Handsome

Filed Under: bd2 news, gargle by BD2
Jun.22, 2011

We’ve built a strong, and now quite long, relationship with the Graphics Department at Wigan College which stems from an initial approach by Course Leader David Beattie some 4 or 5 years ago. Since then we’ve taken on a few placements, set briefs, marked projects, advised students and even found jobs for one or two graduates, which has all been very rewarding from our perspective and is, hopefully, mutually beneficial. We were more than happy, therefore, to be one of the sponsors of the final show for the first year of the new Graphic Design Foundation Degree Course. Naturally we attended last night’s Private View, as we have for the last few years, and were delighted to see the quality of work on display produced by the Foundation Degree’s dozen graduates under the guidance of David. Both from a conceptual and a production perspective most of the work was very strong and it’s no surprise that the new graduates are moving on to complete full degrees or are even going into industry, where demand for their skills is testament to their ability and training given the current tough job market.

Congratulations must go to David for his work with this group, the quality and dedication of which is evident in their output and obvious respect. Hats off too for his personal and proactive efforts to engage with industry by building relationships with local agencies such as ours, but also with some of the bigger London names leading to studio visits for his students to the likes of Pentagram, McCanns and BMB.

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A sweeping statement on E-mail marketing – “Don’t ever generalise.”

Filed Under: email marketing, social media by Stuart Green
Jun.17, 2011

In business, of all the electronic methods at our disposal for communication both internally to our colleagues and externally to our prospects, it is pretty much universally accepted that email will long continue to dominate.

In the consumer brand world, SMS, blogging, in-boxing, poking and tweeting are now an integral part of a ‘switched-on’ marketing strategy. But in the B2B arena the efficacy of such ‘new wave’ electronic communication is very much less understood largely due to the view that it’s immeasurable, ineffective and therefore frivolous. As we know however, relevance of use is key to the success of a particular communication method, and, where there is justification through results, adoption of these ‘new’ channels will no doubt be inevitable.

So currently, in the B2B space there are many ways to engage with our prospects using email marketing; To educate, influence, and stay ‘top-of-mind’ with customers, qualified leads, vendors, and colleagues. To glean information by measuring responses, and to feed leads to sales. To keep prospects warm and nurtured, upsell existing customers, generate more high-quality sales leads, strengthen your relationships overall, generate more referrals, and give sales intelligence that ultimately helps convert more leads into more sales. These methods fit perfectly into the email vehicle and can all be justified as relevant reasons for interaction.

With all of the above diligently in mind, you might be forgiven for treating email marketing as simply a ‘one to many’ means of ‘blanket bombing’ our prospects. BUT, in engaging with the audience, it is important to remember that we are developing a one to one relationship with savvy individuals who will very quickly see through a volley of thinly veiled generalist emails. As with all brand/company perception, once an opinion has been formed it is difficult to change that view.

It’s with this in mind that businesses are now turning to an even more forensic and sophisticated set of techniques which build ‘customer life-cycle’ marketing strategies using gathered intelligence in the form of ‘behavioural’ and ‘engagement’ data. In essence the technologies needed to track and communicate with customers one at a time and based upon their specific behaviours are now available.

By allowing email subscribers to specify email preferences, by dynamically personalising email content, by segmenting email campaigns based upon a sales cycle, or upon behaviour and by sending automatically generated emails based upon triggers, businesses are able to increase click throughs and open rates from 20%-30% significantly by delivering highly personalised and relevant content.

When engagement data is tracked and analysed the resulting segmented intelligence identifies the customers who are likely to buy/contact/order and, those customers engaged with a segmented email are up to 8 times more likely to buy/contact/order than those who are not. Behavioural data is gleaned through the online activity of site visitors and therefore behavioural email targets visitors based upon their online activity for best results. With open rates as high as 70%, you can in turn expect higher click through rates and conversion rates. Automated email strategies incorporating behavioural data and engagement data allow you to pro-actively communicate with prospects throughout the sales cycle and can be defined into many different categories from Welcome programme’ to ‘content triggers’ (i.e. viewed section x of site) from ‘regular browser’ to ‘twitter follower’ and many, many more.

Through our Windowbox e-marketing solution coupled with an initial e-marketing workshop we are able to put the theory into practice in order to help your business make the most of its relationship with individual prospects via behavioural and segmented email campaigns. After all, if you’ve invested in an online presence to generate more business, it stands to reason that you’ll want to drive the buying traffic through it’s door. Otherwise, it’s like investing in a brand new mobile phone and never giving the number out to any of your business network or your best prospects.

To find out what we can do for your business, you guessed it, drop us an email.

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The future’s bright, the future’s round.

Filed Under: industry news, the web by Will Bentley
Jun.13, 2011

If the UK’s internet economy were a separate sector, it would be its 5th largest at 7.2% of GDP. That’s bigger than construction, education or transport and only 2% smaller than financial services [Boston Consulting Group Report 'The connected Kingdom' October 2010]. A fact not lost on the Government who seem keen to further encourage the dotcom generation with business breaks like capital gains tax and venture capital trusts incentives as they attempt to drive Britain forwards as the leading tech economy in Europe. At an event for 100 internet entrepreneurs in Downing Street on June 1st, David Cameron stressed that Britain is relying on the dotcom generation to generate employment not just to preserve it. And e-commerce luminaries, such as Natalie Massenet of Net-a-Porter fame, believe that Europe is addressing the gap between it and the US with Britain at the helm – although it’s safe to say that the big players like Google, Facebook, Linkedin, and Groupon are all Silicon Valley based. “There is a need and an opportunity for Europe to narrow the gap with Silicon Valley, where there is a huge start-up community,” said Niklas Zennstrom who co-founded Skype one of Europe’s big internet successes. He sold Skype in 2005 for $2.6 Billion but it has just been bought by Microsoft for $8.5 Billion demonstrating, yet again, the phenomenal growth in values of e-businesses. Similarly Linkedin, the business social media vehicle, went public on the 19th May at $45 a share which rose to over $90 a share by the end of the first day, valuing the business at over $9 Billion. Such mind-blowing numbers further fuel fears of a second internet crash, but whether it’s dotcoms or bubbles, the future’s definitely round.

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How Did How Do Do?

Filed Under: bd2 news, industry news by Will Bentley
Jun.07, 2011

You have to admire How Do’s knack of putting together a decent speaker line up and consequently pulling in a decent crowd. The ‘How Do Manchester Creative Business Forum’, held at the stylish Studio at The Hive yesterday was typically well attended by a healthy mix of creative industry types drawn in by a wealthier mix of creative industry leaders. The speaker list was topped by Sue Little, Chief Exec of Mccanns, the acknowledged largest agency outside London, which if translated into the famous ‘That was the week that was’ sketch with the Two Ronnies and John Cleese, puts her firmly in the John Cleese position on the left – we all look up to her. Her presentation, whilst b2c biased and inevitably Mccanns view of the world, did capture the current mood of change with its challenge everything message – “think the unthinkable and do the undoable” driven by the rise of social media and newly empowered consumers. Liane Grimshaw, former Amaze director, punchily delivered some widely known but ever relevant home truths summed up, really, as focus – focus on your team, your clients and what you’re good at. And finally there was a dry but fascinating presentation by a ‘Deputy Agent’ (disappointingly not dressed in Cowboy get up as I imagined) from the Bank of England on the overall picture of the economy which turns out to look like a lot of complex graphs cleverly vague enough to accommodate sizable margins for error and frequently caveated by global economic factors outside their control or ability to predict. Summed up, I think, as cautiously optimistic. Which I felt was the general mood of the event, coupled with the ubiquitous rhetoric about collaboration.

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Cobbler’s Shoes

Filed Under: bd2 news by BD2
May.24, 2011

We seem to come across two major problems when attempting to do our own work; firstly, and somewhat inevitably but always happily, our clients’ always take priority, which means that any work for ourselves is constantly pushed to the back of the queue. Mind you, it’s hard to complain about not having enough time to do your own work as it means we’re too busy doing someone else’s; Secondly, we are the most demanding, most critical, most awkward and most frustrating client we’ve ever had to work for.

It’s safe to say then, that designing and building our new website has been a prolonged and sometimes painful process. Over the years we’ve taken various paths, driven by expectation really, and have been locked in a perennial arm-wrestling struggle between looking like a boutique design agency and looking like a web development business, so much so that for the last few years we’ve had 2 sites -  a Shockwave ‘designery’ site at bd2.com and a ‘techie’ web developers site at bd2.net. However, the time has come, or in truth it’s long overdue, to consolidate our online presence into one site that hopefully explains ‘what we do’ and reflects ‘how we do it’ by showing ‘who we do it for’. We’re pleased with it (at least we are this week) but we’re always interested in constructive feedback, so any comments are welcome – please email will@bd2.co.uk.

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B2B blogging strategy

Filed Under: social media by Vicky Graty
May.24, 2011

Many b2b organisations are aware of the benefits of blogging but are still unsure as to how to actually carry it out as part of a business strategy.  Blogging is often perceived as overly time consuming and in turn put to the back of the pile. The following attempts to provide some guidance in terms of what to consider when developing an internal blogging strategy;

Define the objectives

As with any marketing activity it is important to keep focused on the overall objectives, this will help determine the most appropriate content and help develop topics. These objectives may be SEO driven to support an SEO strategy, be based on industry news/thoughts and or to support sales and customer service. It is also vital that the objectives take in to consideration the target audience as the content of a blog and it’s appropriateness to the target audience is critical to its success.

Establish the ‘bloggers’

It is important that the most appropriate individuals within a business are writing the blogs and often a multi author approach can work well in terms of generating new content and ideas. However a level of control is critical in order to ensure the content is checked and appropriate for publishing. Certain disciplines should be set in terms of maintenance, scheduling and content moderation, with appointed individuals responsible for this.

Create a schedule

Creating and defining a schedule will help organise blogging efforts and there are online tools available to help with this, for example the Word Press editorial calendar. Keeping a steady flow of ideas is important but can be challenging, therefore creating a library of topics/blogs and making an investment in time early on in the process can help in the long term. Defining a number of key resources to pull from and keeping on top of industry news can be effective.

Measure the response

Don’t expect too much too soon. You should set small and attainable goals to start with, these may be comments, enquiries, re-tweets etc, and then gradually increase the goals overtime as the momentum increases.

Blogging can seem like a lot of work to start with but by establishing internal processes and disciplines, executing a blog strategy becomes a much simpler task.

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Big Brother, Little Brother: Does size matter? Part 2.

Filed Under: bd2 news, industry news, uncategorized by Will Bentley
May.14, 2011

So I went up to The Storey in Lancaster, a labyrinthine and fascinating venue ran by an equally fascinating Chief Executive with more connections than a Meccano Ferris wheel set and a business CV that wouldn’t flatter a Dragon’s Den panelist, with some nervousness but no real expectations. That nervousness was soon dissipated by a friendly compere – Byron Evans of Wallop Video who must be just as comfortable in front of a camera as behind one, a quick pint of Peroni and some fat comfy leather couches which set a relaxed and homely tone. Although this is reduced somewhat when you look up to see a lecture theatre with rows of faces looking back at you.

The debate soon found itself sidetracked by what exactly constituted a ‘big’ agency these days although the panel was well placed to consider this with a fairly representative spread – ourselves with a dozen people, Wash Design with 5 or 6, Juice Digital again 6 but part of Tangerine PR which is in the mid 20s and Red C Marketing at 42. Perhaps predictably it was the PR guy, Steve Downes,, who proposed that it wasn’t numbers of people or revenues but ‘fame’ that mattered. Rather trickily, this is unquantifiable, although the success of the likes of ‘Love Creative’ has clearly built a reputation leading to work from some big brands. Such examples also reinforce my assertion that it’s all about doing a good job.

Unquestionably size has been less and less of a determining factor which is evident in all the small agencies working on big brands, although capacity must have some bearing. Over the last 20 years or so, the best regional agencies such as The Chase in Manchester and Attik in Leeds, have broken London’s stranglehold on the industry through the excellence of their work setting a new precedent for big corporates to source creative work outside London.

Personally, I believe technology has also played a massive role to assist this and in two ways; firstly as a communications enabler – you don’t need to be next door to your clients with email, electronic documents and innovations like video conferencing and Skype. For example we’re currently working on a project for HP’s Ericsson account in Sweden, the final stages of which have seen alts made in real time in Indesign on our machines, viewed in their virtual conference suite. Secondly, very the nature of the job includes ever increasing digital media involving new skills and technologies. It’s often been smaller agencies that have reacted faster to learn and adopt the skills to deliver these emerging media – web, mobile, apps, viral – and so, when companies have needed these skills, they’ve had to work with smaller agencies either directly or through partnerships. Then, assuming they’ve delivered, credibility is built and any wariness dispelled. This, in turn, leads to more work for them and opportunities for other specialists of any size. At least that’s our experience.

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Big Brother, Little Brother: Does size matter?

Filed Under: bd2 news, industry news by Will Bentley
May.05, 2011

This joint Marketing Industry Network and Creative Lancashire Event at The Storey in Lancashire on the 11th May is set to discuss the benefits or otherwise of Agency size and how small businesses manage to work with big ones. I’ve agreed to be one of the panelists, although having never done anything quite like this before, do so with some nervous concern, mostly about the potential of making a fool of myself in front of lots of people. Plus I’m going to have to start paying attention to panelists on the telly for style tips – David Dimbleby? Michael Portillo? Ian Hislop? Simon Cowell? Perhaps The Hoff? I suppose, given that bd2 is a dozen people in Wigan but we’re currently working with several businesses with revenues in excess of $100 Billion, I’ll have something useful to contribute.

However, and I’m not sure I should reveal this before the event, I don’t think there’s any big secret; it’s all about doing a great job, being professional and looking after your customers.

For more info, or to book tickets, see http://minetwork.me/2010/12/30/big-brother-little-brother-does-size-matter/

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Insider – Social Media Event April 2011

Filed Under: social media by Vicky Graty
Apr.19, 2011

With more and more clients realising the impact social media can have on their business yet still slightly cautious about how they should use it, I was particularly interested in attending the latest Insider media Social Media conference. This half-day conference aimed to explore some of the myths behind social media and explain the business benefits of having a well executed social media marketing strategy.

The event was well located and well organised with an assortment of speakers from various sectors, all with a different target audience. The line up of speakers was strong and was very ‘case study’ orientated which is always a more interesting and effective way of illustrating a varied topic.

The Greater Manchester Police discussed their idea to tweet every call the force received over a 24-hour period, an extremely interesting case study and one that really highlighted how the boundaries within all industry sectors are being pushed due to social media.

Other speakers included the Managing Director of Netcars.com, a new online business who are exploring and experimenting with social media and have clearly identified a link between social media and search engine optimisation.

System One Travel cards explained the importance of ‘engagement’ and the value it has for their business, illustrating how they have seen real value in networking with the local community via Twitter. Likewise No Fear Extreme Energy Drinks described how they use social media to raise awareness of a new product, using online games and other viral campaigns.

Other examples came from Forever Manchester, a charity organisation using social media to target a younger audience and Juice Digital, a social media marketing agency who provided a real insight in to the benefits of planning and measuring any social media activity. Not to mention a humorous spin on the more serious topic of the legal implications of social media for businesses by social media lawyer Steve Kuncewicz.

Overall the key messages were consistent throughout the event, like any other business initiative social media should have a strategy, clear objectives, KPIs and measurable ROI, but  when talking about ROI the value of ‘engagement’ must also be taken in to consideration.

People are increasingly using social media as a way to research before purchasing a product or service therefore becoming part of the verification process, so it can’t be ignored. It can be very powerful tool. How else could you reach such a large audience, so quickly and with such a low cost?

Time still appears to be an issue for many businesses and this was reflected in the Q&A session at the end of the conference. To sum things up, for me, despite the very comprehensive case study examples and the hints and tips provided, I would like to have seen more b2b examples, examples of businesses that don’t have a young target audience, corporate businesses, small b2b organisations using social media marketing as part of their strategy.

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Brief Distraction 12

Filed Under: bd2 news by Vicky Graty
Mar.22, 2011

We have published a new issue of our newsletter “brief distraction”; it’s the latest round up of our creative work on websites, direct mail, email marketing, adverts and literature projects. we have also included a short article on e-strategies, which looks at why organsations should consider their entire online presence in combination.

The newsletter features a website project we have recently completed for Wigan Council; “Way to Work”‚ is a Wigan Borough Partnership initiative designed to make it easier for local people to access work, training and education. Along with marketing communication projects for HP – a key partner within the Atlas Consortium, we’ve completed a major e-commerce rebuild for Ralawise Europe’s largest distributor of branded apparel, and an ongoing new sector marketing campaign for Vision Commercial Kitchens, kitchen suppliers to the new Heston Blumenthal restaurant London.

To request a copy of our newsletter please contact vicky@bd2.co.uk

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