This is a quick post to remind you to check whether your website is iPhone and iPad compatible. In short, if your website has any kind of Flash animation or Flash video, these aspects of your site will not be visible on either the iPhone or iPad.

A lot of businesses spend a lot of money to have their key messages turned into slick Flash animations or videos, and yet have no idea that their attention-grabbing messages are actually appearing as blank white boxes on Apple’s latest technologies. Read more

For most businesses, PR is not the first marketing activity they undertake. It tends to be added to the mix to help raise their profile. But traditional PR (i.e. gaining coverage in printed or online publications) is one of the most difficult activities to measure and also can be one of the more expensive (assuming you are using a PR agency). That shouldn’t put you off, but before you commit to a 12 month agreement with an agency, consider the reasons why you want to add PR to your list of marketing-things-to-do. Read more

Good films, good books and good newspapers have something in common:  Good editing.  In other words, they will all cut out great material and content, for the sake of a better overall story.

And businesses are no different.  They have a story to tell and messages to deliver.  In the same way that a good book has a story that flows smoothly and that a newspaper headline delivers the messages in a handful of words, businesses should apply the same approach to their marketing.  In particular their written content. Read more

If you have spent any time working in marketing or studying marketing, you will be aware of the 4 Ps (Price, Product, Place, Promotion).

(And yes I know, the 4 Ps went out with the dinosaurs.  But you should hear me out).

A sure fire way to lose credibility as a ‘marketing consultant’ (I use the term loosely) is to start spouting the 4 Ps.  Or better yet, the more recent 7Ps, or 8Ps… I think there were eventually up to 13 Ps, but I think they included words like ‘Pretty Pictures’ and ‘Potato Peeler’ (or maybe not).  Whatever number of Ps there are now, the original 4  just aint fashionable any more. Read more

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising gets a lot of coverage on the web, so I’m not going to try and repeat (or dispute) any of that advice.  Here are just a few tips for companies considering PPC (specifically Google’s Adwords) who have either had a bad experience in the past or have never tried it.  Before I start, this article assumes you have installed Google Analytics and set your goal conversions so you can track where new enquiries come from (if that was double-dutch to you, let me know and I’ll explain). Read more