M & A Rainmaker

If you are looking for a company that can provide Marketing Services in the Ironbridge, Telford and Shrewsbury area then I would recommend that you contact Claire at CSL Design.

CSL Design offers professional and honest marketing services in Telford, Shropshire. They offer a full solution for your business from Internet Marketing, Graphic Design and Print to Event Management, Photography and PR. They can also provide you with a free initial marketing overview to measure the effectiveness of your current marketing and show you where improvements could be made to make your efforts more cost effective and successful.

Marketing Services Provided:

Internet Marketing
Websites
Search Engine Optimisation
Social Media (Facebook/Twitter/Blogs)
Email Marketing
Branding/Re-Branding
Graphic Design & Print
Event Management & Marketing
Photography
PR & Copy Writing
Marketing Plans & Reviews

Contact Claire on:

Contact: Claire Windley | Email: claire@csldesign.com | Mobile: 07891 285514

TripAdvisor is a monster that is out of control and you know what happens to out of control monsters ??? They get shot !!

More and more people are joining the movement against TripAdvisor which allows people to post defamatory comments on it’s website and then denies any responsibility for them doing so.

Duncan Bannatyne is one of the more recent victims,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/8277098/Duncan-Bannatyne-to-campaign-against-cowardly-TripAdvisor.html

and it must have come as a bit of a shock to him to find that even with all his money you can do very little to move TripAdvisor when it is on the rampage.

In general the comments on TripAdvisor are polarised towards those that are either trying to damage the business in question or those that are trying to defend it.

People only actually take the time to write on TripAdvisor when they have something they really want to say - whether good or bad.

Blackmail is commonplace with TripAdvisor would be posters threatening hospitality venues with ” a bad review ” unless they get ( whatever it is they feel like demanding - a discount, a free meal etc etc ).

However, when everyone realises that the comments on TripAdvisor are worthless pieces of make believe then what is the value of TripAdvisor ??

I feel sorry for all the hospitality business owners who can do nothing against the TripAdvisor monster.

When they try to respond to defamatory posts TripAdvisor delays or fails to post these responses. ( This is implicitly giving control and ” right ” to the defamers ).

Complaining to TripAdvisor  ( as Duncan Bannatyne found ) is next to worthless as they simply defend themselves like cornered rats.

My advice is to invest in a blogsite that complements your main website ( or is part of your main website ) and to understand how to SEO your blogsite to get it ranked for e.g. Reviews about ( The name of your establishment ).

As a powerful website TripAdvisor will always get ranked high itself by Google etc but this does not mean that you cannot rank alongside or ahead of it for certain search terms.

With your own blogsite you can respond in detail and in the way you want to to any posts put on TripAdvisor in a timeframe that suits you.

http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Hotel_Review-g652382-d191629-Reviews-Bannatyne_s_Charlton_House_Spa_Hotel-Shepton_Mallet_Somerset_England.html

Internet and Traditional Marketing specialist, Claire Windley, has been shining her light around Shropshire and the U.K.  from a hill above Lightmoor near Ironbridge.

Claire’s Internet Marketing business is known as CSL Design after her initials

http://www.shantay-emerald.co.uk/netshows.html

Claire , who has ridden horses from a young age, is organising the Netley Hall Shows and Events for 2011

http://netleyhallevents.co.uk/contact.html

These shows will take place in May, July and August 2011. These are BSJA events and the second two will be filmed by Sky Sports.

Claire has created an Internet presence for Netley Hall  using, for example,  a website, blog, Facebook and Twitter page.

Claire has been trained by U.S. Inbound Internet Marketing phenomenon, Hubspot, to help her customers get found on the Internet, convert website visitors into leads and analyze the results in a continuous closed loop process.

Claire has also been providing Traditional and Internet Marketing advice to Cisco FutureLine which is one of Cisco’s key partners for the provision of communications solutions to Small and Medium Sized businesses. Shropshire is home to many rapidly growing small and medium sized companies and these companies need to expand their markets beyond Shropshire to the rest of the world.

Claire has extensive experience with the hospitality industry having guided Smith & Williamson’s British Country Inns in their marketing strategy over the last year or so and working with a number of exclusive ” gastro pubs ” and restaurants around the U.K.

Internet Marketing should not be viewed in isolation but should be part of an overall integrated marketing strategy and for that you need someone like Claire who understands all aspects of sales and marketing.

Here are 3 must watch marketing videos for #smwf

http://www.youtube.com/user/HubSpot?feature=autoshare

http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/sales-marketing-machine-webinar

http://www.lewishowes.com/marketing/inbound-marketing-plan/#more-2030

This blog is based on a recent  interview with Mike Volpe

http://www.mikevolpe.com/

by Lewis Howes - Author, Speaker and Entrepreneur.

The full transcript and  video is here, which I recommend you look at

http://www.lewishowes.com/marketing/inbound-marketing-plan/#more-2030

Why would you put your effort into Inbound Marketing ??

Inbound Marketing Budget & Results

Lewis: So, what I hear from that is that:

You spend more energy, time and resources or money on creating content, or creating free software, free downloads, free webinars.  So you’re putting that paid advertising money into the free stuff, which is converting twice as well as the paid stuff.  Correct?

Mike: That’s exactly right.

The cost is lower per lead and the conversion rate is twice.  So the cost per customer… it’s 3 or 4 times better. It’s fantastic.

And you’re right.  I think… so we spend some money on creating content and the way that you typically do that is that you end up hiring people.

So I think that in the long term we may have much more as the percentage of marketing budget going to the team and, you know, the people that are blogging and doing webinars and creating content versus buying media.

Building Versus Renting

And I think the interesting… you know, the other analogy if you think about it that way is that:

• If you’re buying media or advertising from someone else, you’re really renting the capability of attracting an audience because you have to pay them every time you wan to do an ad.

• If you’re building up your own blog, if you’re becoming your own media company, you’re building something.  You’re purchasing real estate and building your own real estate.  And obviously what you typically want to do is own those assets over time and things like that.

So just like you do with your blog and everything that you do, you’re building up yourself as this media agency, right?  And if you were to take a month off, you would still get a ton of web traffic because you’ve built this up over time.  If you stop paying that bill to that company you’re advertising with, you get nothing the next month, right?

So I think, again, you should want to build and not rent, and that’s another way to sort of think about it.

How would you start with Inbound Marketing ??

How To Start Inbound Marketing

OK. So let’s give them a good example.

• Say I’m a tech startup company.
• I’ve got 10-25 employees.
• I’m trying to grow.
• I’m trying to get more leads.
• I’ve got a free software, or a free service, but there’s a paid model as well, but I’m looking to get those free leads in to use the service first.

How do you guys collate the information through your blog, your books, your webinars, etc?  Do you hire… if you’re this company, do you hire someone externally?  Do you have members of the team who are doing different things; developers, CEO, running content?  Do you get all the members of the staff involved?  Or do you use one person?  How would you go about that?

Mike: That’s a really good question.

I’m a huge fan of getting the entire company involved in the effort.  I think we’ve had a lot of success and seen the best success among our customers if there’s more than one person.

Maybe you can have a leader, or a manager for your inbound marketing program, but unless you have multiple people contributing… you know, it needs to be the whole company.  You just sort of change your company philosophy to some degree to really make these things effectively.  We’ve seen the best success with companies that have multiple people contributing to the blog.

Because you get those different perspectives: the perspective from the VP of Engineering versus the VP of Sales and the VP of Marketing or the Co-Founders.  It’s going to be a little bit different.  And that helps you attract different facets of your audience.

Lewis: So, what if a company is not willing to do that?  Do you think you’ve really got to adopt this philosophy? Or you’re going to be struggling if you don’t?

Mike: You know…

• It will still work to some degree if you have one person sort of dedicated to it and spending some time on it.

• You will get better results if the whole team is dedicated to it.

IQMS Success Story

I’ll tell you a story about a company called IQMS.  They sell, sort of in that range, or I think they’re around 200 employees.  They sell ear piece software to manufacturers.  They’re based in California.  And what the CEO did, is he decided to basically…

You know it was like when Cortez came to the New World he burned his ships so all the people with him would committed to staying and making a life in the New World.

• He did that.
• He fired their PR agency.
• He cancelled all of their print advertising.
• And he told his marketing staff of only 2 people, that you need to embrace inbound marketing and make it work and here are your lead goals.
• And they said, “Holy crap! What are we going to do?” Right?  And then they said, “Well, I guess we really need to make this work.”
• So they started blogging.
• And the CEO was great because they did have that leadership above.
• The CEO created some content.
• Some other people in the company started blogging and things like that.
• And they’ve actually seen their business, I forget if it was 10% or 20%, buttheir business increased after having decreased the past 3 years.

And you know, we’re still not in a great economic environment yet, and they were able to see an increase in 2010 after having declined in 2008 and 2009.

He really attributes all of their success to that program and being really, really committed to it.

So again, you’ll have some success if it’s one person, but I would really recommend to folks that they think about really transforming their company.

Lewis: Gotcha.

How would you get started with Inbound Marketing ??

A Simple Inbound Marketing Plan

What would be a simple marketing plan for any company trying to get more inbound leads?

Mike: Yeah.

#1: Website Grader

I think the first thing is, I honestly would recommend Website Grader. It’s totally free. I’d run my website through Website Grader. Usually for many of the smaller companies, there’s usually one or two small changes they can make to their site to improve their search engine optimization, or how they’re site is displayed in search engines.  That’d probably be the first thing.

#2: One Blog Article A Week

After you’ve made a couple of those changes, I think the next most important thing is just to start to create some content.  So I would actually say about one blog article a week is probably fine.

You know, someone like you, you’re passionate about the stuff and you create tons of content. You’re doing hundreds of webinars.  If you can do that, that’s fantastic.  But for many of these folks they’re really nervous about getting started so even one blog article a week will have an effect.

#3: Good Lead Generating Offer

And then I think the third component that you definitely need is:

• What’s that good offer that’s going to get people to convert and become a lead?

And usually I think a webinar is a great example of something that people can do.  And then you need to take that call to action, that offer to become a lead and put that on your home page, and put it on all of your blog content.

And I think that if you use just those 3 things, the blog articles and the SEO will start to attract more people to your site and you’re going to have that good call to action and you’ll start to get more leads through that call to action.

And then, you know, there are lots of ways to make it even better and do more with it, but those 3 things will get most people started.

FutureLine’s use of HubSpot Inbound Marketing Software in the U.K. has helped it to dominate visibility for UCExpo related searches and get some high quality leads from potential partners and end users.

A couple of weeks ago Cisco FutureLine increased it’s commitment to HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing software in order to be able to increase awareness of FutureLine for UCExpo 2011 and to dominate selected searches that related to UCExpo.

FutureLine was sharing the Cisco stand at UCExpo and was promoting a range of S.M.B. focussed products and services.

We started blogging a couple of weeks prior to UCExpo both here and on the FutureLine blog page.

The results have been stunning with total domination of searches like:

” cisco ucexpo 2011 ”

” hosted voice ucexpo 2011 ”

” hosted telephony ucexpo 2011 ”

and

” asterisk ucexpo 2011 ”

We also dominated the search for

” coffee ucexpo 2011 ”  !!!!!!!

Although the UCExpo show was not exactly packed out we had some great visits to both our stand at UCExpo and the website. In fact many of the leads were confirmed both through the Internet and physically by visiting the stand. This showed great commitment on behalf of the prospect.

We also got our Twitter page up and running prior to UCExpo (  @Future_Line )

and that really helped us to get up to the minute reports of what was happening at UCExpo.

Searc

The news is just out that HubSpot has raised another $32 Million in Venture Finance and I think that this will probably lead to U.K. , European and indeed Global expansion.Get the inside story from Brian Halligan of HubSpot:

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/10480/Inside-Story-Behind-HubSpot-s-32-Million-Investment-From-Salesforce-Google-and-Sequoia.aspx

Clare Jenkins, M.D. of FutureLine, is going to be one of the speakers at UCExpo 2011 and will have a simples message to deliver.

For Hosted Voice to become widely used it needs to be simples !

It also helps when it is supported by one of the biggest networking companies in the world - and Cisco Systems fits the bill perfectly.

At UCExpo 2011 the Cisco FutureLine stand ( 504 ) will show and demonstrate the latest in Cisco S.M.B. telephony options.

Actually there are two audiences for Cisco FutureLine - the end user and the reseller. Clearly the reseller knows all the technical jargon but the end user does not - especially the S.M.B. end user.

The message needs to be simples to both but between Cisco FutureLine and resellers it may be ok to use the jargon.

It’s about communicating in the right way - taking into account who your audience is.

S.M.B. customers don’t know all the answers to questions like ” What features do you need ? ” - they are typically growing, dynamic businesses who are changing structure and direction quite often.

What they do need therefore is FLEXIBILITY and UPGRADABILITY.

They want to know that they can get a phone system that does the job right now but can grow to suit the needs of thier business in the future.

SIMPLES !!

The reason that I recommend that my clients use HubSpot Inbound Marketing software is because I want them to be in control of thier Internet Marketing spend and investment.

When researching for this article I quite liked this post here

http://www.wsiwebpro.com/roi-formula-internet-marketing.html

which offered a ” Common Sense ROI strategy ” which basically was ” Increase the traffic to your website OR increase the conversion of traffic to leads OR both “.

Within that simple advice are hidden some basic things that some people just do not understand.

As I have said in earlier blogs the key to a website is how often it is found by the right people ( for the product or service that you are supplying ) and it is of lesser importance what it looks like as long as it converts visitors to leads well.

As very few Internet Marketing and Website Design companies understand this very few of them ask a critical question ” What ( words and phrases ) are you trying to be found for and who are your likely customers??  ”

In fairness those that do often struggle to get a response because thier clients simply do not know the answers to these questions. ( The answer to the first part of the question requires that the client put himself in the mind of thier client and think what they would type into Google in order to find the product or service that they provide . The answer to the second part of the question requires that they understand the typical profile of thier target customer. )

When you have your website being found by lots of the right people then you have TRAFFIC !! The you only need to convert that traffic to a lead. ( To be a lead you need some information about the enquirer e.g. name and email address. )

Conversion of traffic into leads is an art that I will not go into here.

The reason that I recommend HubSpot Inbound Marketing software to my clients is that I want to know ( and they need to know ) how much traffic they have; how it is increasing ( hopefully ! ) over time and where that traffic is coming from.

Is it coming from e.g.

- Direct Traffic ( someone just typed in the name of your company - implying that your name is well known for that type of product or service )

- Organic Traffic ( implying that you ARE being found for the words and phrases that you have optimised for )

- email traffic ( implying that you are getting people signing up to your blog/website and your email camapigns are working )

- Referrals ( implying that other people are spotting and highlighting and propagating your information )

- Social Media ( implying that people are following your Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin pages and that they are following these back to your blog/website ).

etc etc

Once we know what is happening to our traffic and where it is coming from we can fine tune to get more and then to convert that traffic into leads and then, all importantly, into sales.

Once we know how many of what product or service we sold ( at what price and profit ) we can work out what our Return on Internet Marketing spend is.

This morning I woke up thinking about the ” share ” facility that you see on so many websites and blogs now. ( Who invented this ??? ). It’s a really powerful thing to be able to share your content so quickly and easily.

This got me wondering about how Synnd and Traffic Geyser were doing. I will explain more about them shortly. As you know we are working with HubSpot on the FutureLine website attracting and converting traffic and monitoring how we are doing over time.

As we know you have to be found on the Internet - for relevant searches. Google is always trying to give people what they want when they type something into the search box.

Yesterday I was sitting in a car service reception waiting for my son’s car to get some new wheels and also they were investigating a problem with the windscreen washers. One of the service managers had a Mini whose keys were not being recognised so he had to get it over to the Mini garage in Derby. We all ( I was eavesdropping and contributing! ) thought that Mini had seperated from BMW and although it was on the same road it was a different garage. So, the receptionist was Googling for the Mini garage NOT the BMW garage. The answers coming back were not clear but the phone number for the garage was found anyway. This led the receptionist and I to a discussion about when Mini was taken over by BMW; who Mini was originally built and owned by and who owned Mini now ?? Googling did not produce all the answers.

We want the best answer to our question or the best result for our search and Google tries hard to give us that.

In our HubSpot trial we have been thinking hard about what people will search for when they want more information on small business phone systems and the we have been trying to ensure that our content, titles, metatags etc are all aligned with those search terms.

When I have produced content e.g. a blog I will share it and post it on various websites e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit etc etc because I know that 1. People that are on those sites and connected to me will see it and 2. That I may gain some benefit to my blog and blogsite by linking back from very highly ranked sites to my own. ( there’s a lot of deep techie debate around this area that I will not bore you with ).

The ” Share ” and ” Like ” facilities are getting easier and I can ” Share ” and ” Like ” to many different sites.

Essentially though what I am doing is a manual process.

Synnd ( see  video on http://www.charlesheflin.com/ or go to http://synnd.com/ ) and Traffic Geyser (     http://mikekoenigs.com/about/ or                http://www.trafficgeyser.com/ )    are about automating this process and creating massive distribution of content or ” Content Syndication ” as it is known.

Mike’s Traffic Geyser is predominantly about the content syndication of videos. Charles’s Synnd covers all content - e.g. blog posts, web pages, pdf’s and video’s .

Traffic Geyser’s focus on video’s derives ( basically ) from the fact that ” a picture or a video tells a thousand words ” and that Google is treating well tagged videos very favourably in search results.

I recommend that you explore all of these facilities and websites - ” Share “,  HubSpot  , Synnd and Traffic Geyser - and watch the videos.

I have subscribed to all of these facilities although I don’t necessarily use them all the time.

One of the things to remember is that once you understand the requirement to distribute content, url’s through ” sharing ” you can automate and scale this up massively if required.