Just Think

Inkyprod.co.uk, a company specialising in innovative and unique wedding videos, is our latest success story. Launched just over a month ago, inkyprod.co.uk owes much of its hype to the highly creative, and often hilarious, Marry-oke wedding videos. The site displays a gallery of contemporary wedding videos, documentary wedding videos, traditional wedding videos, marry-oke wedding videos and general occasion videos, all with a creative twist that is unique to Inkyprod.co.uk.

inkyprod.co.uk owner and Film Director Michael Bell approached Just Think with an idea to promote his Marry-oke wedding videos, a new concept in themed wedding videos. After much discussion it was decided to marry all of inkyprod.co.uk’s unique video concepts into one distinctive and easily accessed website. Inkyprod.co.uk was born out of the fusion of creativity from both the Just Think team and Michael himself.

Just Think have put a team together that blends the best online marketing intellects with creativity, experience and expertise. It is this blend that makes them the first port of call for many of the region’s businesses who have taken the logical step towards promoting and boosting their online presence. Just Think’s ongoing philosophy of advanced thinking for profit was one of the main reasons Michael Bell chose them to work with. Inkyprod.co.uk’s website was just the beginning of a marketing campaign which has seen Inkyprod.co.uk soar in popularity. Using a combination of Google Adwords, SEO, email marketing, Youtube and social media, Inkyprod.co.uk have steadily climbed the search engine rankings.

UK shoppers spent more online than anywhere else in Europe last year, accounting for almost a third of all European sales, research suggests.

UK consumers spent £38bn online in 2009, or an average of £1,102 per shopper, according to the Centre for Retail Research (CRR). Online sales now account for almost 10% of total retail sales in the UK, the centre calculates. It added that internet shopping would continue to grow sharply this year. The centre foresees total online sales hitting £42.7bn in 2010.

Big discounts

“This year is when we will really start to see online sales achieving a significant share of overall retail trade in the UK,” said Bruce Fair, managing director of online shopping and price comparison site Kelkoo, which commissioned the research. He added that online shoppers were growing in confidence, with the proportion of them prepared to spend more than £1,000 or more on a single transaction rising from 12% in 2008 to 25% in 2009.

The recession, from which the UK has only recently emerged, helped to explain the increase in online shopping, he argued. “In these hard times, it is no surprise that shoppers are turning to the internet rather than the High Street, especially when you consider that purchasing items online can result in savings of 20% or more,” Mr Fair said. Germans were the next most prolific spenders online last year with a total spend of £29.7bn, while the French spent £22bn, the research indicates.

Thought I’d share something I read by Adam Ostrow on Mashable.com. It’s a good insight into the opportunities of Social Media.

You’ve most likely had an e-mail newsletter for your company for much longer than you’ve had a presence on social media sites. But now that you do both, the two can go hand-in-hand, with e-mail creating an opportunity to extend your presence on social media sites, and social media sites providing a way to get more e-mail subscribers. At the moment though, most marketers aren’t connecting the dots. According to a recent study published by eMarketer, 48% of marketers include “forward to a friend” features in their e-mails, but only 13% include features that make it easy to share content on social networks. Here’s a look at how to close the gap, and why it’s so important that you do.

Why Include Social Media in Your E-mail? Just like a piece of Web content can “go viral” as people share it across social networks, your e-mail promotions can get a big boost by making it easy to share them. A recent study by Marketing Sherpa concluded that simply including sharing buttons to an e-mail marketing campaign led to a “25% boost in reader interaction, and a surge in inbound traffic from social networking sites.” Moreover, huge gains were reported in traffic via social sites: 2,070% from LinkedIn, 1,680% from Twitter, and 1,351% from Facebook.

How do you do it?  Share buttons have become common on Web content, but they’re also easy to integrate into e-mails. If your e-mail consists of multiple articles, make sure each points to a page on the Web, and that your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn share buttons are setup to share the URL of each respective article (note: you’ll want to stick to images and text links for your e-mail share buttons as opposed to JavaScript). Beyond sharing articles though, make sure all of your e-mails include prominent links to your presence on various social sites. Calls to action in a sidebar or in the header like “Follow Us on Twitter” or “Become a Fan on Facebook” will help people connect with you on social sites and help build your audience on them.

Will a Social Media Specialist become the latest employee in your business? All the early signs show that 2010 will be the year when companies realise that a new vacancy has risen within their business. If Social Media Networks such as Twitter, Linked In, and Facebook continue to grow as predicted, many companies are going to find that they need someone to guide their efforts both externally and internally, to process all the information and data that is being thrown their way and to make sure the company stays at the forefront of a constantly evolving marketing tool (an unenviable task in itself). Thought patterns are changing from businesses wondering if they should be monitoring social media to businesses thinking about which social media tool they should be using.

Social Media will move from being experimental to become a serious marketing strategy, however many organizations will still want it to bring some sort of ROI to justify using it. This is where the new Social Media Specialist will fulfill their role. Part of the job will be data analysis. This requires a special type of person who enjoys digging deep into the analytics aspect, looking for patterns and trends. Businesses (and agencies) who take Social Media seriously are going to need this new Social Media Specialist to drive their online marketing intelligence.

It’s not an easy fix and it’s going to take a special type of person to evolve and adapt to an ever-changing tool. At Just Think, we realised some time ago how big a contribution to the development of the company’s online marketing and community strategies our Social Media presence has brought. Using the right tools and creating a Social Media strategy specific to your targets and objectives can help you reach a massive online audience. So, will a Social Media Specialist become the latest employee in your business?

Just Think would like to wish everyone a very happy and prosperous New Year. 2010 has already started to look like a year of change. Businesses are lifting their eyes from the recession and are looking for financial growth in 2010. The economy and the financial system are a long way from normal but things are looking up and there are some intriguing questions waiting to be answered. Can we look forward to better economic times? Who will win the general election and can they lead the business sector into a new and profitable era? Will Social Media continue to grow and become a serious business strategy? These questions will all be answered as we head into 2010 and we will continue to keep you up to date with all the current and future marketing trends. We look forward to keeping you posted in the New Year.

It was announced last week that a deal has been struck between Twitter and search engine giants Google and Microsoft (bing). The deal allows tweets to appear in both companies search results, this could have big implications on the search engine marketing industry.

For businesses and marketeers this could be a very important step. For example on the lead up to Christmas retailers will be able to get last minute price reductions and offers up on the internet within minutes by posting on twitter, gaining that important march on their competitors.

This news is another step towards Twitter becoming a major player in the online marketing world. So is this the time to start considering setting up a Twitter marketing strategy along with your SEO and adword campaigns?

Get in store credit for your old phones. If you’ve got a few old cell phones just laying around your house collecting dust, than this new ATM may be able to put them to work for you. The ecoATM takes your old phones, assesses their value, and then gives you something back for them.

Late last month, the first ecoATM was placed inside Nebraska Furniture Mart in Omaha. Customers handed in their phones, and received store credit from the ecoATM [if their phone still had monetary value]. After the first day alone, the trading machine accumulated about 23 phones – not bad.

The company hopes that they can place these machines in a number of different stores in various different locations in order to help out the recycling movement. The fact that these machines are free, coupled with the fact that having them in store may help companies with municipal e-waste laws, could prove to be beneficial.

Cash for junk. All in all it sounds like a win win situation.

For the first time in the UK the online advertising spend overtakes television. In the first half of 2009 online advertising rose to £1.75 billion compared to TV’s £1.64 billion.

These figures come from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the IAB and show the 50 year reign of TV advertising has come to an end. Online ad spend now accounts for 23.5 per cent of the total UK ad spend, compared to TV’s 21.9 per cent. Guy Phillipson, IAB’s chief executive said “We could see absolutely see it grow to being a 30% medium (of ad share spend), to go past £4bn to even £5bn annually,”.

A breakdown of the online figures show however that display advertising (banner ads etc) only equates to 18 per cent (£817 million), compared to the 60 per cent share (£1.05 billion) for search marketing.

Despite these figures TV advertisers are already criticising these reports. Lindsey Clay from ThinkBox, the UK TV marketing body, has said: “Online marketing spend is made up of many things including email, classified ads, display ads and, overwhelmingly, search marketing. They should be judged individually.”

“It is. . . meaningless to sweep all the money spent on every aspect of online marketing into one big figure and celebrate it.”

Can Twitter make money?

The discussion on how long Twitter can last without making money has continued this past week after receiving a major cash boost from investors. The investment is reported to be about $100 million (£62 million) and secured from 5 investors.

Twitter a social media site which asks users to share and discuss what is happening right now has exploded over the last year and has become a major rival to sites such as Facebook and MySpace. With this popularity the question arose ‘How can it continue without a revenue source?’ as investments can only take you so far.

An indication that one way for Twitter to continue is with the addition of allowing advertisements to appear on the site after a recent change to the terms of service. Co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the Twitter blog “We leave the door open for advertising. We’d like to keep our options open,”. Biz had previously stated that the company has no plans to start to run ads until 2010.

If Twitter do decide to go along with advertising they can be encouraged by a recent report by ‘Interpret’. They surveyed 2000 social network users and found that 24 per cent of Twitters user are open to reviewing or rating products online, compared to 12 per cent of users of other social network. One in five will visit company profiles, and 20 per cent will click on ads or sponsors, versus 9 per cent of non-Twitter users.

If you are a Twitter user we would like your comments on if you would like adverts to appear on the site?

Spam filters be warned, new research predicts the amount email marketing is due to explode over the next five years, estimated that the average email inbox will receive more than 9,000 marketing messages annually by 2014. Forrester research is predicting email spend to “balloon” to £1.2bn by 2014, a nearly 11% compound annual growth rate. Falling CPMs, a high return on investment, and growing consumer use of social email accounts will fuel the use of email by direct marketing professionals, the company said in its annual Email Marketing Forecast.

David Daniels, Forrester analyst, said: “By 2014 direct marketers will waste £80m on emails that never reach their primary target. Successful direct marketing pros will alter their tactics to overcome inbox clutter and increase relevancy.”

The study also found that retention email – email that recipients have “blessed” with their permission – will continue to replace paper communications and will make up the largest share of marketing messages.

Retention emails will account for more than one-third of all marketing messages in consumers’ inboxes by 2014, representing increased competition for marketers.

While the bulk of the market will continue to deploy email marketing on a self-service basis, the growing complexity associated with data integration and new tactics to increase relevancy will drive healthy grow in use of email service providers, research found.

Spending on ad-sponsored newsletters will also double over the next five years as traditional print publishers face falling circulation and ad revenue.

Daniels said: “The use of email in social networks will be one of the biggest challenges for direct marketers. Over the next five years, marketers must bridge the gap between social and traditional inboxes with social sharing tools.”