Advertising Intelligence

This PPC and digital reporting tool pulls in data from Google Ads and Facebook Ads so that your clients can make easy comparisons. It allows your client to monitor campaigns from multiple platforms in one place. For marketing campaigns to be efficient they must be monitored in order to pinpoint what is making your clients the most money and to uncover the recipes behind a successful campaign.

This tool also contains advanced reporting add-on which allows your clients to cut down on overhead costs and save time with automated reporting, customize metrics, objectives and the date range to match businesses needs as well as proving ROI.

Social Marketing

Social media is a very powerful tool, it is a means to attract new leads as well as maintaining engagement with existing customers. Social media is a huge part of the world we live in with about 3 billion users globally, therefor it is important for businesses to market their selves across various social platforms.

Marketing a business on social media involves supplying a constant stream of relevant content, building up social audiences, and engaging with customers across a range of social media platforms – every single day. This can become quite a task to manage on your own.

With the Social Marketing tool your clients can link all of their social media platforms and run then from one dashboard. The opportunity to simplify your client’s social media management comes within this tool. It will allow them to generate leads, schedule ready-to-publish content, and communicate with all of their followers from one centralised place. Ultimately, saving your clients lots of valuable time with an efficient and effective way of social media managing.

·       Post to all social media platforms from a single source

·       Key word lead generator, scan local twitter feeds for prospective customers

Customer Voice

90% of consumers say they’ll only consider using a business if they have an average rating of 3-5 stars. 

Therefore, it is critical for a business to capture their customers feedback, frequently and preferably positive. Customers are more likely to leave a review if they have had a negative experience, however, customers are also more likely to leave a review if they have been asked or if there is an incentive to do so.

Unfortunately, there may be times when a business will receive a negative review. Although businesses are always after positive reviews, when dealt with correctly negative reviews are a useful for a business to grow and develop. Within the Customer Voice tool your client will be able to respond to reviews rapidly and offer suggested ways of dealing with the review.

With the Customer Voice feedback tool, you can help your clients with this process! Within this product your clients can gather customer experiences to boost online star power and drive more business. Within the product there is the option for your clients to reach their customers via email or text, and collect reviews on the sites that are most important to their business.

·       Proactively and easily request reviews from happy customers

·       Direct customers to leave reviews on preferred review sites 

Reputation Management

Reputation can be defined by reviews, accurate business information, and social media activity. A businesses reputation will impact customer trust and credibility, search engine ranking, revenues and professional image and therefor is crucial for survival. Online reputation can often be the decider of whether or not consumers decide to do business with a company or not. A good reputation means that a business is more credible than their competitors.

Ratings, comments, blogs or social media posts are all means in which consumers are reviewing businesses every day. From what the consumer sees they will then create a judgment of a business and how they identify with it. It is important to be responsive to reviews and try to encourage many reviews in order to gain trust of potential consumers.

Having lots of reviews can impact a business’s SEO, search engine algorithms understand the stress customers place on the online reviews of a company before making a decision. If your clients make their best efforts to deal with their online reputation they will be rewarded with higher SEO.

Many people might not be aware of the fact that good management of the reputation can help a business gain trust of consumers and drive sales. Improved sales can greatly improve the brand image of the business.

The Reputation Management tool in our platform allows your client to easily manage and monitor their online reputation – all from one place! With the ability to monitor what people are saying about them online they will be able to improve their visibility in local search.  They will have access to progress reports to see if their reputation has improved. Not only will they be able to track their progress but they will also be able to track their competition!

·       The platform sends alerts to your email letting you know of any new reviews across all sites

·       Enables you to build up a picture of what is being said about you online through common language and sentiment

Listings Builder

“81% of consumers search online before entering a store”

This figure stresses the importance of having a strong online presence. When a consumer searches a business online, incorrect listings cause 73% of consumers to lose trust in the brand. This could cause a brand to lose consumers to competitors. Incorrect listings can also have a negative impact on a brands findability in online directories and search engines including Google, Bing and Facebook.

Increase in SEO is achieved when a business claims correct business listings across the web, which in turn will result in more visibility among potential customers and could steer consumers away from competitors.

Listing Builder is a comprehensive business listing solution, rich with influential tools such as Google Insights, Listing Sync, Listing Distribution and My Listing which all work towards managing and enhancing your client’s online presence. With Listing Builder, your clients can fix and update their listing information, sync their profiles and create local-search-friendly My Listings all from one place!

Businesses must have consistent and accurate information across business listings, including regular updates and activity across the web. However, this can be time consuming doing this alone, using Listing Builder, listings can be managed in one place across the whole web, which saves valuable time.

·       Ensuring digital footprint is correct across all major listings and directory sites

·       Continuously works in the background ensuring that your name, address and postcode details are up to date

Are your business leads top quality?

Almost 3 in 4 businesses see generating high quality business leads as their biggest marketing challenge. It’s all very well generating leads a-plenty, but if they don’t drive new revenue and promote business growth, what’s the point?

For B2B lead generation to take full effect, you need to ensure leads are top quality offering your sales team the best chance to convert them into clients. Relying on low quality leads to make sales can seriously damage your pipeline.

Whether you embrace a lead scoring model, implement new lead criteria or audit your keyword optimization to improve lead quality, you need to understand your ideal business lead and what audience you’re currently drawing in with your marketing campaigns.

This is why we have teamed up with Lead Forensics. Their ground-breaking software identifies the businesses visiting your website, providing contact details for key decision makers and an analysis of each visit. This not only generates a bounty of fresh lead already harbouring an interest in your product, but allows you advanced insight into your audience, helping you access and improve business lead quality.

Don’t wait to revolutionize your B2B lead generation- book your free demo today!

Creating the WOW! factor with your marketing

To really stand out from the crowd, sometimes you need marketing that creates an instant reaction and puts your brand or product at the front of your customer's minds. If you treat your advertising like you’re constructing a famous building, it’s far more likely to have an impact in the mind’s eye of your customer (What's the old saying, 'If you build it, they will come!'). 

Cadbury's Gorilla Advert

Marketing that creates this so-called WOW! factor sometimes doesn't even have to make sense, it just has to create a reaction and the best example of this is Cadbury's 2007 advert, 'Gorilla'. If you have never seen the advert (video below), it is a 90 second tracking shot of a rather intense large Gorilla, with Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" playing in the background. The Gorilla then performs the infamous "In the Air Tonight" drum solo at the end of the advert, to hair-raising effect. The advert was part of a move for Cadbury away from its traditional adverts, where they pushed their products, to what they called 'entertainment pieces'.

The whole advert was very visceral, it was both intriguing and had the ability to give you goosebumps. It created the WOW! factor instantly. Even though it was very abstract and random, it made the viewer connect with the Cadbury brand in an emotive way, with Phil Collins famous track playing a big part in that.

The advert instantly took up the imagination of the British public, going viral on Youtube, at a time when Youtube was still in its infancy, and spawning many parodies online and on television. There was so much buzz about it, there were even a mystery over whether the Gorilla was real? Some believed it was Phil Collins himself, in a Gorilla costume. Phil Collins didn't mind either way, as "In the Air Tonight" had re-entered the UK singles chart as downloads of the song sky-rocketed.

After the campaign, Cadbury's Dairy Milk sales had increased 9% from the same period the year before, while the public opinion of the brand improved by 20%. 'Gorilla' would go on to win a slew of awards, and was eventually named named by Marketing magazine as the nation’s all-time favourite.

Producing marketing that creates an emotional response, which creates that 'WOW!', will make customers feel good about doing business with you now and in the future. Make sure your advertising makes your business memorable for the right reasons.

Written by Frank Stannard. If you want to find out more about marketing your company, or discuss this article further, you can contact Frank at frank.stannard@sixfoursixfour.com or +44 (0) 7939605820.

What you need to know about Google's new mobile-first guidelines

Last week after more than 18 months of testing, Google released a blog post explaining the newest changes to it's algorithm, meaning that now mobile sites will be the main source of indexing on Google, over desktop sites.

What does this mean for you?

Well, effectively this means that when google looks for search results for websites a Smartphone Googlebot will be crawling for websites, rather than the desktop Googlebot. Of course, this doesn’t mean that desktop page content will no longer be crawled or indexed, but Google is making it clear that the future is very much mobile and for businesses and brands whose website isn’t optimised for mobile, there could be serious consequences.

“Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they’re looking for.” Google says in a blog post announcing the change.

What do I need to do about it?

The implications for businesses and brands in ensuring their websites are built with mobile first in mind are significant. So, here are some things to consider when assessing the potential impacts of Google’s mobile-first move:

• As a rule of thumb it is best to be following best practice guidelines, but responsive websites should be fine. It is likely responsive sites will become doubly valuable, due to their inherit nature to dynamically fit to the size of the browser they are being viewed in across any platform. 
• Google recommends that the content of separate and mobile and desktop sites be the same, including metadata.
• If you are about to redesign your site, it is important you take these new guidelines into account and make sure your new site is built with a mobile first mentality.
• Frankly, this point has always been an imperative when maintaining website, but fast-page loading speed is more important than ever and will become even more important from July when page speed will become a ranking factor. No one wants to wait for that epic header picture on your site slowly loads, it will only annoy your audience and could turn away potential customers.

What all this means is that time is running out for webmasters without optimized websites for mobiles, soon their Google search rankings will be taking a blow.

Written by Frank Stannard. If you want to find out more about optimising your website, or discuss this article further, you can contact Frank at frank.stannard@sixfoursixfour.com or +44 (0) 7939605820.

Keeping our site fresh with a redesign

It's important to always keep things fresh, so we decided to re-design our site for 2018. Let us know what you think!

If you are new here, find out more about us here and about what we do here!

Also, if you want to get in touch or have any questions, visit our contact page here.

Philosophies of Business

Every corporation, brand, political party, charity and sole trader will have its own individual identity which dictates how it interacts with its consumer and fellow organisations. A code by which its every action is underpinned.

Sir James Dyson once declared that "You need a stubborn belief in an idea in order to see it realised"; such a belief has to be instilled at every echelon of ones organisation, or else the organisation betrays all that it sets out to acheive in each of its every actions. 

There is a distinct problem that can consume organisations; they may believe fully in principles which they have set out as the cornerstone of thier working practices, yet if they fail to act them out then they hold little resonance. To betray the philosphy is to betray your product or service. Therefore, it is paramount that the ideology is the life blood of every action.

The belief of a customer in an organisation certainly can be waivered if said organisation fails to practice what it preaches. Evidence of such occurences are widespread, an example of which is a nationwide commercial computer store. where staff aren't provided with up to date computing systems, leaving staff and customers alike wasting their time waiting for Windows XP to load up in order to process a transaction. Despite this, the company's rhetoric remains that it is vital we  all use the most revolutionary new Desktops, Laptops and Tablets for personal and professional use,  even though they can't provide their own staff at grassroots the same systems. 

Imagine finding yourself in a forest, in which you had never before visited, without a map or any means to find your way out, the frustration would be over-bearing. Similarly, if the philosophy of an organisation fails to resonate through every level of the business, the customers and employees are likely to experience a similar frustration. Employees would wander through a working day in a fashion akin to being in the forest, they would be ultimately lost without a philosopy. By extension customer service may suffer, while the quality of work produced by staff could become inhibited. The establishment of a mission statement, the articulation of the vision and the embedding of philosophy through action, are all vital in order to stop any problems regarding clarity of vision.