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 internet is the biggest thing that’s ever happened. Ever, ever, ever. Ever.

Now

With the explosion of online media and accessibility your website needs to be optimised to work for the new world of proactive customers. It needs to be so much more than just an online presence:  it needs to perform as an inbound lead generation tool.

First it needs to be found. Once found it needs to interest and engage. Lastly it needs to help convert interest into a sale.

To get to this point, there are several key issues that you need to consider.

Click here to read and download our InTouch Why?guide, make your web 
work.

written by Andy

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 the key to effective communication is to understand that the message sent is not as important as the message received. We ensure we ask: what do the audience want to hear, what have they heard, and is it having the effect we need it to?

So let’s just think for a minute about message sent and message received. My son likes to call me baldy. I have no issue with that, in fact, I quite like being greeted when I get home with ‘OK baldy?’ I find it endearing. However, if a total stranger, who was bald, came to the house and my son answered the door ‘Hello baldy, what can I do for you?’ I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were offended.

How, therefore, can the defence be: I used a word which at home is not an insult? I would argue that when a player says to an opponent ‘good pass’, they mean it ironically and in an offensive way to try and put them off.

How then does this terribly fragile defence stand up? In any communication, if the recipient’s interpretation is that it was an insult then it was. The person sending the message needs to understand this and modify their communication.

If we want to stamp out racism or any ‘ism’ then we need to be consistent and set the right example. Mr Lawrenson, you were being a Liverpool player this morning and getting drawn into the field of play. You really should know better and the BBC needs to educate its pundits more effectively to stamp this kind of misguided input out.

written by Andrew

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 the creative was good and the message clear but this does not always guarantee instant success.

Closing this loop is important. It gives valuable insight into how successful a campaign was but also provides other extremely helpful pointers for honing and improving your communication.

Measuring and analysing results helps to answer some key questions such as:

What were response rates?

Was the message sent the one received?

How good was the data?

Did the response mechanism work as well as expected?

And crucially, what changes can be made to improve the communication?

Of course experience helps to preempt the pitfalls to good communication. Audience, message, media act as filters to ensure that the ingredients which go into the communication cake are correct to begin with. But of course modern communication is confusingly multi channeled and multi layered. And audiences more savvy. Gone are the days of light the blue touch paper then sit back and wait. If they ever existed. Audiences need courting. Confidence needs building. Dialogue needs to be nurtured.

Big brands can operate simultaneously across global channels to diverse audiences. Smaller brands don’t have the same opportunities to blitz the Market. Budgets have to stretch further so measurement is even more important to improve the efficiency of the communication and reduce waste.

So unless you have a bloomin’ big rocket one communication will not suffice. Measuring, honing and repeating the message is vital to get the most bangs from your marketing fireworks.

We have developed a programme which helps businesses to develop more successful campaigns. We call it Active Customer Development and it is designed to optimise sales and marketing knowledge about audiences to build targeted communications that find and help retain customers.

written by Andy

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 + has added some impressive new features such as video hangouts which allow up to ten people to chat via Android smartphone and for users to share the content of their computer screens with whoever they are talking to. It has also added ‘social search’ which allows members to find results from socially shared information, in addition to the wider web. This will be of great interest to businesses in terms of search engine optimisation, as a recommendation (+1) or comment from a user’s friend could push a business higher in the search results.

Facebook has responded to Google’s challenge by introducing a number of new features, including a new friend system which makes it easier to add people to categories, similar to Google Circles. Facebook also announced that it’s working on a feature which will help users link their profile directly to their Twitter account.

When Google’s senior vice president, Vic Gundotra, was asked what he thought people would move away from Facebook or use Google+ in addition, he said: “We suspect people use many different tools to share.”

Has Google done enough to turn people off Facebook or is it in danger of overwhelming us?

written by Rachel \\ tags: Facebook, 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 with detailed instructions and sent out for typesetting which would sometimes take days to return. It was very labour intensive.

The bad old days? Not when it comes to imagery, no. Back then, image was king. At one time we had a constant flow of photographers and agents through our offices, presenting beautiful original work to get our creative brains fuelled with all the fantastic possibilities. How better to differentiate a brand than a wonderfully conceived original image to go with a face melting headline?

When I worked on the Guinness annual report in the 90s the photography budget alone was circa £100K. We designed sumptuous sets, hired fabulous models, seduced the top photographers to champion the products. The results were nothing short of art. Commercial art. 

Today, the budgets for imagery are non-existent. After all, images are free aren’t they?

Nowadays, it seems, the image is an afterthought. The proliferation of ‘free’ royalty free libraries and the abundance of cheap imagery has driven down the desire for high standards in imagery, and devalued the term photographer. In the past, photo libraries were the absolute last resort. A poor compromise. Today they are seemingly the first, and often, the only choice.

The good ones do hold a range of fantastic images, but at a price often too high for a client’s budget. Creatives are sent back to the cheaper libraries to hunt down a ‘similar image’ at a fraction of the cost. This can take hours and hours, time which is often not accounted for, so the cost of finding an alternative image is absorbed by the agency.

A huge bear pit to this approach is exclusivity. How do you know your chosen royalty free image of a pretty girl used to promote chocolate isn’t being used by someone else to raise awareness of chlamydia?

There is another problem: the digital camera, or worse, the camera phone. Everyone has one, no one can use it. But because it’s free, image quality isn’t important. All of a sudden, it’s ok to present yourself in fuzzy, overexposed, flash burnt, harsh-shadowed, red-eyed glory! Or, a favourite of some, in a dinner suit.

It seems that only the top brands with the biggest budgets are still investing in creating unique high quality imagery to sell their products. It is a real pity that the art of originality seems to be a dying one. After all, a picture is worth…

written by Andy \\ tags: Images, Photography