February 2012
1 post
3 tags
Web Development Case Study
We recently created a custom website called fashion.ie. It’s a fashion portal site for fashion and celebrity news as well as fashion tips.
We’re proud of it and the site is doing really well with great traffic thanks to a #1 rank on Google for “fashion” searches.
As the whole site was developed from scratch I thought I’d write a case study in case anyone was...
November 2011
1 post
8 tags
What Is PageRank?
One of the major factors in how well your website performs in search results is based on something that few people know about and even less understand. This trade secret is called “PageRank”. I don’t profess to being an expert in the area of SEO, but I am in the top percentile when it comes to SEO knowledge and even I don’t truly understand the real details behind how it...
September 2011
1 post
4 tags
Avoid Surprises - Insist on a Requirements Doc for...
I have just finished writing the fourth website requirements document for as many clients in just a few weeks and am amazed by how important these documents are to the success of the overall web development process for both the client and the developer. While some websites are quite straightforward and require little more than the ability to change the content, other sites can be quite complex....
August 2011
1 post
15 tags
How Search Rank Beats The Brand
In the old days you had to spend money on marketing your business in order to have people find you. Therefore, by definition, your success was almost directly tied to brand recognition. Think about the Yellow Pages (Golden Pages in Ireland). In its heyday you open it up to find a specific company and you would be hit by full-page ads. You would flick through page after page of full page ads and...
July 2011
1 post
6 tags
Great Marketing - The Million Piece Jigsaw
I was just listening to the radio and came across a business discussion in which a branding expert was talking about marketing. I know the guy and he is a very knowledgeable and eloquent speaker. He was talking about how important perfection is in marketing. The importance of focusing on fonts and not using lots of them or choosing and sticking to a specific colour or colours for your branding,...
February 2011
2 posts
4 tags
Starting A Business? Research Before Spend
If you are thinking of starting a business or a new service within an existing business, it is extremely easy to get carried away in the moment. Everyone knows that you start with a business plan, but that might just be your first and quite fatal mistake. As you write your plan a strange thing happens; you start to believe your own hype! It is easily done, everything sounds so plausible and the...
6 tags
Have You Heard About QR Codes?
Innovation is amazing! Just when you thought allowing people to find your business and contact you couldn’t get any easier, along comes a new innovation that makes it easier again.
Take QR Codes for example. They were invented in 1994 by a Japanese company(Denso-Wave) and like so many technologies now used for marketing businesses, QR Codes were originally used for tracking car parts through...
November 2010
1 post
7 tags
Attraction Marketing vs. Pursuit Marketing
I think every business owner would agree that it is far more pleasurable picking up the phone to someone who wants to do business with you than it is to make a phone call to try and convince someone to do business with you. It sounds like Nirvana to have customers ring you and say the magic words “can you help me with…” or “can you provide me with…”, etc. But...
October 2010
1 post
3 tags
The Importance Of God Smelling! (How Poor...
If I had a Euro for every time I found spelling mistakes on a website, in a brochure or on a leaflet I wouldn’t be a millionaire, but I would certainly be a lot more comfortable. Unfortunately until the government creates the ‘Department of Literacy & Spelling’ I will have to make do with tutting.
However on a serious note, bad spelling is a real turn-off for many potential...
September 2010
2 posts
Speaking At Ratoath Chamber Of Commerce Event
I’m speaking at the Ratoath Chamber Of Commerce event tomorrow on Social Media - So much to cover, so little time! Find out more at http://alinkto.me/f9y
August 2010
4 posts
7 tags
The Power Of The Free-Trial
We have all been in a supermarket or shopping centre and been offered a taster of food by someone promoting a new product. The other day I received a small packet of breakfast cereal through the door! Whichever way it’s delivered, this is known as a free trial and it is most commonly linked to consumer products like food, face creams, toothpastes etc. and computer software. In essence anything...
tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?
7 tags
What's In A Colour - The Power Of Colour in...
A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to become a father to a lovely baby boy and suddenly the house was full of blue. Had the child been a girl it would have been full of pink instead. I was intrigued, never having thought about it before, to find out why these colours were associated with these genders. What I discovered amazed me!
In the Middle Ages boys were the dominant sex and seen as more...
5 tags
Want To Sell? Spin A Yarn! The Power Of...
From the moment we can understand language, we love to hear stories. From Goblins and princesses to rocket men and space aliens, we engage with stories. It shapes how we perceive the world and teaches us right from wrong.
It’s no surprise therefore that many years ago advertising agencies worked out that telling stories helped to sell more products. When did this happen? A few minutes after...
June 2010
1 post
May 2010
2 posts
4 tags
Don’t Confuse A Website For A Web Strategy
(Or The Story Of Too Little Thought & Too Much Spend)
Too often when talking to potential clients I hear the sad story of a company that has spent a sum of money on a website that they were expecting would help to revitalise their business, only to find out that it achieved nothing more than create one more invoice to pay. It doesn’t matter whether they spent only a little or a lot (although...
4 tags
Social Media For Business Owners - Get Friendly To...
If you’re reading this then you fall into one of two groups of people; those who have been blogging and tweeting for some time and those who have just started or are dabbling. If you fall into the latter group then this piece is for you.
I am often asked, by clients who are mostly in their late 30s onwards, (younger people just get it) what place social media has in the business world and...
April 2010
2 posts
6 tags
New Business Marketing
If you have recently started your own business or you are thinking of doing so, then this is for you. There are 5 things that a new-business owner needs to think carefully about before opening their doors to customers:
Learn The Ropes You know about your business, but do you know about the fundamentals of running a business? In particular, do you know the basics of marketing a business? Make...
7 tags
The Seven Deadliest Marketing Sins
There are literally hundreds of ways to market and promote a business these days. Print marketing, online marketing, viral marketing, guerrilla marketing, blog marketing…and the list goes on. For every marketing discipline there are about a million ways you can get it wrong. So in reducing this long list down to seven I looked at the things that cut across as many marketing disciplines and...
March 2010
2 posts
6 tags
SEO Case Study
So some of you may be interested in a new web design and SEO case study we have written on a project we completed some months ago. Basically it outlines a before and after on a web project that has had a major impact on the client’s business, proving how just a little design thought and SEO can go a long, long way.
Click to read the web design and SEO article
5 tags
The Mobile Web - Explained
Whether you have heard about the “Mobile Web” or not it’s an area which is literally exploding. To give you an example of just how quickly this growth is happening we need to look at history. It took approximately 15 years for the internet to really bed itself into the general psyche, whereby these days even your grandmother “Googles” knitting patterns or new recipes....
February 2010
1 post
6 tags
Advertising Agencies - Not Just For The Big Guys
When you think of advertising agencies, your mind immediately jumps to names like Coca Cola and other big corporate companies spending millions of advertising campaigns. Small business owners naturally think that they are therefore forced to deal with handling the media buying for their adverts themselves and more onerously, they have to deal with the many phone calls from the media sales people...
January 2010
4 posts
5 tags
Work Backwards Into Your Marketing Budget
I am sticking to my New Year marketing budget creation theme (as per my last blog).
When working with clients on their marketing budgets I always work backwards into it. You start at a macro level (look at the big picture) and work backwards until you are looking at a micro view (looking at the many small details). The steps are as follows:
Decide on your target revenue - the most critical macro...
“Marketing is what happens when you’re not trying, when you’re being transparent...”
– Seth’s Blog: In between frames (via caterpillarcowboy) (via brittanybelt)
OK, so the above is not technically “marketing” but customer relationship management. However, there is so much cross-over that the point is moot. The truth of what is said above is that many thousands of...
8 tags
New Year - New Budget
As each new year starts (whether calendar or financial), business owners start to think about how they are going to generate business over the next twelve months. This leads onto how much it is all going to cost and I am often asked, “how much should I budget for marketing spend in the coming year?” The starting point is how much you should plan to spend. The answer begins, rather...
7 tags
You Scratch My Back-link & I'll Scratch Yours!
So you have developed a website. You might have even implemented some optimisation on your site in the form of keyword research. But if you haven’t thought about back-links then you may be missing out on one of the most important ways of increasing the visibility of your site. Back-links are simply links on other websites that point to your site; so why are they so important? The technical...
December 2009
2 posts
5 tags
When Marketing Think About The Customer - Not Your...
Everybody knows that you market your company, product or service to attract new customers. So how come so many people end up creating websites, brochures and ads that just don’t work? It is actually a common error that a lot of people make and it comes from not having an objective and end-goal in mind. Instead, people focus on what’s easy, i.e. what they like and dislike. Of course a...
On Google, Real-Time Searches, and B2B Marketing
More proof, if any was required, of the dual importance of Social Media Networking. Yes, of course it’s about creating “relationships” and trust with people across the globe, but more and more it’s also about helping your business to rank in more places, more often in search engine results.
brittanybelt:
Earlier this week there was a lot of chatter surrounding the...
November 2009
1 post
Do You Know What You Don't Know?
I am sure you would agree that you are an expert in your field. Whether you are an electrician, plumber, accountant, solicitor or belly dancer, everyone is an expert in their business. So let’s call that “What You Know”. You may spend a great deal of time gaining greater knowledge on a given subject. Some of you may dedicate some time and money on marketing campaigns to promote...
October 2009
4 posts
Manage Your Online Reputation
It is a strange reality in business that you rarely if ever receive feedback from customers in terms of how they really feel about having worked with you or hired you to carry out a project. In most cases customers who are happy with the services will tell you in person at the end of the project, but those who are not happy will in many cases not say a word to you. In the pre-internet world, the...
50 Blogging Lessons To Know If You’re Starting... →
If you have ever considered blogging as a good way to give your company/name a higher online profile, then this blog is a MUST read. brittanybelt:
Technorati has started to share content from their annual state of the blogosphere report. This year, they have engaged a research firm to add another layer of authority. According to the this year’s report, the benefits of this type of blogging are...
Search Engine Optimisation Explained
Websites fall into two categories. Those that can be found and those that can’t and if your business needs a website that can be found by potential customers then you need something called SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). But what does this mean and why is it so important? Finally, what does it typically cost to have your website optimised? These are very important questions, especially...
Adwords Rookie Mistakes - Read If You Want To Save...
I am seeing a pattern emerge of businesses wasting a lot of money on poorly implemented Google Adwords campaigns. These are business owners that want to generate more traffic to their site, but don’t have the funds to pay a professional PPC company to do it for them. I understand this, but all too often instead of making them extra revenue, it depletes already tight marketing spend! So I...
September 2009
5 posts
Consistency For Successful Marketing
When people think about marketing, they tend to think about the big impressive stuff, like full-page adverts in the national newspapers, or even radio and TV ads. The problem with these types of activities is that they are expensive, so many business owners will run one ad or a short, one-off campaign and hope that it pays dividends. Unfortunately, marketing rarely works like that and so the...
.Mobi - Don't Be A Dinosaur - Join The Mobile...
We all know what happened to the Dinosaurs. They didn’t see something coming that was going to change their world and they died out. We’ve all heard the analogy between dinosaurs and business before, but it has never been more relevant than now. There is a new shift in how consumers go online and the amazing thing is that it has already happened and most business owners know nothing...
Stop Wasting Money On Leaflets!
No, I don’t mean that leaflets are a waste of money, quite the contrary when well designed, but often that’s not what I see when a leaflet drops through my letterbox. So let’s review the “Do’s & Don’ts” of leaflet design.
Do Treat Your Leaflets Like Adverts Don’t Waste Space Don’t Fill Your Leaflet With Text Do Use An Attention Grabbing...
Advertising Agencies - Not Just For The Big Guys!
When you think of advertising agencies, your mind immediately jumps to names like Coca Cola and other big corporate companies spending millions of advertising campaigns. Small business owners naturally think that they are therefore forced to deal with handling the media buying for their adverts themselves and more onerously, they have to deal with the many phone calls from the media sales people...
Sorry I haven’t updated the blog recently. We’ve been working hard loading up the many articles on our website. If you can’t wait for the guided drip-feed, then go to http://www.thedggroup.eu/marketing-articles.asp and start reading now. New articles are loaded regularly.
August 2009
4 posts
The Perils Of Accepted Wisdom
The last quote really shows how the best research in the world may not help if you have a ground-breaking product or service. In this situation the only way to really identify if what you have is what people want is to test and measure.
“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”
– Henry Ford
(via bethinkr)
(via shawnyeager) (via marketingbarista)
Our New website is live!
After a great deal of blood, sweat and tears and a lot of effort from our excellent team, our new website is live and if I say so myself, it’s pretty damn great!
Go see it at www.thedggroup.eu
Of course if you’re looking at this post on our site then you don’t need to click the link ;-)
First Blog
This is our first blog. Each week we will be posting one or more blogs on various areas of marketing that we hope visitors will find interesting. Most of the blogs will have a corresponding longer article with more details and we will include links to these in the blogs.
We hope you find these useful and if so, please let us know.