Category Archives: Sales and marketing

‘Social media is vital for business’, says Harvard

If you’re wondering whether dedicating time and effort to social media is really worth it, this new research may just make your mind up!

The Harvard Business Review recently published a great article about social media that we think all Chief Executives and Managing Directors NEED to read! The latest report from CEO.com and business intelligence firm DOMO has confirmed our view that social media is more pervasive than ever among consumers. In fact, a whopping 50% of the population currently uses Facebook and more than 37% use Twitter.

The report found that among Fortune 500 CEOs, only 7.6% are present on Facebook, only 4% use Twitter, and less than 1% use Google Plus. However, there is evidence that this may be changing.

A recent survey conducted by IBM found that out of 1,709 CEOs, only16% used social media. The study predicts this figure may grow to 57% within 5 years and that social media will become one of the two most important forms of engagement with employees and customers, second only to face to face interactions.

Thankfully, Managing Directors and Executives are finally recognising what the team here at Seven Creative already know – using social media to communicate and engage with customers, suppliers and their own employees, means their company will be more adaptive, agile and of course, more successful.

As experts in social media, we value the many advantages of using social media very highly.  And we receive ongoing confirmation from our customers that our management of their social media channels generates more business, provides access to potential customers, and provides effective  communication channels for existing customers.

Using social media is so effective in fact, that The BRANDFog 2012 CEO Survey found that more than 82% of respondents are likely or much more likely to trust a company who engage in social media. The study also reports that 77% of respondents are likely or much more willing to buy from a company whose mission and values are defined through their involvement in social media.

Here at Seven Creative, we agree that social media is vital for business. It will give your business a strong potential competitive advantage, not only by providing communication channels, but by boosting traffic to your website and increasing sales. But what if you don’t have time? What if you’re busy running your business?

We understand social media marketing, and we know that using it in this dynamic, complex and ever-evolving marketplace requires knowledge and experience. Seven Creative are experts in the field, and we can offer you a full spectrum of social media integration services. In other words, we can do it for you, and therefore remove the time and the hassle that social media can become if it’s not managed correctly. And to keep you in the loop, we’ll let you know exactly what we’ve done in regular reports,  proving to you that we’re getting results!

For more information, contact us through our website  or visit our Facebook page!

 

Seven Creative can manage your social networking and marketing

At Seven Creative, we specialise in communicating. So if you don’t have the time to manage your own social networking and marketing, we can do it for you.

We are able to set up and write your blog, write articles, take care of your direct mailing, manage your social networking and your email marketing. In short, we make sure that your message is in front of the right people at the right time.

Our customers find the service a very cost-effective way to retain their current customer base, and find new customers at the same time. It can even give your website a huge boost in the organic listings on Google and the other major search engines.

Satisfied customers

“Seven Creative are our sales and marketing department”

“Seven Creative are such a great company to work with – friendly, knowledgeable and providing an amazing social network and marketing service.  We now have a large and very active online community who actively promote our business. Stunning value for money!”

“The social networking management and email marketing campaign that Seven Creative write and manage for me gives an amazing return. Suddenly we’re all over the internet and we’re becoming the name associated with wooden windows”

Let us manage your social networking and marketing, and you can keep doing what you do best – running your business.

Give us a call today and let us show you how digital marketing will work for you.

Call Chris on 0114 383 0711 or visit our contact page to send us a message.

Sales and marketing optimisation

Consider the alternatives

If you were in any doubt that offline advertising spend had fallen in 2009, this physical comparison between the Yellow Pages directories from 2009 and 2010 should convince you. The 2010/11 edition is literally 40% thinner than the 2009/10 edition.

According to IAB (2010), in the UK, the entire advertising sector contracted by 16.6% in the first half of 2009, however, the online advertising share grew by 4.6% to a record 23.5% share of the market.

Obviously, in the midst of a recession, you’d expect advertising spend to decline, however, it seems as if many companies are realising that the traditional forms of advertising and marketing may not be the best way to reach customers and deciding rather to look towards the internet.

Google dominates the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising world with a 65.4% market share (AFP, Feb 2010) and for most people, they’re the only place they’ll ever think of advertising online.

There is, however, another way!

The primary objective, when deciding your marketing approach, will be to give you the best return-on-investment (a.k.a. ROI) which, to put it another way, basically means get the most customers for the least spend.

Google advertising is great for some businesses, but for others, it’ll never work – potential customers simply don’t use the internet to find some kinds of suppliers. Even for the businesses where it potentially works well, so much money is sometimes wasted through poorly researched and implemented key-phrases and badly-planned campaigns that they never reach their potential. Besides this, as the main player in the PPC world, competition for key words and phrases can be fierce!

Social network advertising, on the other hand, has shown some fantastic results with campaigns we’ve run recently. One of the main problems with Google PPC  is you are only able to target customers geographically. Social Network Marketing, on the other hand, allows you to also target customers demographically and psychographically!  As a relatively new avenue, the current costs can be much lower than Google PPC and you have the option to also pay by impression if you’d prefer.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as another way to boost your organic search engine rakings. Whereas the results can sometimes be much less tangible than the PPC campaigns; a well optimised web site can give a much better ROI over time.

If you’re certain that traditional Search Engine PPC is the one for you, consider Bing, Microsoft’s search engine competitor to Google and Yahoo. Bing is currently gaining search engine market share from Google and Yahoo remains a force in the market.

Whichever you choose, as ever, the key to getting it right is good planning.

More information

With many years experience of online and offline advertising campaign planning, setup and management, Seven Creative are perfectly placed to help your business get the best ROI by optimising your sales and marketing activity

If you’d like Seven creative to help you with your marketing strategy, give us a call on 0114 383 0711 (international: +44  114 383 0711) or contact us through the website