For those of you who don’t know what foursquare is, it is a mobile app for both Android and iPhone that allows users to check in where they are. Sounds pretty basic right? Well it also allows them to find restaurants, boutiques or whatever they’re into that are near to their location and share their adventures. As a business you can be part of this experience.

But why is foursquare so good?

One, Numbers Don’t Lie:

Here are some vital statistics:

• 1, Foursquare has a community of about 15 million people across the globe,
• 2, It has had more than 1.5 billion check-ins – this number is increasing by millions every day,
• 3, And more than 600,000 businesses use its Merchant Platform.

Two, Building Customer Relationships:

Millions of people check in to millions of businesses everyday through foursquare. This app can show you who your regulars are, help you to open-up new conversations and  inform them of your current news and offers. Foursquare also can help you to find new customers as your popularity grows. Essentially, it’s free friendly marketing.

Three, Super Special Specials:

If you want to raise the profile of your business utilise the specials function on foursquare to give your customers a unique experience and encourage people to talk about what you’re doing. According to the foursquare site you can do much more than offering discounts. You can offer things for free if people log in a certain amount of times within a set period of time or you can give them special treatment (foursquare uses the example of a zoo who said: “check in on foursquare for private access to the penguin feeding”). Foursquare encourages you to get creative with your digital PR.

Four, Useful Stats:

Every entrepreneur loves discovering statistics about how their business operates and foursquare delivers these details to your business account for free. This real-time data includes the total number of check ins at your business, who your most recent visitors were, the gender of your visitors, the time of day that they checked in, and the number of check ins that are shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Five, Brand Pages:

If you’re an established company with an online presence you need to build a brand page on four square. There are three good reasons why you should do this. Firstly, a brand page encourages people to follow your business so they can hear all about your latest news. Next, if someone is following your brand page they can also then access your foursquare tips. These reveal your local recommendations when they’re out and about. Finally, when your site’s users read of an event happening or a review of something they can add it to their foursquare to-do list by clicking on the ‘save to foursquare’ button.

Plugin One: NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is an image display plugin with a slideshow feature. It’s a good gallery tool because it is easy to customise its design, it’s not intrusive and it is user-friendly for our clients. It can also to be tailored to be as simple or as complex as needed.

Key features of NextGen Gallery include; the ability to add custom templates to your WordPress theme, being able to copy or move images between galleries and  sortable albums. You can also watermark images, get tag support for images, and meta-data support.

Plugin Two: WP e-Commerce

With 1.3million downloads (according to WordPress), WP e-Commerce is a shop plugin with “unparalleled experience”. The Seabrook Associates team like it because it’s easy to use (if you know your PHP) and it allows us to design the shop in anyway we want because it can be built into bespoke templates. This plugin saves both us and the client time and money.

Key features of WP e-Commerce include; 15 types of payment gateway can be integrated, marketing tools such as free shipping and flexible coupon options and it is 100% search engine friendly. The plugin also has international currency transactions, built-in shipping rate calculators, secure checkouts, extensive admin control including catalogue management, and basically it has more cool features than we can bothered to list.

Plugin Three: Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools does what it says on the tin. It integrates the client’s WordPress CMS with their twitter account. This is particularly useful if the client isn’t social-media savvy, if they’re lazy, or if they’re absent-minded. We like Twitter Tools as it automatically updates a client’s twitter account when they publish something on their news / blog page – making self-marketing easier.

Key features of Twitter Tools include; an archive of your tweets, the option to create a daily or weekly post of your tweets and you can also post tweets directly from your sidebar and your WP Admin screens.

Plugin Four: WordPress SEO by Yoast

We like Yoast because it provides our clients with the comprehensive search engine optimisation (SEO) service. It takes care of all the technical elements of SEO like urls and meta tags but mainly it focuses of helping users to write properly keyword optimised articles. It also shows them how posts and pages will look in the organic search engine results and makes sure that meta tags make sense.

Key features of Yoast include; page analysis to check you’ve included your keywords in your article and meta description, analysis of whether your posts are long enough, XML sitemaps functionality, social-media integration and a multi-blog function which only needs setting up once.

Set Site Objectives:

It is easier to identify that you (the client) need a new site than to plan what you want to use it for. The process of creating a site map can help you to determine what you really want to get from your website because it shows you how your site will be structured in a heirarchy.

Improve SEO:

Site maps plan your website’s search engine optimisation (SEO) tools. They state which key words should be used in each page’s written content and plot how these words will be used in url links.

Streamline Your Conversions (Navigation):

Using a site map you can strategically plot the easiest path for your customers between browsing your products / services and making a purchase. Your site map will help you to eliminate any unnecessary elements of your site that might cause a potential customer to become disinterested and click away from your site, which is the last thing you want.

Get Everyone Working From the Same Page:

There can be a number of people working on a website development project. Designers, coders, art directors, copy writers, the client, animators – the list goes on. A site map outlines which sections of the site each person is responsible for and acts as jobs checklist.

Cost Effective:

Drafting a site map can highlight some potential problems before you reach the main design and build stages of the website. Spotting any difficulties at the earliest point in the project can save both the designers and the client money. Later amends can be expensive, time-consuming and can seriously alter the website’s design.

Without a site map a website can be disorganised, in-effective, expensive and difficult to navigate. It’s worth taking the relatively short-amount of time it takes to create a site map as it can save everybody a lot of time and money and create a better site.

The whizkids at Seabrook Associates, Manchester-based graphic design agency, have developed their own email-marketing software called KnowledgeMail, but we won’t go on about it you can read for yourself why email-marketing is so great:

Global Reach: 

It goes without saying that emails are brilliant because you can contact your customers from all over the world in an instant.

Lower Cost:

Obviously it is far cheaper to send emails than paper-based mail but did you know that it can be up to 80% cheaper to design and distribute a professional email-marketing campaign than a printed one. You can contact thousands more readers more quickly while using far fewer materials.
TEST

Design Mailer Templates:

Your e-newsletter can look professional with very little effort. Email-marketing systems like KnowledgeMail have email templates built into their software which you can adapt for free to suit your campaign.

Interactive:

Your subscribers can interact with your emails by playing videos, viewing links and responding to questionnaires – you can’t do that with printed advertising.

Opt-in: 

A good quality email-marketing software, like KnowledgeMail, will enable your website’s users to sign-up for your newsletters. This is a great way to build a database of contacts that are genuinely interested in your products, projects, news and offers. These contacts are far better than bought lists as you are much more likely to get a response from them.

Easy Contact Uploader:

When you’re setting up your email-marketing software you can upload all of your contacts for your email accounts in one go via CSV file.

Round The Clock Marketing:

With top-of-the-range email-marketing software you can carefully plan when to distribute your news and implement your campaign when you’re away from the office.

Highly Personalized:

Email enables you to personally greet all of your contacts and tailor your campaigns to specific groups of customers. You can create custom-built lists so you can market to people based on sub-groups like their age, location, interests or average spending amount etc.

Measurable Results:

Like Google Analytics, decent email-marketing software like KnowledgeMail will tell you who has read your newsletter, where your subscribers are reading your letters, what time they opened the email and which links they have clicked on. These statistics can then be used to plan future campaigns so they can be more effective.

Faster Response:

Email campaigns have a quicker customer reaction time than printed marketing. Email campaigns generally have the largest response on the day that the newsletter is sent out but printed campaigns can take between between seven and 12 days to garner any response. People can respond to an email immediately simply by clicking a few buttons. It’s a far more lengthy process replying via letter.

Written content is one of the most important element’s to be incorporated into your website design and here’s why:

1)  Clarity: This might sound like a glaringly obvious point but your written content tells your website’s visitors who you are, what you do and how you operate so it is important to get it right.

It’s amazing how many sites I have seen that have content that does not actually tell the website’s user what that company does.

2) SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): Your written content also helps you to be found by search engines.

Webspiders or bots from search engines crawl the net looking for key terms about the topic their searcher is interested in. If your copy is written well it will be infused with carefully planned keywords which will help search engines to find your site and rank higher in their organic results.

Incidentally, a good organic ranking is far better than a bought ranking as 85 to 90% of all clicks on Google are on organic results.

3) Referrals: Good quality website content is also a great way to build a following of interested people who want to hear what you’re company has been working on and what resources it is interested in.

If your blog or news copy is original (copied content is useless for SEO), insightful , useful, funny, newsworthy or controversial your followers will post links to it on their sites and on social media. This will also bolster your SEO credentials, increase number of hits on your site and ultimately bring in more business.

Well-written website copy is not the be all and end all of online digital marketing but it has an essential role to play and can offer a very good return on relatively little investment.

Now, we are not the first agency to use and integrate WordPress into the business model, however we have produced an abundance of enterprising websites for our clients, using WordPress as our content management system of choice.

We do continue to develop our own software platforms and cloud-based systems (for accountancy practices, CRM services etc) although for content rich websites, we focus purely on WordPress.

So, what we thought would be a good idea (for you and for us) is to list each month 3 great reasons why we love WordPress, starting with our November choices:

1. Open Source

WordPress is open source, which means that it has been developed by a growing community of programmers from around the world – not just one company. These developers contribute their own time to help make the platform stronger for everybody that uses it. So when we integrate WordPress into your company website, you will be using one of the most reliable content management systems available to you (helping to make your online presence reassuringly dependable).

2. Fantastic Plugins

There are thousands of ‘plugins’ (16,970 and counting) that can help to make your website even more innovative. You might want to create your own social networking platform, or even start to sell products online for example. Using WordPress plugins, we can help to kick-start your new concept at an affordable rate.

We will be reviewing these Plugins in more detail in the upcoming weeks.

3. Cost Effective

Running a business in these challenging times means that you are looking harder at what you are spending your budget on. By using WordPress for your content management system, it means that what we charge you for is the integration and customisation of the software into your website – instead of paying for a bespoke content management system from scratch. This has the potential to reduce a standard development time substantially; and as it is WordPress, you will be getting a better product too. Excellent.

We hope that this helps you to consider the immediate benefits of using WordPress with your new or existing company website, and if you would like to discuss your thoughts further, then please contact us on 0161 860 7010 and we can talk through your ideas. 

In the meantime, here are some examples of websites that we have recently created, that use the fabulous WordPress content management system:

www.biasi.co.uk
www.eventcrockeryhire.co.uk
www.twothousandtreesfestival.co.uk

1. Strategic communication

PR skills are becoming central to digital marketing because onsite content is increasingly important and websites are now the focal point for all online conversations about a brand or business.

Public relations professionals manage conversations between a business and its audience and the profession is well placed to help web designers to create an online narrative for their clients.

2. Content led SEO

After the most recent Google Panda update, good quality content is more important than ever – all at the expense of SEO spam.  At the heart of PR is content. Relevant, interesting and commercially focused content.

3. In-bound links

A key part of PR is generating press and blog coverage for clients that, more often than not, will include links to a client website or domain.  By incorporating a PR into a digital marketing campaign, web designers can help their clients naturally build authoritative inbound links to a website.

4. Incremental revenue

Clients should see genuine commercial return if they action the three previous points, be that in terms of increased site traffic, lead generation and conversions.  As custodians of the client relationship web designers can use PR to build an ongoing income stream, long after initial fees for designing and building the website has been ended.

www.pragencyone.co.uk

However with the explosion of new digital platforms available across a multitude of devices, we have managed to organise ourselves very effectively (and have fun at the same time!).

So, what we thought we’d do is to create a monthly blog so that you can see what works for us, and in turn might be helpful to you.

No 1: Action Method, by Behance (www.actionmethod.com)

Every day we are working on a variety of projects, and we’ve always found that keeping track of what needs to be done can be a little bit ad-hoc. Action Method has helped to change all of that.

This beautifully crafted tool enables us to manage our projects by associating action steps to each one, which can then be delegated to the appropriate team member. We can schedule the steps, and put them in an order of importance. Notes can be added, and we can see where there are any bottlenecks in each project.

The other key use of Action Method is when brainstorming (sorry ‘thought-showering’) an idea. Ideas can come at any time of the day or night, and with both the iPhone and iPad apps, we can add a quick action step to each innovation. Plus, as it is cloud based it automatically updates our account. It looks sublime, works instinctively and costs under £100 for the year. Marvellous.

Have you had the feeling that over the past six months that it has been more challenging than ever before to sell your products and services?

Have you thought “if only we could refresh our company’s logo, improve our website or sell our products online; then we would be able to get ourselves out of these difficult times?”.

A question that I am constantly asked is “do we invest in design to grow our business or do we hold onto our money and try to ride out the storm?”.

I’ve also been in this predicament. After a successful 2010, I decided to invest in my business. I employed new designers, moved to a larger design studio, and spent money on a new computer infrastructure; knowing that this would enable me to offer a vastly improved design service to my clients.

The first few months of 2011 were a different story. The number of customer enquiries was still increasing but clients were taking much longer to make a decision about purchasing my products. I discovered that my customers did want my services but were often too worried about investing a significant amount of money in a lump sum during these uncertain times.

My team and I decided that we needed to find a solution to this problem and we came up with a great new three-step approach. Now all my clients have to do is to choose one of my design services (i.e. a new website, a brand refresh or a new company brochure), I consult with them and quote them a price, and then they can choose how long they need to pay for it – 3, 6, or 12 months.

This new approach has been a fantastic success for both my customers and the agency. My customers can now afford the design services they need to grow their business without having to worry about spending a large ‘chunk’ of money in one go. Phew.

Our new three step approach is very simple. All you need to do is:

1. Choose a design solution (brand refresh, new website, ebook etc),

2. Contact me for a free consultation,

3. Agree a price and a staged payment scheme (3, 6 or 12 months for example).

Many businesses make the mistake of trying to ‘ride out the storm’ (reduce spending) during tough economic times but successful enterprises know that dynamic marketing can help them to steam ahead while others are sinking.

Email me at william@seabrook-associates.com if you would like to find out more about our new design offer.

William Seabrook

SA is hooking up with the Chorlton Arts Festival to produce an ebook of the shortlisted entries for the inaugural Flashmob writing competition.

We don’t know what the stories are yet (the shortlist of 12 is announced on Friday May 13), but competition co-organiser and judge Sarah-Clare Conlon tells us they’re pretty good.

Sarah-Clare is also handling the PR for the festival, but she’s a very nice lady who always speaks the truth. She’s also the person behind award-winning blog Words & Fixtures. We have no reason to doubt her.

The competition is for very short short stories (no more than 500 words), and in keeping with the form’s requirements, the plan is to produce a functional ebook that grandstands the writing – design that’s a little on the shy side, that doesn’t really want to be noticed too much. It’s all about the words after all.

The winning story and two runners-up will be announced at an event on Thursday May 26, in Dulcimer bar, Chorlton, and the ebook will be unveiled at the same time. The action, including readings of all the shortlisted stories, starts at 7.30pm.

Come along if you can. And if you can’t, don’t forget to check out the short stories when they’re published on the Myebook platform. They’ll be flash, but the ebook itself will be suitably sober.