@OpiyoUK Hi, Thanks for the follow! Am aware (and like the look) of your co, hope to work together sometime! Us on FB: http://t.co/ZtfuAjtb
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We often get asked what details need to be included on a letterhead. Many clients don’t realise the legal requirement to feature particular information on their corporate literature. Laws came into force a couple of years ago requiring companies and limited liability partnerships to make sure that their legal name was stated in legible lettering on all letters, order forms, invoices receipts, websites and emails. Check now. Are you complying with the law?
It doesn’t stop there. You’re also breaking the law if your letterheads don’t have the following printed on them:
It’s not really in our interest for our customers to be in jail, so please check you’re not a Larry Law-breaker. If you are we won’t tell — just stop using your old news letterheads and get some new ones printed sharpish. Check out our range of lovely stationery.
Source: The Companies (Registrar, Languages and Trading Disclosures) Regulations 2006.
Leaflets are so versatile, it’s no surprise so many of our customers find them an essential part of their marketing. Whether they’re being popped through letter boxes, inserted into newspapers, posted out or propped up on the counter — they look great in glorious full colour and are incredibly low cost.
Many things will affect the response you’ll get from your leaflet campaign. Answer these questions and make your leaflets work harder for you:
Who are you trying to reach? Are you selling to consumers or businesses? Where do they live? What industry are they in? What age group? If you can’t answer these questions, you’ll find it a bit trickier to find the right way of targeting your market.
Presumably you’re investing in marketing to win more business. We do it all the time, so there’s no need to be shy. Think about what makes you different or special. What problem can you solve? What need can you satisfy? What’s your Unique Selling Point — yourUSP? Why should they buy from you?
We’ve seen leaflets which are no more than business cards — a name, a number and maybe a list of stuff they do. When you get a leaflet like that, what do you do? Save it or bin it? The most effective leaflets use time-bound offers. Maybe “half price this month”, “free teddy with every quote” or “free consultation during November.” Think really hard about offering an incentive — and the level of it. “5% off” may be enough to get some interest… but what would “25% off” do to the response?
What’s the next step? You don’t need to close the deal there and then (although, if you can, do it!) Tell them what you want them to do next. “Call now for a free sample”, “Bring this leaflet to…” or “Email us for a quotation.” Spell it out. Make it easy for them to buy from you.
There are many ways to get your message out. First or second class post is highly targeted, but quite pricey. Try inserts in a local free newspaper, or pay some local kids to do a leaflet drop. For a more targeted approach try an insert in a magazine read by your target market. Selling crochet saddles? Put an insert into ‘Your Pony Magazine’.
We’d recommend that you spend at least 30% of your budget on design. Design can mean the difference between success and failure. A badly designed leaflet may do more damage than you think. There’s no such thing as a second impression, so get it right first time. We can help. Design is our business, after all. Talk to us.
This will depend on what you’re selling, although according to the Direct Marketing Association, October is the prime time for inserts. You’ll probably get a lower response in summer months, since your recipients may be sunning themselves in Benidorm or Barbados. At Christmas, your message will have to work harder to compete with all the others.
Leaflets are a wonderfully effective marketing tool… when they’re used correctly. We want you to be successful for selfish reasons — you’ll invest more with us if you are. Let us help you succeed — get us involved from the start. And, good luck!
Pay Per Click advertising has been a revolution in marketing and is the largest area of growth, for good reason. We want to tell you all about it and how we believe it can really work for your business.
What is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising? - It’s a way of paying to get to the top of Search Engine listings. (When we talk about Search Engines, Google is by far and away the most popular so we concentrate on that.) Whilst they’re placed adverts, they’re designed to look similar than natural search engine results, and despite what you may think many, many people do click on these ads. It’s massive, Google makes $20 billion a year profit from this but this comes from people running poorly managed campaigns. We’re confident you’ll get back more than what you put in to this area of marketing, if it’s run well.
It’s uniquely tangible - The fantastic and unique thing about PPC is it’s instantly measurable and changable, more than any other form of advertising. You can tweak and improve every day if you want to, and in no other form of advertising can you specifically and exactly target people that are search for the service you provide. Compare to advertising in a publication, instead of hoping someone reading the publication is looking for ‘web design and marketing gloucester‘, we can have our advert pop up when some searches specifically for ‘web design and marketing gloucester‘.
Selecting your keywords - Keywords are the trigger for your advert to appear on a persons computer, for example as shown in italics above. This is example is a ‘long tail keyword’, it basically presents better value and targeting to your campaign. Each keyword trigger costs a different amount, depending on the competition and number of searches for this keyword. For example ‘web design and marketing‘, without the geographical element will cost lots more because you’re competing on a national level. We maybe talking about 4p per click compared to a few pounds per click. We advise our clients to focus right in on ‘narrower’ (or longer tail) keywords to ensure the very best value. We can provide a report on words related to and around your business which shows the cost of various keywords and phrases.
Google v Content network ads - You may have seen on some websites, there are ‘adverts by google’. You can choose whether you want to appear on relevant, partner websites – or purely on Google. This may be relevant and useful to your business or not. Content network is a little more like traditional marketing, as you’re trying to ‘distract’ people rather than helping solve a persons search query. The key is to separate out. If in doubt, we’d advise to disable the Content Network.
Click Thru Rate (CTR) and quality score - Where and how often your ad appears is largely based on the budget you set for your adverts. If I set a £50 a month limit to my click thru costs, I will get approximately double the appearances of a competitor with a £25 monthly budget. However, it’s not quite as simple as that. Depending on your CTR, Google awards you a Quality Score, it uses as a measure the % of people seeing your ad and clicking on it. Changing, testing and reviewing your CTRs to increase them is a crucial part of making this marketing strategy work the hardest for your business. Being clever means you should be able to increase the CTR and reduce your costs.
Relevancy and landing pages - Google is clever. It also ranks your advert by checking your landing page and website for relevancy and uses this to score your advert. This is also reflective of a customers experience. Clearly, if someone clicks on our advert using the ‘web design and marketing‘ example, they want to be spoken to about that when they click through to your website. Various ads landing on the most appropriate pages is key, not only to improving your PPC campaign, but in converting visitors into customers.
Maximise, convert your website visitors - A PPC campaign is a very effective tool in getting more traffic to your website. The crucial element is then to make a sale from this visit. This requires fine tuning of your website, it’s headline, copy and the offer. We can help you independently look at your website and review it’s offer to make the most of your visitor a buyer.
See for yourself
We can set up, run and manage a Pay Per Click campaign for you. We can use our expertise to maximise these campaigns really benefit your business to save you time and hassle, for a small monthly fee. Compared to traditional advertising, we really do genuinely believe PPC provides a great value form of marketing and advertising. We provide a monthly report so you can see exactly how your ad is performing and we’ll constantly suggest improvements.
The first thing to do is to ask us to produce a Keyword Analysis report for your business. We’ll provide this free and without obligation to continue – what have you got to lose? It’s a really useful way to get an idea of what people are searching for around your business and the services you provide, if nothing else.
If you’re a new visitor, thanks for dropping by – if you’ve been here before – welcome back! This reincarnation of our website has been a long time coming, if I’m honest almost 12 months in the making!!!
“That doesn’t look like 12 months work” I hear you laugh!
Well we’ve been very busy with some exciting developments, and Absolute has changed shape somewhat in the last year. We’ve been desperate to update the website to reflect these changes, but client work always comes first!
Firstly, we’ve signed up to become Printing.com franchise. Our regular clients will know that this actually happened in June 2010. Becoming a Printing.com franchisee has been a very exciting change for the business and our clients. Its allowed us to offer a massive range of high quality printed items, with guaranteed turnaround times. A great asset, as this allows us to speed up the design and production process considerably, also giving us tighter controls on quality and price. I hope you’ll agree a win-win!
After almost three years trading, we had outgrown The Loft, our home in College Street since we established the business and it was time to move on. We’d enjoyed working in our home town of Gloucester, and decided to look for suitable premises in the area. After many viewings, and some interesting propositions, we actually found the perfect spot, two doors down at No.9!
Formerly the home of the Visitor Information Point, the new home of Absolute gives us a ‘shopfront’ and ability to raise the profile of our products and services. We’ve got all of our samples and products on display, to allow clients to drop in and discuss their needs in a convenient location. The new space also offers the scope to expand Absolute as things develop.
If you’re in the area and want to check out our printing range, take away some samples or a buying guide, please drop by and say hello!