Ok, we’ve all been there, jumped on social media channels for 5 minutes then looked at the clock and wondered where the last hour went. What we’re going to talk about in this blog post is about the importance of UTM tracking parameters and how they can be used to accurately track social media activities.
What are UTM Tracking Parameters?
Unless you are quite a savvy digital marketer you may not have come across UTM tracking parameters previously, so before we look at how they link in with social media we will run through a short history and technical lesson. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Monitor. Urchin was the predecessor to what is now known as Google Analytics which we all know and love.
One of the core pieces of technology underlying both Urchin, and now Google Analytics, is the ability to clearly track information about where a website visitor came from when they landed on your website. This core functionality was extended to allow business, brands and marketing managers to customise this information as they please. What all of this means is that UTM tracking parameters allow traffic to your website to be tracked accurately.
The UTM tracking parameters are the additional bits of information that you may have seen in website addresses as can be seen in the example below;
What you will see in the website address above is three additional pieces of information, the UTM tracking parameters;
utm_source: i.e. where did this user come from
utm_medium: i.e. what type of traffic is this – direct, referral, social, organic or paid
utm_campaign: i.e. was this from a specific marketing campaign that you ran
In addition to the required parameters above, you can also further customise the information by adding additional information such as;
utm_term: i.e. if this was from a paid advertising campaign where you bid on specific keywords, such as with Google AdWords
utm_content: i.e. if you wanted to test different Ad Variations for your paid advertising campaigns, you can track this back with this parameter
Ok, so you may be wondering what this has to do with social media. Before we go onto that, just a bit more important technical background information that you need to understand before we look at how this links in with social.
How referral traffic is tracked within Google Analytics
By default, Google Analytics handles all of the magical UTM tracking parameters in the background (and much more) automatically if a URL doesn’t have anything specified. For example, if a user visits www.contradodigital.com without any UTM tracking parameters in the URL, then Google will see what information they have available about where this person came from and use this to feed into the correct buckets of information within Google Analytics automatically.
For example, if a user came from organic search, then Google knows this and that is why you see website traffic classed as ‘Organic’ and from ‘Google’ within Google Analytics. Likewise, if a user clicks on a link on an external website and lands on your website, then this would be classed as referral traffic within Google Analytics.
The reason why Google Analytics is able to understand this is due to the way web browsers work. When you browse the internet, web browsers pass basic information between websites such as the domain name where you came from.
For example, you can see a page we shared on our Twitter account recently;
Webpage we shared on our Twitter account
The shortened website address con.tra.do/TPz3K9 is actually the following website address https://www.contradodigital.com/resources/social-media-tracking-tool/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Our-Social-Updates and as you will notice, this has included the UTM tracking parameters in the URL.
This isn’t what I want to talk about here though. Hidden away in the browser when a user actually clicks on this link is additional information within the HTTP Header which contains information for the website where the user is going to, i.e. in this example our website. Below is a screenshot of the HTTP Header information when a user clicks on the link;
HTTP Header Referer Information Example
What you will notice in the highlighted line is the Referer information. Yes, you will notice that is actually spelt incorrectly and there is a rather interesting story behind this if you are interested and wondering why this is still widely used.
The referrer information is telling the website that you are landing on the full website address where the user came from. So in this case, this is http://t.co/euI7Tjaime which is the automatically shortened URL that Twitter now uses.
What this means is that within your Google Analytics account, if you didn’t use UTM tracking parameters, then the traffic would be listed as from t.co, opposed to twitter.com. This is due to the automatic shortened URL that Twitter uses.
You may be wondering why this is a problem. Traffic from twitter is coming from t.co, which we know to be Twitter. So why is this a problem for us? Well, glad you asked.
Optional Referrer Information
The reason why this is a problem is that the referrer header information is optional, meaning that it may not always be present depending on where and what ‘thing’ the user came from. This generally isn’t too much of a problem for modern browsers as they do support this by default. The problem lies with the range of technologies people are using to access information on the internet.
What this means is that the referrer header information often isn’t passed along when a user clicks on a link. So when a user is flicking through their Twitter feed over coffee in the morning and they see a link to some amazing content you have on your website, then this traffic will be potentially be classed as direct traffic within Google Analytics. Wait. What? This isn’t right. This is the key point to take away from the blog post.
Direct traffic within Google Analytics isn’t people who typed in www.your-website.com into their browser. No. Direct traffic is actually Google’s way of saying ‘we have no idea where this traffic came from’.
This may be difficult to grasp just reading through this quite technical blog post, so let’s illustrate this for clarify. We have been focusing on Twitter throughout this blog post, although this isn’t just Twitter where this problem lies. This is a large scale tracking problem that can only be solved with using correct UTM tracking parameters on your URLs.
Missing Referrer Information
To illustrate the point above, I picked up my phone (Samsung Galaxy S4), opened the Facebook application that I have installed and navigated to the Contrado Digital Facebook page as can be seen below;
Contrado Digital Facebook page as viewed from a native mobile application on phone
I then clicked on the ‘Visit Website’ link. Now imagine this was a normal status update that you shared a link to your website, this is the same thing. Then I headed over to Google Analytics to view the Real Time Analytics report which shows who is on the website right now, and most importantly where they came from;
Google Analytics Real Time traffic report no referral data from Facebook native mobile application
What you will notice here is that the medium is set to ‘Direct’ and the source is ‘(not set)’. This isn’t good. This should be set to ‘Social’ and ‘Facebook’ respectively. What this means is that you will be receiving traffic from your social media channels, although you won’t know that it is from your social media channels if you don’t tag your URLs up with UTM tracking parameters correctly.
If you are spending a reasonable amount of time implementing your social media strategy, then you want to know that it is delivering results. I repeated the same process, although on our Twitter account and this traffic is actually coming through correctly from the mobile application that I am using as can be seen below;
Google Analytics Real Time traffic report shows referral data from Twitter native mobile application
What this does highlight is the inherent discrepancy between different native mobile applications and that some will and some won’t pass on the referrer header information for the website to pick up on. If I was to repeat this experiment using a different mobile application that was pulling in Tweets or social media updates, then the response will likely be different again. Likewise, if I was to repeat the experiment on an Apple iPhone then again the results would likely differ.
The Solution
What you will hopefully have picked up on throughout this blog post is that unless you are using UTM tracking parameters on all URLs that you share on social media channels then you will not be getting a full picture about how your social media marketing efforts are performing.
Thankfully, you’ll be glad to know that there is a simple and effective solution. That is to use our Social Media Tracking Tool which will automatically add on the relevant UTM tracking parameters for the main social media channels you will be using.
Social Media Tracking Tool
What this means is that when you share correctly tagged up URLs on your social media channels, you will be able to see within Google Analytics exactly where the user has come from. I.e. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or Pinterest. No longer will you have to guess where traffic is coming from. Tag your URLs and track the data accurately.
While UTM tracking parameters are very simple in their nature, the underlying technology behind them can get quite technical. If you have any questions or comments on the above then leave a comment below.
Have fun tracking all of your social media updates accurately from now on!
Social media is an extremely powerful medium that allows you to connect with your audience even easier than ever. While this is true, most businesses are still unsure about how to use social media effectively and how to track social media activities. It is easy to spend a lot of time on social media without knowing what your business is getting back from the time invested.
Here we will talk you through a few tools that we use, and one that we have built, which are all designed to help you manage your social media work effectively. No longer will you have to use guess work to measure performance, instead you can use these selection of tools to track all social media activities effectively.
Ok, so you’ve just created some awesome content on your website or blog and now you want to share this with the world on your various social media channels. Firstly, it is important to tag all of your links up that you are sharing so that you can easily see how many people have clicked on these links from the various social media channels.
Social Media Tracking Tool
To tag up your URLs that you are sharing you can use the Google URL Builder if you have custom and individual requirements, or alternatively you can use our new Social Media Tracking Tool. This tool is designed to speed up the process for updating social media channels and tracking the number of clicks received from the different channels.
By default, links that aren’t tagged will not be tracked accurately within your web analytics tool such as Google Analytics. The reason behind this is due to the ‘referrer’ information not always being passed from the source through to your website when a user clicks on the link from various sources including native applications, i.e. a Twitter App on your followers’ smartphones. When this happens, it will appear that traffic to your website from social media channels is ‘Direct’ traffic, which isn’t the case.
Our new tool will tag all of your links up automatically, saving you time manually updating each link with the correct campaign tracking tags. Have a go and see how easy the tool is to use.
Bit.ly
Another tool that you will find useful for tracking your social media activities is Bit.ly which is an additional link tracking tool that sits between users clicking on a link that you have shared on social media and when they arrive on your website. This is a great tool to use as this means you can track the number of clicks the links you are sharing on social media, regardless if these links are to your website or another website. Below shows the daily clicks for our social media activities over the last month;
As can be seen above, this is great data to understand what your fans and followers are most interested in reading about. Knowing this information will allow you to tailor your social media updates to content that is most interesting for your audience.
Buffer
Now you have your list of links that you want to share on social media, you can easily schedule these updates to save you having to spend all day on social media. Simply schedule posts to be sent out automatically throughout the week and save yourself hours of time, allowing you to continue running your businesses.
As you can see above, here are a few of the scheduled posts we have. With this tool you can easily set custom schedules for each of the social media accounts that you connect to Buffer. The simplicity of this tool is brilliant and really does all you to save an enormous amount of time managing your social media activities.
HootSuite
Now you have all of your content scheduled to your social media channels, you need an easy way of managing engagement from your fans and followers. While you can simply hand out your login details to several members of staff to manage social media for you, this will inevitably lead to challenges. For example if a member of staff leaves your business, you will have to change the passwords. In addition, you may have an external party like ourselves managing your social media channels and you would prefer we didn’t have your passwords.
Tools such as HootSuite get around these issues by being able to manage social media channels without logging in/out of each social media account through the day. This really helps to reduce the management time along with increase the response time when responding to fans and followers on social media.
As you may already know, we are an official HootSuite Solutions Partner so we are confident in the tool and its abilities. Being able to manage multiple social media channels from a single dashboard is ideal and there is also the flexibility to allow members of staff to do this from their own HootSuite account too. Meaning that you can easily manage a team of people working on the social media activities. Below shows you how simple the tool is to use;
Google Analytics
Now you have all of your social media activities working well, tracking is the essential part of this. Tracking is available within all of the tools mentioned above so it is always recommended to monitor each of the individual tools. Social media can be a great way to drive additional traffic to your website and as mentioned earlier, our new Social Media Tracking Tool allows you to easily track this data within tools such as Google Analytics.
Below shows a graph from our Google Analytics account for the traffic our website has received over the past few months as a direct result of talking about our blog posts we have promoted;
This traffic is broken down in Google Analytics based on the way that you tagged your campaigns. Thankfully with our new Social Media Tracking Tool, you don’t have to worry about this as the tool will automatically tag all of your campaigns quickly and easily for you.
Once you start to use this approach with your social media activities you will be able to quickly see which channels are driving the most traffic to your website. Most importantly, this traffic data will now be accurate since if campaign tracking tags aren’t used, then this is likely to be under-reporting on the results the social media activities are generating.
Summary
Overall, social media management doesn’t have to be an extremely time consuming task. Instead, using the right tools for the job can save a huge amount of time and allow you to focus on other areas within your business. To summarise the tools and steps below;
1) Social Media Tracking Tool: Use to automatically tag all your links up correctly when posting updates to your various social media channels
2) Bit.ly: Use to see how many people are clicking on the links you are sharing, whether these links are to your website or to an external website
3) Buffer: Use to easily schedule social media updates throughout the week without having to continually post throughout the day
4) HootSuite: User to easily manage engagement from your fans and followers by joining the conversation when the time is right
5) Google Analytics: Use to accurately track which social media platforms are driving the most traffic to your website. Ensure campaign tracking tags have been set up using our Social Media Tracking Tool so you aren’t under-reporting on results achieved
Hopefully this has given you a good selection of tools and explained clearly how these various tools can be used to manage your social media activities effectively. Save yourself a huge amount of time using the above tools.
These tools are our preference when managing social media channels, if you have any other tools that you like to use, then leave a comment, we’d love to hear from you.
Social media is an extremely powerful medium that allows you to connect with your audience even easier than ever. While this is true, most businesses are still unsure about how to use social media effectively and how to track social media activities. It is easy to spend a lot of time on social media without knowing what your business is getting back from the time invested.
Here we will talk you through a few tools that we use, and one that we have built, which are all designed to help you manage your social media work effectively. No longer will you have to use guess work to measure performance, instead you can use these selection of tools to track all social media activities effectively.
Ok, so you’ve just created some awesome content on your website or blog and now you want to share this with the world on your various social media channels. Firstly, it is important to tag all of your links up that you are sharing so that you can easily see how many people have clicked on these links from the various social media channels.
Social Media Tracking Tool
To tag up your URLs that you are sharing you can use the Google URL Builder if you have custom and individual requirements, or alternatively you can use our new Social Media Tracking Tool. This tool is designed to speed up the process for updating social media channels and tracking the number of clicks received from the different channels.
By default, links that aren’t tagged will not be tracked accurately within your web analytics tool such as Google Analytics. The reason behind this is due to the ‘referrer’ information not always being passed from the source through to your website when a user clicks on the link from various sources including native applications, i.e. a Twitter App on your followers’ smartphones. When this happens, it will appear that traffic to your website from social media channels is ‘Direct’ traffic, which isn’t the case.
Our new tool will tag all of your links up automatically, saving you time manually updating each link with the correct campaign tracking tags. Have a go and see how easy the tool is to use.
Bit.ly
Another tool that you will find useful for tracking your social media activities is Bit.ly which is an additional link tracking tool that sits between users clicking on a link that you have shared on social media and when they arrive on your website. This is a great tool to use as this means you can track the number of clicks the links you are sharing on social media, regardless if these links are to your website or another website. Below shows the daily clicks for our social media activities over the last month;
As can be seen above, this is great data to understand what your fans and followers are most interested in reading about. Knowing this information will allow you to tailor your social media updates to content that is most interesting for your audience.
Buffer
Now you have your list of links that you want to share on social media, you can easily schedule these updates to save you having to spend all day on social media. Simply schedule posts to be sent out automatically throughout the week and save yourself hours of time, allowing you to continue running your businesses.
As you can see above, here are a few of the scheduled posts we have. With this tool you can easily set custom schedules for each of the social media accounts that you connect to Buffer. The simplicity of this tool is brilliant and really does all you to save an enormous amount of time managing your social media activities.
HootSuite
Now you have all of your content scheduled to your social media channels, you need an easy way of managing engagement from your fans and followers. While you can simply hand out your login details to several members of staff to manage social media for you, this will inevitably lead to challenges. For example if a member of staff leaves your business, you will have to change the passwords. In addition, you may have an external party like ourselves managing your social media channels and you would prefer we didn’t have your passwords.
Tools such as HootSuite get around these issues by being able to manage social media channels without logging in/out of each social media account through the day. This really helps to reduce the management time along with increase the response time when responding to fans and followers on social media.
As you may already know, we are an official HootSuite Solutions Partner so we are confident in the tool and its abilities. Being able to manage multiple social media channels from a single dashboard is ideal and there is also the flexibility to allow members of staff to do this from their own HootSuite account too. Meaning that you can easily manage a team of people working on the social media activities. Below shows you how simple the tool is to use;
Google Analytics
Now you have all of your social media activities working well, tracking is the essential part of this. Tracking is available within all of the tools mentioned above so it is always recommended to monitor each of the individual tools. Social media can be a great way to drive additional traffic to your website and as mentioned earlier, our new Social Media Tracking Tool allows you to easily track this data within tools such as Google Analytics.
Below shows a graph from our Google Analytics account for the traffic our website has received over the past few months as a direct result of talking about our blog posts we have promoted;
This traffic is broken down in Google Analytics based on the way that you tagged your campaigns. Thankfully with our new Social Media Tracking Tool, you don’t have to worry about this as the tool will automatically tag all of your campaigns quickly and easily for you.
Once you start to use this approach with your social media activities you will be able to quickly see which channels are driving the most traffic to your website. Most importantly, this traffic data will now be accurate since if campaign tracking tags aren’t used, then this is likely to be under-reporting on the results the social media activities are generating.
Summary
Overall, social media management doesn’t have to be an extremely time consuming task. Instead, using the right tools for the job can save a huge amount of time and allow you to focus on other areas within your business. To summarise the tools and steps below;
1) Social Media Tracking Tool: Use to automatically tag all your links up correctly when posting updates to your various social media channels
2) Bit.ly: Use to see how many people are clicking on the links you are sharing, whether these links are to your website or to an external website
3) Buffer: Use to easily schedule social media updates throughout the week without having to continually post throughout the day
4) HootSuite: User to easily manage engagement from your fans and followers by joining the conversation when the time is right
5) Google Analytics: Use to accurately track which social media platforms are driving the most traffic to your website. Ensure campaign tracking tags have been set up using our Social Media Tracking Tool so you aren’t under-reporting on results achieved
Hopefully this has given you a good selection of tools and explained clearly how these various tools can be used to manage your social media activities effectively. Save yourself a huge amount of time using the above tools.
These tools are our preference when managing social media channels, if you have any other tools that you like to use, then leave a comment, we’d love to hear from you.
It seems like the fun never ends! After recently being shortlisted in the finals for the Lancashire Red Rose Awards 2014, the Prolific North Awards 2014 and The Bibas 2014, we have now also been shortlisted in the finals in the Chartered Institute of Marketing Northern Awards 2014 in two categories! The two categories we are through to the finals for are, Digital Marketing Campaign of the Year along with Northern Agency of the Year.
The category for Digital Marketing Campaign of the Year recognises the work from an outstanding digital campaign that has successfully met objectives and delivered excellent results. The Northern Agency of the Year category is an award to celebrate the best marketing agency in the North of England.
The Chartered Institute of Marketing Northern Awards recognise and reward the creativity and success of companies participating in digital marketing in the North of England. The Chartered Institute of Marketing is the leading international body for marketing and business development with over 40,000 members. CIM provides marketing qualifications, training for marketing professionals.
Digital Marketing Campaign of the Year
To be shortlisted in the finals for the Digital Marketing Campaign of the Year award we had to clearly demonstrate a successful campaign we have worked on. Thankfully, we have several of these which we can choose from. As part of the entry we outlined the clear objectives set for the campaign including the target audience for the campaign.
This allowed us to create a strategy that would meet those objectives. Talking through the implementation of the campaign and the creative elements that went into the campaign clearly showed how every action was linking back to the main objectives.
The campaign we ran led to a huge increase in traffic and sales which far exceeded the targets we had.
Within this category we are up against the likes of the University of Huddersfield, one of the UK’s leading PR agencies along with a large agency with over 170 members of staff and revenues in excess of £155,000,000 in 2013. Getting through to the finals against such large and well established companies within our first year of trading is something we are extremely proud of.
Northern Agency of the Year
To be shortlisted in the finals for the Northern Agency of the Year award we had to outline how amazing we are. We’ve always got a lot to talk about, so this was our opportunity to do exactly that. As part of the entry we had to talk through our objectives for the previous year, or for us this was since we launched back in August.
We then talked through what we have been doing over the past year for our clients and in the community. As you may imagine, our recent campaign work was also included in this area. In addition, we talked through our recent achievements as a business, which since launching has been quite a few including the other awards we have been shortlisted in recently too.
Following on from this, we talked through the key challenges we have faced as a business in the past year which have been around external factors with the digital industry moving at such as phenomenal speed. This meant continual innovation was essential to stay ahead as a business.
Within this category we are up against other digital marketing agencies with over 60 members of staff, which again highlights the achievement getting shortlisted in the finals against such large and well established companies.
Judges
The judges for the awards this year are from senior marketing positions ranging from local universities, marketing companies, local councils and the Recommended Agency Register. The judges who decided that we have what it takes to get through to the finals are; Steve Antononwicz, Managing Director at Recommended Agency Register; Giovanna Battiston, Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Sheffield Business School at Sheffield Hallam University and Chair CIM Yorkshire; Yvonne Dixon, Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Sunderland and North East Regional Board Member at the CIM; Diane Earles, Network Manager at the CIM; Dave Edmundson-Bird, Principal Lecturer in Digital Marketing & Enterprise at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School; Duncan Frazer, Visitor Economy Marketing Manager at Marketing Liverpool; Scott Hadden, Marketing Manager, Aaron & Partners and Vice Chair CIM North West; Sarah-Jane Howitt, Director of Marketing at Weightmans; Sandy Lindsay, Group MD at Tangerine PR; Charlie Nettle, Head of Marketing at North East Chamber and Vice Chair CIM North East of England; Ian Ratcliffe, Head of Corporate Communications and Public Involvement at Stockport Council; Dawn Southgate, Head of Knowledge at the CIM; David Teale, Chief Executive at North of England Excellence; Graham Webb, Managing Director at Yorkshire Sales & Marketing Developments.
It seems like the fun never ends! After recently being shortlisted in the finals for the Lancashire Red Rose Awards 2014, the Prolific North Awards 2014 and The Bibas 2014, we have now also been shortlisted in the finals in the Chartered Institute of Marketing Northern Awards 2014 in two categories! The two categories we are through to the finals for are, Digital Marketing Campaign of the Year along with Northern Agency of the Year.
The category for Digital Marketing Campaign of the Year recognises the work from an outstanding digital campaign that has successfully met objectives and delivered excellent results. The Northern Agency of the Year category is an award to celebrate the best marketing agency in the North of England.
The Chartered Institute of Marketing Northern Awards recognise and reward the creativity and success of companies participating in digital marketing in the North of England. The Chartered Institute of Marketing is the leading international body for marketing and business development with over 40,000 members. CIM provides marketing qualifications, training for marketing professionals.
Digital Marketing Campaign of the Year
To be shortlisted in the finals for the Digital Marketing Campaign of the Year award we had to clearly demonstrate a successful campaign we have worked on. Thankfully, we have several of these which we can choose from. As part of the entry we outlined the clear objectives set for the campaign including the target audience for the campaign.
This allowed us to create a strategy that would meet those objectives. Talking through the implementation of the campaign and the creative elements that went into the campaign clearly showed how every action was linking back to the main objectives.
The campaign we ran led to a huge increase in traffic and sales which far exceeded the targets we had.
Within this category we are up against the likes of the University of Huddersfield, one of the UK’s leading PR agencies along with a large agency with over 170 members of staff and revenues in excess of £155,000,000 in 2013. Getting through to the finals against such large and well established companies within our first year of trading is something we are extremely proud of.
Northern Agency of the Year
To be shortlisted in the finals for the Northern Agency of the Year award we had to outline how amazing we are. We’ve always got a lot to talk about, so this was our opportunity to do exactly that. As part of the entry we had to talk through our objectives for the previous year, or for us this was since we launched back in August.
We then talked through what we have been doing over the past year for our clients and in the community. As you may imagine, our recent campaign work was also included in this area. In addition, we talked through our recent achievements as a business, which since launching has been quite a few including the other awards we have been shortlisted in recently too.
Following on from this, we talked through the key challenges we have faced as a business in the past year which have been around external factors with the digital industry moving at such as phenomenal speed. This meant continual innovation was essential to stay ahead as a business.
Within this category we are up against other digital marketing agencies with over 60 members of staff, which again highlights the achievement getting shortlisted in the finals against such large and well established companies.
Judges
The judges for the awards this year are from senior marketing positions ranging from local universities, marketing companies, local councils and the Recommended Agency Register. The judges who decided that we have what it takes to get through to the finals are; Steve Antononwicz, Managing Director at Recommended Agency Register; Giovanna Battiston, Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Sheffield Business School at Sheffield Hallam University and Chair CIM Yorkshire; Yvonne Dixon, Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Sunderland and North East Regional Board Member at the CIM; Diane Earles, Network Manager at the CIM; Dave Edmundson-Bird, Principal Lecturer in Digital Marketing & Enterprise at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School; Duncan Frazer, Visitor Economy Marketing Manager at Marketing Liverpool; Scott Hadden, Marketing Manager, Aaron & Partners and Vice Chair CIM North West; Sarah-Jane Howitt, Director of Marketing at Weightmans; Sandy Lindsay, Group MD at Tangerine PR; Charlie Nettle, Head of Marketing at North East Chamber and Vice Chair CIM North East of England; Ian Ratcliffe, Head of Corporate Communications and Public Involvement at Stockport Council; Dawn Southgate, Head of Knowledge at the CIM; David Teale, Chief Executive at North of England Excellence; Graham Webb, Managing Director at Yorkshire Sales & Marketing Developments.
You may think we have gone mad, as links are still a key factor that Google uses to determine authority of websites and hence increased visibility in the search engines. So hear us out and you will see why we are taking the stance that we are no longer building any links for our current and future clients.
This post is designed to be an open & honest discussion with businesses who will have likely heard about ‘Link building’ and want to focus on this activity to increase traffic to their website through Search Engine Optimisation work. A lot has changed over the recent years and below we will run through how outreach & promotion needs to run in the modern age.
What we’ve been noticing
As you can imagine with working on a lot of Search Engine Optimisation campaigns, we naturally look at a lot of different websites and what websites are mentioning other websites online. This certainly does make you realise just how many weird and wonderful websites there are on the internet.
Approaches often taken for link building included identifying relevant websites, drop the webmaster an email to see if they would be interested in linking to ‘Website X’. This, as you can imagine, has an extremely low response rate as people simply hit the ‘Delete’ button as they receive hundreds of requests like this every month.
For any website owners who do respond, they are often clued up about the real reason why they are being contacted. For a link, for Search Engine Optimisation purposes. Different industries are savvier than others, with the travel industry being extremely savvy to this. The general response would be along the lines of “That’s nice, here is what we charge to place a link on our website” – which isn’t a good approach to take. This falls into the paid links category which is against Google’s guidelines and can lead to your website being penalised and removed from the search results.
It is clear that in a lot of industries the websites that are linking out to other websites are in the main, well…horrible. They aren’t going to be driving any referral traffic and they are purely there for Search Engine Optimisation reasons only. The more websites we review the more we have been seeing this trend over the last couple of years. It has reached the point now whereby the quality websites are few and far between and simply aren’t interested in just linking to a website because they have received an email from the website owner.
In summary, the more traditional competitor link analysis and link building approaches that we do, the more challenging it is becoming to achieve good results. Too many websites simply aren’t good enough quality nor are they on-brand. This is not a good way to be spending time as the results to come from this work take far too long to come through.
On the client/business side, it is clear that there is a huge gap in knowledge about outreach & promotion and how it relates to Search Engine Optimisation. Hence the reason for this blog post to help to bridge that knowledge gap and educate businesses as to what is needed to compete in a modern age. Hopefully this blog post can be a resource for businesses to look at to understand in more detail about why traditional ‘link building’ isn’t a future proof strategy and how content marketing, outreach & promotion is going to benefit the business.
Why are links important
Firstly, let’s take a look at why links are important, how search engines analyse links and what role this plays in modern Search Engine Optimisation work. As a business looking to increase visibility in the search engines you will more than likely have heard about how important links are when it comes to increasing visibility and driving more traffic to your website.
Let’s get one thing straight, links are important to both users and search engines. They can drive referral traffic to your website from popular websites which can also lead to a direct increase in revenue as customer purchase your product and services.
Search engines analyse links and want the link to be a genuine endorsement from ‘website A’ about ‘website Bs’ products and services. Whether this is talking about said business in the form of press coverage (non-advertorial), a review of the product or service or even official membership from somewhere.
Links impact the visibility of your website in the search engines. Various studies have been completed over the years that show how there is a correlation (not causation) between how visible a website is on Google and how many high quality backlinks the website has.
This brings us onto the issue we have with ‘link building’. Correlation does not equal causation. Businesses and website owners should not be chasing links for Search Engine Optimisation purposes. Stop doing this, immediately! Start building relationships with your customers, peers and industry websites so that you earn links.
Link building
The phrase ‘link building’ has spread throughout the Search Engine Optimisation industry and picked up by businesses across the world over recent years. This phrase is misleading businesses into thinking there is a magic box of tricks that allows someone (generally a digital agency or a junior level person within a company) to go out onto the internet and tell other website owners that they must link to ‘website A’ because it is amazing. Hence why you see so many companies offering to ‘build links’ for your business;
Surely the services at $27.99 are going to be a good investment aren’t they, right? If it seems too good to be true….then it probably is. Businesses paying for ‘link building’ activities that is not integrated with the rest of their businesses are leading to only one thing…a Google penalty for unnatural links. Businesses in highly competitive industries are notorious within digital circles for going down this route and several multi-national well-known brands have received penalties from Google for their activities. This should be a lesson to businesses.
Simply ‘building links’ isn’t a good approach to be taking. Websites are owned by real people running real businesses, and they too have the age old question running through their mind WIIFM – What’s in it for me. No-one, no matter how good they claim to be cannot simply go out and ‘build links’ for any business. Sure, it is possible to place links on low quality websites around the web that no-one is ever viewing, but this approach is going to get you penalised by Google, leading to reduced traffic from the search engines. As mentioned earlier, Google continues to crack down on these activities and if your business is relying on Google for a significant part of your revenue, then you have to ask yourself, is this a risk you are willing to take if you get caught out?
As a business and website owner, to generate more high quality links to your website, then you need to be doing something worthy of other websites talking about you. It really is as simple as that. Stop trying to manipulate things. We believe so strongly that going out and trying to ‘build links’ for clients is not the best approach to take, that we have taken the stance that we simply aren’t going to help with this. Instead, we are helping businesses to take digital seriously and build a strong brand online through the range of digital marketing services.
The evidence and industry changes
Let’s take a look at the evidence about how the industry has been moving over the last few years. Not from hearsay, gossip and proposed ‘experts’, but straight from the horse’s mouth.
Will backlinks lose their importance in ranking?
Answer: Yes, backlinks will become less important in the future. Google currently uses links to assess the basic reputation of websites
What could the webspam team have done better?
Answer: We probably waited too long to penalise websites who use paid links to manipulate search algorithms
Should I build links using article directories?
Answer: No. No, you should not be doing this
What should I be aware of if I’m considering guest blogging?
Answer: Don’t use guest blogging for SEO purposes.
Does Google take action on spammy guest blogging activities?
Answer: Google is willing to take action if they see spammy guest blogging activities for link acquisition
How does Google consider site-wide backlinks?
Answer: There are some genuine cases for this, although often these are spammy
Do you recommend article marketing as an SEO strategy?
Answer: Not a good approach to be taking
What are some effective techniques for building links?
Answer: You do want to build great content, and often great content is what earns links
Other
Looking at Matt Cutts’ (Head of Web Spam at Google) personal blog titled, the decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO highlights this point even further. Looking around the web, there are always blog posts titled “10 ways to build links” etc. and quite frankly, these are often rather generic and not very useful. Don’t get me wrong here, there can be some interesting tips when looking at the points made, when adapting this to your businesses in the sense of earning links.
Why we have taken this stance
The reason we have put this blog post together and taken this stance is because we speak with a lot of businesses about Search Engine Optimisation work, and most businesses are still living in the past, 5 years ago, when this type of practice was acceptable. Digital moves fast and as a businesses, to stay ahead you also need to move fast. This includes keeping up with the large shifts in how to market your business online for sustainable growth.
Results can be achieved by genuinely making your products and services better along with connecting with your audience and customers. This post is designed to be a wake-up call for businesses to highlight what is needed in the modern era to compete online and to increase traffic from search engines.
How we move forward
To reiterate, we aren’t saying we aren’t going to be increasing mentions of client brands and websites online. This is not the case. This is still extremely important for brands to be focusing on, although it is the method of working towards this goal that is changing.
A change of mind set is needed;
From: Building links for Search Engine Optimisation purposes
To: Earning links and natural mentions because you are doing awesome things as a business that people want to talk about
Integrated Online Marketing
If your business isn’t integrating digital into every aspect of work, then you are missing an opportunity to build your brand further online. Find the expertise, knowledge and stories within your business and look to showcase this digitally. Whether this is through blog posts, digital resources or video content for your customers and audience.
Building a strong brand online will earn your business links which will help to increase the authority of your website and hence traffic levels. All our focus for clients is on building a strong brand online and linking digital marketing activities together to earn links. No longer can we look at a departmentalised or segmented approach to digital marketing with the aim of increasing popularity on the web.
An integrated approach is the way businesses need to be looking at their digital marketing activities to compete online in competitive markets. To give an indication of the type of content your business could be producing to earn links;
Product / service content: You would be surprised how many websites simply don’t have enough detail about this. Why are your products/services so amazing? Why are they better than competitors? What awards have you won for your work? What are the features and benefits for your customers? How can the product / service fulfil your customers’ needs?
Blog content: Talk to your customers about what is happening throughout the business. New member of staff joined? Then talk about what they are there to do. What events have you recently attended? What services have you just launched? How are you making a difference in your local community? How can your customers use your product / service in innovative ways? Don’t just think about the product / service, but think about how customers will use it.
Resources: What resources and information will help your customers? Are there any specific files, drawings, guides, calculators, etc. that your customers will find useful? Start to genuinely help customers online by providing resources to help them with what they need. Anyone can sell ‘product x’ – all of the above is what makes your business different to others and hence increase authority on the web.
Summary
The one thing to take away from this blog post is that we are helping businesses to develop their brand digitally. Quite simply, the industry has moved on very fast and this is what is needed for businesses to compete online today. Some may think this is a strong stance to take, yet we believe strongly that this is the right approach and will ultimately lead to better results.
What you may also be interested in heading about is some of the content focused work our staff have completed during their careers that has achieved phenomenal results, without ‘building’ one single link;
Building industry: Non-brand organic traffic growth of +97% within 6 months
Building industry: Brand new business, driving +14,000 visits to the website within 12 months
Travel industry: Non-brand organic traffic growth of +25% within 3 months
All of the above has been achieved through by expanding relevant and useful content on the website. Not through ‘building links’, but by making the website better for customers by providing additional information that is useful for them. We know this works and we would like to reiterate to businesses that content, along with relevant promotion, needs to be the key focus for building your brand online.
You may think we have gone mad, as links are still a key factor that Google uses to determine authority of websites and hence increased visibility in the search engines. So hear us out and you will see why we are taking the stance that we are no longer building any links for our current and future clients.
This post is designed to be an open & honest discussion with businesses who will have likely heard about ‘Link building’ and want to focus on this activity to increase traffic to their website through Search Engine Optimisation work. A lot has changed over the recent years and below we will run through how outreach & promotion needs to run in the modern age.
What we’ve been noticing
As you can imagine with working on a lot of Search Engine Optimisation campaigns, we naturally look at a lot of different websites and what websites are mentioning other websites online. This certainly does make you realise just how many weird and wonderful websites there are on the internet.
Approaches often taken for link building included identifying relevant websites, drop the webmaster an email to see if they would be interested in linking to ‘Website X’. This, as you can imagine, has an extremely low response rate as people simply hit the ‘Delete’ button as they receive hundreds of requests like this every month.
For any website owners who do respond, they are often clued up about the real reason why they are being contacted. For a link, for Search Engine Optimisation purposes. Different industries are savvier than others, with the travel industry being extremely savvy to this. The general response would be along the lines of “That’s nice, here is what we charge to place a link on our website” – which isn’t a good approach to take. This falls into the paid links category which is against Google’s guidelines and can lead to your website being penalised and removed from the search results.
It is clear that in a lot of industries the websites that are linking out to other websites are in the main, well…horrible. They aren’t going to be driving any referral traffic and they are purely there for Search Engine Optimisation reasons only. The more websites we review the more we have been seeing this trend over the last couple of years. It has reached the point now whereby the quality websites are few and far between and simply aren’t interested in just linking to a website because they have received an email from the website owner.
In summary, the more traditional competitor link analysis and link building approaches that we do, the more challenging it is becoming to achieve good results. Too many websites simply aren’t good enough quality nor are they on-brand. This is not a good way to be spending time as the results to come from this work take far too long to come through.
On the client/business side, it is clear that there is a huge gap in knowledge about outreach & promotion and how it relates to Search Engine Optimisation. Hence the reason for this blog post to help to bridge that knowledge gap and educate businesses as to what is needed to compete in a modern age. Hopefully this blog post can be a resource for businesses to look at to understand in more detail about why traditional ‘link building’ isn’t a future proof strategy and how content marketing, outreach & promotion is going to benefit the business.
Why are links important
Firstly, let’s take a look at why links are important, how search engines analyse links and what role this plays in modern Search Engine Optimisation work. As a business looking to increase visibility in the search engines you will more than likely have heard about how important links are when it comes to increasing visibility and driving more traffic to your website.
Let’s get one thing straight, links are important to both users and search engines. They can drive referral traffic to your website from popular websites which can also lead to a direct increase in revenue as customer purchase your product and services.
Search engines analyse links and want the link to be a genuine endorsement from ‘website A’ about ‘website Bs’ products and services. Whether this is talking about said business in the form of press coverage (non-advertorial), a review of the product or service or even official membership from somewhere.
Links impact the visibility of your website in the search engines. Various studies have been completed over the years that show how there is a correlation (not causation) between how visible a website is on Google and how many high quality backlinks the website has.
This brings us onto the issue we have with ‘link building’. Correlation does not equal causation. Businesses and website owners should not be chasing links for Search Engine Optimisation purposes. Stop doing this, immediately! Start building relationships with your customers, peers and industry websites so that you earn links.
Link building
The phrase ‘link building’ has spread throughout the Search Engine Optimisation industry and picked up by businesses across the world over recent years. This phrase is misleading businesses into thinking there is a magic box of tricks that allows someone (generally a digital agency or a junior level person within a company) to go out onto the internet and tell other website owners that they must link to ‘website A’ because it is amazing. Hence why you see so many companies offering to ‘build links’ for your business;
Surely the services at $27.99 are going to be a good investment aren’t they, right? If it seems too good to be true….then it probably is. Businesses paying for ‘link building’ activities that is not integrated with the rest of their businesses are leading to only one thing…a Google penalty for unnatural links. Businesses in highly competitive industries are notorious within digital circles for going down this route and several multi-national well-known brands have received penalties from Google for their activities. This should be a lesson to businesses.
Simply ‘building links’ isn’t a good approach to be taking. Websites are owned by real people running real businesses, and they too have the age old question running through their mind WIIFM – What’s in it for me. No-one, no matter how good they claim to be cannot simply go out and ‘build links’ for any business. Sure, it is possible to place links on low quality websites around the web that no-one is ever viewing, but this approach is going to get you penalised by Google, leading to reduced traffic from the search engines. As mentioned earlier, Google continues to crack down on these activities and if your business is relying on Google for a significant part of your revenue, then you have to ask yourself, is this a risk you are willing to take if you get caught out?
As a business and website owner, to generate more high quality links to your website, then you need to be doing something worthy of other websites talking about you. It really is as simple as that. Stop trying to manipulate things. We believe so strongly that going out and trying to ‘build links’ for clients is not the best approach to take, that we have taken the stance that we simply aren’t going to help with this. Instead, we are helping businesses to take digital seriously and build a strong brand online through the range of digital marketing services.
The evidence and industry changes
Let’s take a look at the evidence about how the industry has been moving over the last few years. Not from hearsay, gossip and proposed ‘experts’, but straight from the horse’s mouth.
Will backlinks lose their importance in ranking?
Answer: Yes, backlinks will become less important in the future. Google currently uses links to assess the basic reputation of websites
What could the webspam team have done better?
Answer: We probably waited too long to penalise websites who use paid links to manipulate search algorithms
Should I build links using article directories?
Answer: No. No, you should not be doing this
What should I be aware of if I’m considering guest blogging?
Answer: Don’t use guest blogging for SEO purposes.
Does Google take action on spammy guest blogging activities?
Answer: Google is willing to take action if they see spammy guest blogging activities for link acquisition
How does Google consider site-wide backlinks?
Answer: There are some genuine cases for this, although often these are spammy
Do you recommend article marketing as an SEO strategy?
Answer: Not a good approach to be taking
What are some effective techniques for building links?
Answer: You do want to build great content, and often great content is what earns links
Other
Looking at Matt Cutts’ (Head of Web Spam at Google) personal blog titled, the decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO highlights this point even further. Looking around the web, there are always blog posts titled “10 ways to build links” etc. and quite frankly, these are often rather generic and not very useful. Don’t get me wrong here, there can be some interesting tips when looking at the points made, when adapting this to your businesses in the sense of earning links.
Why we have taken this stance
The reason we have put this blog post together and taken this stance is because we speak with a lot of businesses about Search Engine Optimisation work, and most businesses are still living in the past, 5 years ago, when this type of practice was acceptable. Digital moves fast and as a businesses, to stay ahead you also need to move fast. This includes keeping up with the large shifts in how to market your business online for sustainable growth.
Results can be achieved by genuinely making your products and services better along with connecting with your audience and customers. This post is designed to be a wake-up call for businesses to highlight what is needed in the modern era to compete online and to increase traffic from search engines.
How we move forward
To reiterate, we aren’t saying we aren’t going to be increasing mentions of client brands and websites online. This is not the case. This is still extremely important for brands to be focusing on, although it is the method of working towards this goal that is changing.
A change of mind set is needed;
From: Building links for Search Engine Optimisation purposes
To: Earning links and natural mentions because you are doing awesome things as a business that people want to talk about
Integrated Online Marketing
If your business isn’t integrating digital into every aspect of work, then you are missing an opportunity to build your brand further online. Find the expertise, knowledge and stories within your business and look to showcase this digitally. Whether this is through blog posts, digital resources or video content for your customers and audience.
Building a strong brand online will earn your business links which will help to increase the authority of your website and hence traffic levels. All our focus for clients is on building a strong brand online and linking digital marketing activities together to earn links. No longer can we look at a departmentalised or segmented approach to digital marketing with the aim of increasing popularity on the web.
An integrated approach is the way businesses need to be looking at their digital marketing activities to compete online in competitive markets. To give an indication of the type of content your business could be producing to earn links;
Product / service content: You would be surprised how many websites simply don’t have enough detail about this. Why are your products/services so amazing? Why are they better than competitors? What awards have you won for your work? What are the features and benefits for your customers? How can the product / service fulfil your customers’ needs?
Blog content: Talk to your customers about what is happening throughout the business. New member of staff joined? Then talk about what they are there to do. What events have you recently attended? What services have you just launched? How are you making a difference in your local community? How can your customers use your product / service in innovative ways? Don’t just think about the product / service, but think about how customers will use it.
Resources: What resources and information will help your customers? Are there any specific files, drawings, guides, calculators, etc. that your customers will find useful? Start to genuinely help customers online by providing resources to help them with what they need. Anyone can sell ‘product x’ – all of the above is what makes your business different to others and hence increase authority on the web.
Summary
The one thing to take away from this blog post is that we are helping businesses to develop their brand digitally. Quite simply, the industry has moved on very fast and this is what is needed for businesses to compete online today. Some may think this is a strong stance to take, yet we believe strongly that this is the right approach and will ultimately lead to better results.
What you may also be interested in heading about is some of the content focused work our staff have completed during their careers that has achieved phenomenal results, without ‘building’ one single link;
Building industry: Non-brand organic traffic growth of +97% within 6 months
Building industry: Brand new business, driving +14,000 visits to the website within 12 months
Travel industry: Non-brand organic traffic growth of +25% within 3 months
All of the above has been achieved through by expanding relevant and useful content on the website. Not through ‘building links’, but by making the website better for customers by providing additional information that is useful for them. We know this works and we would like to reiterate to businesses that content, along with relevant promotion, needs to be the key focus for building your brand online.
We’ve been rather busy over these last few months working away in the background getting things in place so we can offer our clients a full range of digital services. As always, our focus is on increasing traffic, sales & enquiries through our clients’ websites with digital marketing activities.
Why we have expanded our services
Before we look at the new services we have on offer, I’d like to explain the rationale behind this change. Since launching only 9 months ago we have spoken with a large number of companies within the East Lancashire area, from start-ups to multi-million pound well established businesses. One thing above all that we keep hearing in the discussions we’re having with businesses is around need for a wide range of high quality digital marketing skills.
Businesses we have spoken to have been struggling to find the right skills and experience to fulfil roles and requirements in a wide range of digital marketing areas. Requests from clients vary hugely and requirements often cover multiple disciplines. This is the reason we have expanded our services to support our current and new clients with a full range of digital services to suit their needs.
New Services
We see digital marketing breaking down into five key areas which are design, build, traffic generation, tracking and optimisation. We are now able to offer our current and future clients a full range of digital marketing services to suit their specific needs. Find out more about each of our key service groups below.
Design
We believe that design feeds into all digital marketing activities from website development, search engine optimisation and email marketing. Design should be an integral part of all digital marketing activities to generate maximum engagement and response from campaigns.
We understand the importance of building scalable and stable platforms for your customers. That’s why we work with you to build websites and mobile applications that your customers love. With so many options available for developing websites and mobile applications, we recommend the best solution to suit your needs.
Whether this is a simple WordPress website or a large Magento ecommerce platform to sell your products. Save yourself time and money by working with enterprise level content management systems (CMSs) so you can make the changes to your website with ease by simply logging into the administration area and making the change.
Traffic generation is essential for all businesses operating in the digital world. An increase in traffic to your website, mobile applications and social channels leads to an increase in sales and revenue. With so many options for generating traffic and sales through your website, we will create a clear strategy for your business to grow.
Tracking digital marketing campaigns is essential for brands serious about growing their business online. Tracking is at the heart of everything we do to ensure that all campaigns are performing well along with seeing where improvements can be made. We use advanced tracking solutions to provide detailed insight into your business to allow you to focus your marketing budget on areas that are going to provide a return.
Continually improve your website and the user experience for your customers to increase sales and revenue. Find out what your customers really think of your website and identify areas for improvement. Using a mixture of a data driven quantitative methods along with user driven qualitative methods allows you to gain a deeper understanding of your customers.
We also offer training across the range of digital marketing services which are suitable either as a one-2-one intensive training session or as a group based session for your internal marketing teams.
Summary
If your business is looking to increase traffic, sales & enquiries online then get in touch to find out how we can help. To make sure you are working with the right digital agency, we offer a free proposal tailored to your specific needs so you can try us out before you commit to working with us.
We’ve been rather busy over these last few months working away in the background getting things in place so we can offer our clients a full range of digital services. As always, our focus is on increasing traffic, sales & enquiries through our clients’ websites with digital marketing activities.
Why we have expanded our services
Before we look at the new services we have on offer, I’d like to explain the rationale behind this change. Since launching only 9 months ago we have spoken with a large number of companies within the East Lancashire area, from start-ups to multi-million pound well established businesses. One thing above all that we keep hearing in the discussions we’re having with businesses is around need for a wide range of high quality digital marketing skills.
Businesses we have spoken to have been struggling to find the right skills and experience to fulfil roles and requirements in a wide range of digital marketing areas. Requests from clients vary hugely and requirements often cover multiple disciplines. This is the reason we have expanded our services to support our current and new clients with a full range of digital services to suit their needs.
New Services
We see digital marketing breaking down into five key areas which are design, build, traffic generation, tracking and optimisation. We are now able to offer our current and future clients a full range of digital marketing services to suit their specific needs. Find out more about each of our key service groups below.
Design
We believe that design feeds into all digital marketing activities from website development, search engine optimisation and email marketing. Design should be an integral part of all digital marketing activities to generate maximum engagement and response from campaigns.
We understand the importance of building scalable and stable platforms for your customers. That’s why we work with you to build websites and mobile applications that your customers love. With so many options available for developing websites and mobile applications, we recommend the best solution to suit your needs.
Whether this is a simple WordPress website or a large Magento ecommerce platform to sell your products. Save yourself time and money by working with enterprise level content management systems (CMSs) so you can make the changes to your website with ease by simply logging into the administration area and making the change.
Traffic generation is essential for all businesses operating in the digital world. An increase in traffic to your website, mobile applications and social channels leads to an increase in sales and revenue. With so many options for generating traffic and sales through your website, we will create a clear strategy for your business to grow.
Tracking digital marketing campaigns is essential for brands serious about growing their business online. Tracking is at the heart of everything we do to ensure that all campaigns are performing well along with seeing where improvements can be made. We use advanced tracking solutions to provide detailed insight into your business to allow you to focus your marketing budget on areas that are going to provide a return.
Continually improve your website and the user experience for your customers to increase sales and revenue. Find out what your customers really think of your website and identify areas for improvement. Using a mixture of a data driven quantitative methods along with user driven qualitative methods allows you to gain a deeper understanding of your customers.
We also offer training across the range of digital marketing services which are suitable either as a one-2-one intensive training session or as a group based session for your internal marketing teams.
Summary
If your business is looking to increase traffic, sales & enquiries online then get in touch to find out how we can help. To make sure you are working with the right digital agency, we offer a free proposal tailored to your specific needs so you can try us out before you commit to working with us.
Wow, wow and wow!! That’s right, we are in the finals for 4 separate categories for the Lancashire wide business awards, The Bibas 2014! This is such an amazing achievement within the short space of 9 months since officially launching.
The Be Inspired Business Awards is the largest business awards in Lancashire designed to showcase leading companies in Lancashire. This year there were over 1232 applications from 576 companies. Lancaster University Management School prepared the judges for the awards who undertook rigorous training. The research project from Lancaster University examined the world’s leading business awards to gain insight into how to judge the best companies. Based on this, they established a set of criteria to evaluate the large amount of applications to create a shortlist of excellent companies.
Dr Ellie Hamilton from Lancaster University Management School said;
“I promise you, if your business makes it to the interview stage, you have done very well indeed.”
The awards are being backed by leading companies including;
Here are the four award categories that we have been shortlisted for.
Creative Business of the Year
Companies shortlisted for the finals of the Creative Business of the Year award category had to show how their creative expertise delivered innovative products and services to their clients. We showcased how we balance both creative and commercial development for projects with clients and the strategies we use to ensure both work in harmony.
We are a creative company and are always looking for new opportunities for our clients. Within the application for this category we had to explain how we nurture creativity within the business and how we achieve excellence as a company by providing solutions to our clients to suit their individual and unique needs. You may have seen earlier in the year, we became an official HootSuite Solutions Partner.
E-Business of the Year
We have been shortlisted in the finals for the E-Commerce Business of the Year. This category was open to businesses that have significantly grown their business or that of a client. This may be achieved through e-commerce, communications and mobile technologies.
As part of the application, we demonstrated how we have used the internet and technology in an innovative way to enhance commercial performance for our clients, and identified opportunities for growth.
Given the pace of change, it is a constant challenge to respond with meaningful actions and strategies for our clients. There have been several major changes within the digital industry that we have had to adapt to stay ahead since launching only 9 months ago.
We are always looking ahead at what the next big thing is going to be and we strongly believe that digital is on the verge of changing everyone’s lives in ways we can’t even imagine. With the rise of superfast broadband throughout the country along with physical computing and wearable devices gaining ground, this really is going to be an interesting time ahead.
New Business of the Year
Another award category we have been shortlisted for is the New Business of the Year award. This award was open to businesses that have been operating for less than 3 years.
We had to explain how we identified key opportunities within the digital and creative sector and innovations we have brought to the market. Since launching in 2013, we have grasped huge opportunities and continue to grow the business further.
Stay tuned for how this start-up company grows over the next few years!
Most Inspiring Business of the Year
Finally, we have also been nominated for the Most Inspiring Business of the Year award. This category wasn’t actually open for applications like the other awards.
Instead, the judges looked at the 1232 applications from all 576 companies and decided that we were a company worthy of the finals and one to watch for the future!
Companies shortlisted for the finals of the Creative Business of the Year award category had to show how their creative expertise delivered innovative products and services to their clients. We showcased how we balance both creative and commercial development for projects with clients and the strategies we use to ensure both work in harmony.