Chichester Design

There’s an interesting article about the development of social media marketing in the corporate world in the latest edition of Marketing Week. It points out that, while most of the UK’s top retailers use Twitter and Facebook, too many companies are shouting and not listening, and this got me thinking about how SMEs use social media marketing.

When the article says shouting and not listening, it doesn’t mean companies have an over-fondness for capitalisation (although our copywriter may like to argue that point), what it is saying is that social media marketing is being treated too much as …

Very interesting news from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) annual report: the UK online advertising market grew by more than a quarter in 2010 to reach almost £1 billion. What was the key growth driver? Social media.

A move by advertisers into the social media world was a principal factor in the marked upturn in online advertising, itself irrefutable evidence of the digitalisation of the general marketplace. Where are we forming our opinions? Where are we making our purchasing decisions? Where are we doing that purchasing? Online.

So, it follows that more and more companies should be investing in online …

I’ve got another client profile on the Chichester Design blog for you this week. We’ve recently launched a website for Anode Outlet, an online retailer of sacrificial anodes for leisure craft.

What are sacrificial anodes? Good question! You don’t hear too much about these strips of metal, but they are vital to stopping the corrosion of important parts of boats, such as hull plates and rudders. Anodes are attached to the underside of a boat and they attract the corrosion instead of the metal components of a boat.

Anode Outlet is a brand new company and their USP …

More interesting news on Facebook’s growing role as a marketing tool for businesses. A recently published report found that, of the people surveyed, nearly a quarter wanted brand information via Facebook.

According to the report by digital consultancy Beyond, nearly half of those surveyed said that they follow brands and companies through a social network, with Facebook the most popular source: 23% of participants said that they would prefer to receive information on brands and companies through Facebook, ahead of a company’s own website and a company’s own blog.

The report also found that half of the participants said …

Following on from my post on the growth of Facebook company pages and the use of this social network as a business marketing tool, I want to discuss digital marketing in a bit more detail.

Search engine optimisation and social media marketing, which I talked about in relation to Facebook company pages, are elements of digital marketing, which is essentially marketing carried out on the web. As you can imagine, this type of marketing is becoming increasingly important as more and more business is carried out online.

You can read more about search engine optimisation and social media marketing in …