Tweet

Tweet, Tweet, and Tweet Again.

Posted by & filed under Business Tips, Dorset Marketing, General, Lead generation, Local Marketing, News, Online marketing, Social Media Marketing, Website marketing.

No it’s not the Birdie Song that we are chirping on about, but Twitter. Twitter is just one of many social media sites that form part of the marketing mix for businesses. The unique twist with Twitter is that you are restricted to just 140 characters. This means that being really precise and punchy with any ‘Tweets’ you send is vital.

 

What is the definition of Twitter? – ‘a short burst of inconsequential information,’ and ‘chirps from birds.

 

Unlike using Twitter for personal use, you need to bear in mind that this is for your business and be aware that many abbreviations, extreme opinions or negative comments may not be appropriate. Twitter has an amazing way of making you really think about your own writing and the content, but don’t be put off by this – you can add links and images to help get your message out. There are many tools that can shorten your links too like ow.ly. The 140 characters must include your links, however all you are asking of the remaining characters is to engage with your audience to entice them to open any links you may have added.

 

At Hook Solutions Limited we love Twitter and are always happy to help others when they are not certain of ‘Tweeting’ or the use of any other Social Media sites. Hook know the importance of Social Media for businesses and acknowledge that this area of marketing is growing on a rapid scale. The main appeal is that it is free to use.

 

Regarding ‘Tweets’ – try to make them engaging, memorable and unique. These will then be the ‘Tweets’ that will resonate with your audience and help to create and keep that bond with your customers.

 

So get your marketing in order – give Twitter a try, social media can be a hugely beneficial part of every company’s marketing campaign.

Tweet

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wordle Hook Blog Personalisation

The age of personalisation

Posted by & filed under Business Tips, CRM Platform, Dorset Marketing, Email Marketing, General, Lead generation, Local Marketing, Marketing Automation, Marketing Dorset, News, Online marketing, SEO Management, Solution implementation, Website marketing, Zoho, Zoho CRM.

 

Wordle Hook Blog Personalisation I’m sure you would agree how nice it is to receive something that is personalised, right?

1908 saw the creation of assembly line production and mass production for the masses. The following 100 years has seen this become the standard way for businesses to grow to scale.  This has started to change over the past 10-15 years with the evolution of the Internet and social media. 3D printing is at the cutting edge of this revolution and poses some exciting questions for many industries.

Gone are the days when mass marketing made sense, people simply don’t have time for it. When did you last have a good look through the pile of junk mail that came through your letter  box or read all of the offers that came into your email box, if like me you probably even fast forward the adverts on TV!

More and more people are looking for personal products and services that meet their specific needs. Companies that are on the ball have recognised this and started to listen and move. Marketing is not isolated from this change and is very much at the forefront. Only 20 years ago if you needed to understand what your customers wanted it meant surveys, letters, phone calls and mail shots all of which took time to organise, implement and collate. Now this information is out there in tweets, Facebook likes and posts, blogs and emails, all your business needs to do is understand how to pull it all together and make use of this invaluable information.This is what we can help with….

The great thing about social media is that it is such a great leveller, whether you are a small business looking to grow quickly or a large FTSE company, social media allows you to understand your customers on an individual basis and tailor your products and services to meet those needs. Marketing your brand/products effectively equals time, cost savings and long term sustainability.

 

At Hook Solutions, that we we do. We can advise where to cast your net and how to bring in the catch you want! So why not give us a call for a chat today….

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Why customers buy?

Posted by & filed under Business Tips, CRM Platform, Dorset Marketing, Email Marketing, Local Marketing, Marketing Dorset, News, Online marketing, Solution implementation, Website marketing, Zoho.

Hook Blog Image

This may seem like a simple question but do you really know why customers buy your products? Does your marketing reflect these reasons?

Are you aiming to be the same as your competitors or do you really stand out?

Most businesses do not realise that they need to show the benefits of their product or service and not the features. Sure features are great but…. Image you are buying toilet roll. Everyone buys toilet roll and knows the main use and features, but they need to decide which one to buy. If your product was a toilet roll what type would it be?

  • Stronger
  • Longer
  • Cheaper
  • Softer
  • Textured
  • Luxury
  • Coloured
  • Fragranced

Just because there are already toilet roll providers does not mean you cannot stand out with your brand, do everything right and you could take a big share of the market and be the brand to have in your home. You do not need to reinvent the wheel to have a successful business in supplying wheels.

Finding what is different about your product and the benefits it will bring to the consumer is essential before any marketing campaign is even started.

A lot of companies drone on about how they have 20 years’ experience, a nice big office block, employ only the best staff – but does this mean they are getting their message across about why people should buy from them?

How about they concentrated on saying what the product can do for their clients, pay £50 for our product and it saves you £150 in just 3 months, an investment. You are clearly stating what the benefit is for the client – in this case a monetary benefit. It could be a time saving benefit, a hassle saving benefit, a compliance benefit … or in the case of toilet roll almost a status benefit.

Some of the benefits you can think about might be:

  • Faster – Can you deliver your product or service quicker than anyone else?
  • Successful – are your results at least 10% more successful than the average?
  • Guarantee – can you offer a guarantee to your customers that others do not?
  • Quality – does your product/service last longer, provide a cost saving long term?

Whatever benefits you find, the key ingredient is how you get that message across to clients. At Hook our main benefit is that we provide an Ethical, Organic and sustainable service – no shortcuts, no law breaking, dodgy deals or underhand tactics.

Speak to us about how we can assist you with getting your message across. 01747 830965

Hook Solutions are a Dorset based marketing company in the UK.

 

Looking for a mobile responsive website?

Marketing for small business

Posted by & filed under Business Tips, CRM Platform, Dorset Marketing, Email Marketing, Lead generation, Local Marketing, Marketing Automation, Marketing Dorset, Online marketing, SEO Management, Solution implementation, Website marketing, Zoho, Zoho CRM.

When is the best time to spend some of your hard earned cash on marketing your small business?

  • Right at the beginning?
  • Wait until you are short of customers?
  • When you are really busy?
  • Just before you are about to go bankrupt?
  • When your competitors do?
  • When you have time to squeeze it in?

All of the above are correct. We see many businesses that come to us for help to rescue them – they are desperate for new business, when things were ticking along nicely they did not see the need to spend on marketing – after all, they may not have plans to expand and employ more staff or become a big multinational, or maybe they do!

As small business owner’s wear many hats they are unable to keep doing everything all the time, when they have no work they may do some marketing, this might bring a few customers in so they then spend the time working for those customers. They do not market as they do not have time so when the work is complete they are left with no new customers again – the small business owner is caught in a viscous circle they cannot seem to break.

When they have time to market again their reputation has slipped, they are nowhere to be seen in the search engines, people do not know about them, social channels are blank, and in today’s fast paced internet world that is a recipe for disaster.

Another area often forgotten is the existing customer base. Keeping them informed of changes in your industry, news from your company and even your opinions can mean they remember you and let others know about you too. If you have other services that might be of interest then these can be included in communications. It is a well-known fact that it is cheaper to sell more to existing customers than spend money generating new customers.

Our top 5 tips for keeping your small business afloat:

  • Keep marketing on a small scale all year round.
  • It is harder to fight your way back up the search engines than maintain a good position – keep SEO at the top of your list.
  • Social media channels should be keep active.
  • Special campaigns can be run if you need extra revenue or find you have time to service more clients.
  • Maintain contact and communications with existing customers.

If you would like assistance with marketing your small business then drop us a call and have a chat. We have packages to suit all business types and industries.

Hook Solutions – Ethical marketing for small business in the UK. 01747 830965.

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How important is colour choice in your marketing?

Posted by & filed under Business Tips, General, Online marketing.

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When we think about some of the most successful brands, there is generally a colour that you would intrinsically associate with that brand. If I were to say to you what colours were associated with say Cadbury’s?, Coke? and Facebook? … I’m guessing you’d get three out of three?

What is it about these colours that makes it synonymous with these brands?

And why does colour play such an important part when Marketing your business?….

 

Marketing your business is about communicating and more importantly connecting with your customers/target audience.

Colour communicates in different ways to words, sounds and smell because it stimulates different parts of our brain, it communicates an experience that most of us will probably have had with that colour. Yellow…warm sun, Blue …blue skies or crystal clear sea, evoking a memory perhaps?

Being the visual creatures that we are it’s no wonder that subconsciously we base a significant importance on visual factors when purchasing products or services.

 

When thinking about the colour for your brand, consider carefully the message you are trying to communicate. A brand’s strength lies within it’s ability to stand out, so if your competition has a strong brand connection with orange, consider going for green or blue.

 

Another factor to consider is the cultural differences that play a part with colour. For example in Japan and other part of Asia, they wear white whilst in mourning. There are many different kinds of colour blindness, but the most common is a difficulty distinguishing between reds, yellows, and greens. This is called “red-green” colour blindness. Interestingly according to the ‘New Yorker’ the reason Mark Zuckerberg chose blue for his Face Book logo is because he is partially colour blind and blue is the colour he can see best.

 

Of course colour choice is subjective and it’s time well spent investing some thought into your decision.

 

So if you find yourself in a pickle over which pink or bemused by which blue, why not get in touch with us at Hook Solutions and we would love to help with your search for the perfect colour to market your business.

 

Zoho_social_media Logo

Zoho CRM social media management

Posted by & filed under CRM Platform, Email Marketing, Marketing Automation, News, Online marketing, Zoho, Zoho Apps, Zoho CRM.

If you think about the attention you give to a promotional email from a company then think about how you respond to a social media message – how does it differ?

I know that in my experience I am much more likely to just hit delete with an html email from a company that looks like a sales email but I would read a tweet sent to me or a message sent via Facebook – but why? Social media is just that – more social and at the moment there is not an awful lot of junk or spam messages that come to us from this source. So social media is the ideal avenue to explore to enable you to make contact with your prospects.

In Zoho CRM you are able to connect your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts (Or your organisations). Then you can search for your prospects and when you find their profile, associate it with the lead – there is even an option to pull their photo through to the CRM from Twitter.

Then instead of sending out an ineffective HTML email you can drop them a tweet or join in with the conversation.

Within the Zoho campaign app you can use your HTML email templates to pull through as a tab in Facebook, ideal for special offers, webinar invitations or just updating your Facebook friends with the latest industry news. You can even send out tweets and LinkedIn posts that link to your HTML email online. All the usual options are available with regards to how many clicks you receive to each post. The perfect landing page option with built in analytics.

Talking of analytics – Zoho campaigns also allows this integration with Google analytics, you can see how your campaign has been received as well as view other analytic data.

Zoho certainly have the right idea with mainstream marketing moving more in the direction of social and have followed on from this with a new integration with their Survey tool as well as external links with Eventbrite.

Watch this space for new tools and features as the nature of marketing changes at a rate never seen before.

Hook Solutions offer a range of services for Zoho users in the UK.  Being Zoho UK partners gives you the reassurance that we are able to assist with all aspects:

  • Marketing Strategy
  • Implementation
  • On and off site customisation
  • Training
  • Campaign design, implementation and management
  • Support

Call us for a chat about your Zoho requirements today. 01747 830965

Or email admin@hooksolutions.co.uk

Zoho_social_media Logo

 

Looking for a mobile responsive website?

Why build a mobile responsive website?

Posted by & filed under Business Tips, General, Lead generation, News, Website marketing.

Mobile responsive website

 

Do you know how many people view your website on a mobile device?  Which devices are the most popular?  How your site looks on these devices?

We are all told that having a mobile responsive website is the way to go but have you actually taken a look at the analytics from your site to see what these mobile visitors are doing when they arrive?  Where they go and what calls to action they are completing? What are the rising trends in your industry?  What insights are there available to allow you to assess your mobile prospects?

Have you set up goals and events to see how your visitors are converting?  If your site is converting well for desktop traffic but failing for mobile then there is a good case for having a mobile site.

We have access to many clients’ website data – and being analytic qualified we just love delving in to the figures, charts and graphs to see what visitors are up to.  The figures vary depending on industry but range from around 15% to 40% of overall website traffic.

How do mobile visitors vary from regular visitors?

These are generalisation but mostly mobile visitors are looking for information, they tend to try to find what they want quickly, this might be getting a phone number or viewing a product.  Mobile visitors are more unlikely to sit and read a whole book of text or download a whitepaper – why? Because their device is not able to support large amounts of data storage.  So this begs the question – does your website aim to support these visitors or are you putting hurdles in their way?

A good mobile site

Having a great mobile responsive website is about prioritising what is important to your visitors, if you are a recruiter then they are most likely checking on the latest vacancies, if you are a shop they could be seeing if something is in stock (to order when they get home).  Attitudes are changing to purchasing from mobiles, there used to be a lot of concern over security, this seems to be easing as users embrace the technology and providers aim to allay their fears. Is it easy for your users to purchase online?

Ensuring you site is easy to navigate has never been more important than now, making sure users do not have to try to enlarge links to click them – much better to have a large button that a finger can trigger as opposed to text hyperlinks.  With a mobile site you can be more selective about what and how it is displayed.  Providing the most relevant information boldly, with easy to find buttons is preferable.

Where do we go from here?

At Hook we have experience and knowledge of customer relationships, behaviour and desires, we know how these work in a mobile world and what needs to be done to ensure you are not ‘back buttoned’ by these precious mobile visitors.  From the initial analytic assessments, trends and insights Hook are able to design a mobile site that can satisfy your visitor’s needs, provide a good return on your investment and achieve your goals.

Our clients see an improved mobile visitor response – from an increase in visit duration, a lower bounce rate and higher goal conversions.

Contact Hook today to see how you can capitalise on this growing market.  +44 (0)1747 830965

Google algorith change from Hook Solutions Ltd

Google Hummingbird Algorithm Change

Posted by & filed under Business Tips, General, News, Online marketing, SEO Management.

Google Hummingbird – The latest search algorithm major change – Sept 2013

The biggest algorithm change from Google since 2001?

The algorithm changes from Google are never really discussed in details when they are announced, the only thing we know is that this has already happened and will mainly affect long tail searches.

In fact it happened about a month ago, so if you were wondering about changes in your traffic good or bad this may provide the answer.  It takes time for us to decipher the full impact and any changes that might need to be made to specific campaigns.  The change was only actually announced yesterday.

Google algorith change from Hook Solutions LtdGoogle say that is should return better results for the user. It was named Hummingbird because it is “precise and fast” (Search Engine land).  We can see why they have done it – with the new smart watches and smart devices that are being unveiled there is a need for voice recognition, this change will enable Google to return results that are more like natural language.

So what does this mean for you?  Writing naturally and being more aware of organic language should already be part of your SEO tactics, Google is keen to provide results that are not driven by the most someone can spend on SEO but on well written content that is more in keeping with everyday language.

Content driven sites will again be top of the list, remember that fresh relevant content, having popularity (a good pagerank) are as important as ever.  Ensure your site is regularly updated, give yourself the best chance of being found with good clean code, appropriate backlinks (again from good pagerank pages), encourage content to be shared and create a good following.

If you would like more information on our quality organic content driven SEO please give us a call 01747 830965

 

Dorset digital marketing from Hook Solutions.

Customer Relationship Consultants

Posted by & filed under Business Tips, CRM Platform, Marketing Automation, News.

Customer Relationship Consultants – How we can help you? …

 

The mainstay of most businesses is the ability to build a loyal customer base and keep finding new clients to build and grow over time. This is where customer relationship consultants come in!
Sales and marketing go hand in hand but so do data management and CRM. Managing your sales team, the sales pipe line, the potentials, the individual marketing campaigns – email, QR, PR, SEO, advertising, social media as well as all the results can be a daunting task, in amongst it all you do not want potential clients to slip through your fingers or campaigns to not be followed up.
Then there is the reporting, are you checking which campaigns are actually providing a return on investment? Which team members are outperforming others?
What are your competitors up to?
What is the perception of your reputation by the public?

Customer relationship consultancy from Hook Solutions Ltd.
From your website to the tone of your employee that answers the phone – it all matters to your customers. The relationship you have with them from the first point of contact – that could be a tweet, a flier or a cold call.
Being able to have a consistent level of service across all these platforms means having great employees, tools, services, products and delivering time and time again. No lost customers paperwork, unlogged calls or errors on emails.
A customer relationship consultant can help you identify the areas that are not consistent, areas to explore that may be missing as well as developing the efficiency of current systems and procedures that are in place.

For an informal chat about how our customer relationship consultants could help you please give us a call or drop us a message on our enquiry form. 01747 830965

Hook solutions are Zoho uk Consultants

Zoho UK Consultants

Posted by & filed under CRM Platform, News, Zoho, Zoho Apps, Zoho CRM.

Zoho CRM Consultants in the UK

Hook pride ourselves on being flexible Zoho UK consultants

We are on hand to assist with any aspect of your Zoho experience, this can often include an hours training on a new module or full mapping of your processes to enable the CRM to be customised to your needs.

The easiest way to start is to give us a call and let us know about your requirements.  We can chat through the options with you and decide on the best way forward.

If you are a manufacturer we can assist with applying for help with costs from the Manufacturing Advisory Service.  This service is a life line for many companies, providing a match funding opportunity that can allow companies to put systems and processes in place that boost sales, increase marketing channels and enable a clear expansion funnel.Hook solutions are Zoho uk Consultants

Our experience comes from all sectors and industries, the beauty of Zoho is that it can be adapted to suit your demands – you might be management consultants or nail technicians….

Being Zoho UK consultants means we are able to provide you with on site or virtual services – you are able to choose from an ad hoc hourly rate, just pay as you go or we can work with you on a larger project from design to implementation followed by ongoing support and training.

At Hook we use a range of Zoho products to run our business so know the challenges – we know that your CRM is the beating heart of your business that needs to be used to its full potential to be as efficient as possible, on boarding staff and offering support is all part of the process.

So if you are looking for a quality responsive Zoho UK consultant then give us a call – 01747 830965