the barriers to continual improvement and [...]

Marketing your products and services by email can be a fantastically effective way of reaching audiences that other channels cannot reach. But it has to work a lot harder these days to not end up being trashed even before it has been opened. Here are some things to think about when creating your next email [...]