Welcome to the Escape Blog

So, back by (popular) demand - This Week At The Escape - and what a week!

But first, a little catch up… Alex Rourke joined the team a couple of weeks ago. She’s doing a very tough challenge in Jersey this weekend so good luck her.

Steve went and got married to Sarah last week. He took us through the 800 photos on Tuesday when he came back from his honeymoon in the Escape hideaway in Cyprus.

On the project front, the Jabra stand project was a big success at the Call Centre Expo 2007 and the client is very happy.

Rob “he really needs to learn how to use his camera but at least it wasn’t in night vision this time” Jones got a shot of the stand but we have a better one coming and a case study will follow on the website.

The Brackenwood website (1st phase) also went live last week.

It’s also been very quiet around the office this week - Simon’s away travelling in Italy. Meanwhile Craig came back from his Human Element course raring to go and got stuck in with the sales team:

Wow, what a course. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand their behaviours and the motivation behind them. But, be prepared to have your eyes opened very widely.

The problem with high street retail is shelf space. There simply isn’t enough to go round for all the products you may want to sell. Imagine how big the Amazon shop would need to be to hold it’s inventory.

That’s why I like the Retro Lush solution, from one of my favourite consumer high street brands Lush.

The premise is this. Their stores can’t stock everything so when new products come out, they discontinue the ones that don’t sell much. But, obviously, your personal favourite may be one of them.

So, with Retro Lush, as a disgruntled customer, you can put your money where you mouth is…

Place an order on the product you love. When the first order is made on that product the race commences! The race will last 5 days. When the 50th product is ordered it is guaranteed that our “chef” will make it and the race is replaced with a big old PARTY which anyone can join until the 5 days is up. Your order will only get made if the race is completed.

It’s a great idea and creates buzz.

We sacked our cleaners last week. They had been getting progressively worse to the point that in the last two weeks, they didn’t even vacuum the building.

It’s interesting that when we first used this company, the person who started the company was the person cleaning, or at least coming to check. As the company grew, the actual people who came in got progressively worse.

When Jacqui placed the call to the company last week to sack them, their indifferent response was “you’re only as good as the people that represent you”.

When I think of how companies market themselves, through PR, advertising, etc. retention still boils down to customer service and yes, you are only as good as the people that represent you on the front line.

And that, is why all marketing starts at home. Employees are the most effective form of marketing and their development is well worth part of your marketing budget.

Using pay-per-click - especially Google - is becoming harder and optimisation of your adverts is central to keeping this manageable for a small business.

Costs for keywords are rising exponentially and although it is easy to blame Google, Webmasters need to be looking at themselves and what they can do. The title of this post came from an article on Search Engine Land about Adwords Quality Score, a pain in many people’s side at the moment, although I see it as a massive opportunity.

Simply, my view is this. Any company can throw money at advertising if they have spare cash (and many do). But, Google (and maybe I am being näive here) want to offer their searchers quality results, whether in their natural listings or with their advertising, so naturally they have started taking the landing page of the advert into consideration - the page people get to when they click on the advert.

Why should they care? What’s it got to do with them?

Well if their paid search results simply went to the highest bidder, it’s not necessarily in the interest of the person doing the search. If that person feels they aren’t getting good results they may go somewhere else to search and Google can’t let that happen. Searchers make Google successful not necessarily the advertisers.

The best way to remedy (or try to control) your Adword costs therefore is:

1. Create specific adverts for specific landing pages - if you are selling products or services break it down and send the advert off to the right page. This also requires specific keywords for each advert as well. Your Quality Score Index will mean your advert costs should come down per click. If you Adwords account has only one advert in - you are doing something wrong.
2. The first word of Quality Score Index is “Quality” - add some to your landing page. You’d be amazed how many people don’t see why they should.
3. Refine your “keywords”. Don’t go after the obvious “loose” keywords. Get specific and use phrase, exact and negative keywords in your campaigns. You may get less click-throughs but they should be more likely to take action when they get there.

Go on - take control today.

This morning, E Consultancy have reported that Facebook is now the largest social networking site based on unique visitors, overtaking MySpace:

• Facebook - 6.5m unique visitors
• MySpace - 6.4m
• Bebo - 4.4m
• Windows Live Spaces - 2.3m
• Friends Reunited - 2.1m

It seems that Microsoft are keeping a very close eye on their growth with a view to an investment valuing the site at $10 billion.

Following on from our new marketing machine, which is getting some great feedback, comes Escape client The Picture Studio.

I live quite close to Paul who runs the company, a local picture framers, so I do often see him but I have started to notice his new van in the local supermarket car park quite a bit.

When I mentioned this to him he told me (and the idea is so simple it made me laugh) that because he lives close, he parks his van there for a few hours in the evenings and at weekends and walks home.

In fact, when I went shopping on Saturday morning, right by the entrance to the car park, what did I see…

A bit of self-indulgence for two minutes if you’ll let me but one of the opportunities for online shops as I see it is the ability to create loyalty and value for your customers. It’s the reason The Boomerang Solution does what it does the way it does it.

This post on retail bulletin re-inforces this idea based on a recent survey from Verdict.

Verdict stresses that sales cannot be grown blindly, and that the key lies in maximising traffic to sites by both attracting and keeping shoppers. With over 31m UK consumers currently shopping online, the key priority for e-retailers is to have much closer relationships with the customers they serve to try and secure their loyalty. This is for two reasons.

Reliance on Google Adwords is the problem for so many online businesses and whilst it makes Google rich and does deliver traffic it only increases our acceptance that this is the industry standard when it’s not.

A healthy balance of advertising can be achieved by building the relationships. The old saying “It’s easier and cheaper to keep an existing customer than to get a new one” rings very true.

How you attain loyalty in customers goes back to the basics and relys on your market and customer profile. I personally find that above and beyond great customer service, the informational route really works for me for my online shops. Yes, it takes time to add information-based and educational content, even to the point where it may feel that you are giving it away, but the pay off is much more rewarding and spreads the reliance.

That approach and adding value through loyalty has allowed me to create an opt-in database of over 900 people in 12 months for TS Beauty. Moving forward it makes me much more confident that I can retain customers, rather than pay for new ones, reducing my advertising costs whilst increasing relevant sales.

This is straightforward…

Steve got married a couple of weeks ago and Alex joined the team last week.

Congratulations to Mr and Mrs Clark and welcome Mrs Rourke.

A quick question if you fancy commenting… do you really miss the old “This Week At The Escape” posts?

Blogging is an interesting marketing activity (even now) that many people still can’t understand in terms of business. Mark White asks what makes a successful corporate blog and outlines some objectives I automatically saw as possibilities that are worth sharing in the different context:

• Increased enquiries generated through the blog using specific email addresses or forms
• Incremental sales which can be tracked back to the blog
• Sign ups either to your newsletter, white papers or other sources of information
• RSS subscribers to the blog or individual categories within the blog if the level of content warrants it
• Inbound links generated by the blog when others reference and link through to the content
• Better Search Engine positioning because of the blog’s regularly updated content, internal structure and inbound links
• New products identified and developed through the market research or product development carried out on the blog
• Customer queries answered leading to reduced customer service or technical support calls

He has other advice in terms of pointers for blog but I will leave you with one thought for the doubters who may be asking, “why would anyone be interested in me?”.

Firstly, if you don’t network, like I wasn’t networking, it may not happen, but think of Facebook (if you know it). Then, think of how voyeuristic it is and how much you read others peoples stuff… then read the people who they link to… or is it just me? I think not.

Blog Statistics in The UK

Matt Ambrose also tuned me into a survey from Inferno PR with some interesting corporate blog related stuff:

50% of the companies surveyed had undertaken blogging in some form and of those nearly 90% said it had generated new business…

Other findings included:

• 64% of UK corporate blogs have been launched in the last 6 months
• 66% of managers in the survey have visited blogs in the last 12 months
• 80% of blog users visit blogs during working hours
• 33% of blog visitors will access a blog on a daily basis
• Amongst purchase decision makers, blogs were second best source for influencing buying decisions, after industry reports

We were notified today that City Link are introducing a minimum weekly order value of £50 and that this would be starting on the 28th September 2007. Coupled with this they are decreasing their payment time to 14 days via Direct Debit only.

Well City Link, this is one client you will be losing, we won’t be able to justify a minimum of £50 to any of our clients, quite frankly it’s daylight robbery.