Category: News

In today’s marketplace, the internet has become the most important aspect of the whole business process. In fact, the internet is the new market place. Online presence is the most important representation of your company, but, having a presence is not enough; the only way to make that presence felt is through marketing. With that in mind, here’s our top 10 tips for marketing your company online.

Create Listings or Reviews on Online Review Sites

Use online review sites because, nowadays, everybody gets their information from the internet and review sites can make or break a business, just look at Trip Advisor and the fear it can strike to hotel owners. The best (and cheapest or free) online review sites or listings pages are Google My Business, Yelp, and Yahoo Local, and the best way to attract good reviews is to build good relationships with influential bloggers.

Use Social Media

We are living in the social media age, people connect via Facebook and Twitter or Instagram or Pinterest; if you want to market your company, having a presence in these social media sites is massively important. Creating social media profiles is a great way to introduce your company to a much bigger audience than would otherwise be possible, and an even better way of staying in their consciousness. Obviously you can offer discounts, free trials and anything else you can think of.

Hold FREE Webinars

Webinars is a new and more interesting medium to advertise or market your company. There are lots of expensive webinar software but you could go for something like Webinarignititon, which is relatively cheap. Whatever you decide, webinars are a great way to market your business.

Hire Bloggers to Spread the Word

Bloggers are today’s high rank journalists, and a successful blogger might have millions of followers, and can thus be very influential. You can try to get them to write nice things about your business by making them aware of who you are, or you can simply hire them. This could be worth its weight in gold.

Create a Newsletter

An email newsletter has the potential to reach an immense amount of people and allows you to be in constant touch with any past or potentially clients. You can fill it with news about your business, general news about the industry, or even just interesting titbits about everything and anything just to keep your brand in their minds. Send it out to your database and you can even buy leads or cold call to boost your list.

Host Live Conferences

This is not as difficult as it might seem. If you look around you can find conference halls which you can hire pretty cheap, and the setting up costs are negligible. If you are an estate agent you can invite other agents, existing landlords, potential buyers, entice them all with some finger food and drinks (you can get a local business to do it for free as promotion), and then somebody from your company can make a speech about the industry as a whole, find local leaders to explain all about their projects, and local businesses can maybe promote themselves. Then, and this is the crucial part, you film it and post it on your site, which will make your company seem bigger than it really is. Also, you can host live conferences online, via skype.

Join Other Industry Forums and Communities

Establish a presence online by joining other forums and posting comments, opinions, questions, all the time subconsciously directing people back to your own website.

Create Competitions and Exciting Offers

The clue is in the title; create competitions which will get people involved, like a photography competition where you get people to send pictures of sunset views from their holidays, or offers which will entice people onto your site, like offering a client “NO FEES FOR 2 MONTHS” if they can refer two new potential clients to you.

Partner up with Other Businesses

Use local businesses to advertise you by entering in strategic partnerships; you can go to flooring companies, building firms, cleaning services, and a whole host of other companies in order to establish mutually-beneficial relationships. And you can exchange banners with other online websites in similar industries.

Consider Sponsoring Events

Simple; go to local community businesses or projects and offer to sponsor them in exchange for simple banner space, mentions on the radio or whatever. This is never as expensive as you might think and it encourages good word-of-mouth advertising, and establishes a local presence for your business.

Blast Digital will be launching our first campaign alongside Alice House Hospice(Hartlepool Hospice). Alice House is a hospice that is very close to our hearts, and we are hoping to boost the presence of the hospice as well as raising funds for the charity. We are reaching out to local companies in the Hartlepool area to run their own campaign to each raise a minimum of £200 per company. The company that raises the most amount of money for Alice House Hospice between the 5th December 2016 and the 13th January 2017 will win a website to the value of £2000, designed & created by us, Blast Digital (see details below). Our target companies would be in the Hartlepool, Teesside & Durham area who are looking to raise their online presence or who currently have little or no budget for a website, or have just never gotten around to it due to time constraints. The companies that agree to take part in the campaign will receive the following: Promotional Poster Promotional Leaflets Small Point of sale for their establishment Charity collection boxes Support from Blast Digital for promotional Ideas We ask that all companies taking part in the campaign actively promote Alice House Hospice. Each week we will liaise with the companies to check on progress and we may even create an online league table to encourage a little bit fun and healthy competition between the competitors. The prize: Website Design Website Development Responsive HTML Development for mobile browsers CMS system to allow the winner to manage their website content 15 Page website 12 months website and email hosting Domain Name Online enquiry system Fully branded website – taking companies existing branding Value = £2000 The Terms: E-commerce not included Search Engine Optimisation will not be included Payments must reach Alice House Hospice on the 13th January 2017 Each company to raise a minimum of £200 Come and have a Blast while raising awareness for Alice House Hospice.

There are certain words which are overused in today’s business-savvy environment, but ‘branding’ is not one of them. The importance of having a professional brand cannot be overstated. The branding of your business is everything, it represents your philosophy, your reputation and your customer guarantee; in short, it’s what you should use, as a business, to tell your audience what you are all about.

First and foremost, the importance of having a professional brand lies with the fact that your business branding is what creates recognition among your customers, and this usually comes down to, quite simply, the company logo. A professional looking logo, one which takes into account the message it’s supposed to portray, in other words ‘advertise’ the company, as well as being simple enough for people to understand straightaway, can have a huge impact on your business, and will create an instant presence among other similar businesses.

Another reason why you should never underestimate the importance of having a professional brand is that branding creates trust among your customers, since people are more likely to trust a business which looks polished and professional as opposed to one which appears to be amateurish. This will also help in the valuation of a company since perception has as much to do with what a company is valued at as the actual assets of that company, especially on the stock market. A professional brand will help create the perception that the company is strong and healthy, and run by people with experience and understanding of the industry they’re working in.

The importance of having a professional brand is also due to the fact that it can help to establish a certain pride in your employees as they recognize that they are working for a professional firm, one which stands above the rest, and this can help to inspire them to do their best work.

A professional brand also helps to drive advertising, since it establishes who is your target audience and the how to go about reaching them. This then helps to generate new customers and builds your business up, allowing you to move forward and not be caught standing still.

The importance of having a professional brand should not be underestimated; act now and create your professional brand with us, it’s the first step on the road to success.

There are many reasons to improve your website, especially if your website is a business and depends on traffic; after all, everybody knows that, nowadays, websites are good for business, and indeed some businesses are purely driven through websites.

First of all, even if your website is not a business, it is still a platform on which you want to display your passion or your hobby, it is still the megaphone you are using in order to proclaim your message, it is still the medium which you are using to reach people and share your thoughts or beliefs; if your website is hard to navigate, if it looks messy, cluttered, or just plain ugly, people will not stay there for long and the message will be slightly lost so the website’s purpose will be redundant. So, spend time and improve your website.

If you want to share your expertize, for whatever reason, then you want to share it with as many people as possible, you want to have as great a reach as you can possibly get, which is another very good reasons to improve your website, whether you have a business or not.

And if you do have a business, and even if your website is up to an acceptable standard, there are even more reasons to improve your website.

If your website is live and attended to 24/7, then it means your business is available at all times and you can interact with your customers regularly. This means that you develop trust and you can cultivate a relationship with them, and it is much easier to sell to a customer who feels appreciated and connected to you, rather than someone who is disengaged and may feel slightly disenfranchised.

Communication is paramount in any business, and this alone is good enough reason to improve your website. You need to ensure that the speed it runs on is adequate, and that it works the same whether it is on a desktop computer, a laptop, or a tablet or IPhone. You need to ensure that your customers can find the information they need easily and quickly, and they also need to feel that going to your website is actually worthwhile and that there is something to be gained from it. The better your website is, the better it is for your business.

Also, you need your website to be as professional looking as possible in order to look respectable, gain credibility and encourage trust among your customers. Not many people will want to buy anything from a business which has a website which looks like it was hastily put together. If the information or products you are providing are displayed in a clear, clean, organized manner, then you can create a good impression for your customers.

A good website (coupled with a good marketing plan) will also increase your customer reach, because there is no other medium which can improve your geographic reach as much as the internet. Then, once you have an audience at your fingertips, you can save a lot of money on advertising and marketing since you already have their attention.

These are some of the best reasons to improve your website; it’s all down to the simple formula… the better your website, the more successful your business will be.

Lets chat!

Whether you’re part of a global team or venturing solo, the benefits of having a website for your business are just the same: a 24-hours-a-day worldwide shop window facilitating the relationship between you and your potential customers.

Imagine someone out and about looking on their smartphone for something in their local area that your company can provide. You would like that person to find your company and therefore your website will be an oasis of useful information, such as opening times, what you offer, where you are and – perhaps most importantly – the ways in which people can easily get in touch with you. Email forms, social media feeds, interactive location maps and live chat are features that are being adopted more and more by companies looking to get the most from their website.

Websites needn’t be expensive and contain all the fancy “bells and whistles”. They range in scale so that anyone is able to pay for and publish a starter website, or employ a third party to take care of it for them. You will find that an easy-to-use, clean, modern and fast website will keep customers engaged and interacting with you, enabling you to get a more accurate picture of what your customers are thinking and ultimately increasing your monthly or annual turnover. Thanks to analytical software, you will also be able to find out which parts of your website your visitors are landing on, how long they are staying on there and how they move from page to page.

When your company has a website it demonstrates that you are serious, you care about your customers, and are here to stay.

To discuss your website needs with us simply get in touch > or view our website portfolio > to see what we are all about!

We’d LOVE to chat with you 🙂

What is a responsive website?

Responsive web design is a technique in the web development industry where a website or web page will be displayed in direct response to the size of the device viewing it. Typical devices include desktop computers, tablets, smartphones and televisions.

Responsive web pages also “fluidly” adjust within its viewing area (known as the viewport) when the width or height is reduced, increased or rotated; columns of text change to sit side-by-side or on top of each other, depending on how it is programmed. Large images will be restrained appropriately. This is all done to keep the layout easy to read and navigate, whether the viewport is three or thirty-three inches wide.

The concept of responsive web design has been recognised for over ten years and it has been increasingly adopted over the last five years.

Why make your website responsive?

It is claimed over 60% of internet access is occurring on mobile devices. With mobile phone ownership overwhelmingly high and tablet usage continuing to increase, it is proving convenient to do the weekly shop, bank, socialise with friends and family around the world and look up information online on demand anywhere.

Last year the search engine Google was found to be ranking responsive websites higher than those that were not. It was reported that 40% of people will choose another search result if the first site they visit is not mobile-friendly.

Each year more and more small businesses say they have actively made their websites mobile-friendly.

I want my website to be responsive!

We can help >

We have arrived!!

it’s only fitting that we make our first news article all about us… Well here we are, we have worked vigorously to bring together creative minds, technical whizz kids and management superstars to forge what is quite simply a rockstar team right on your doorstep in Hartlepool.

If you haven’t guessed already, we are creative people who do creative things… From website design and graphic design right through to online and offline marketing to ensure that you not only look the part but people actually get to know about you.

Our passion

We are passionate about helping companies achieve their goals, your success is our success, however cheesy that might sound its true… If you succeed off the back of what we do for you then it works out for everyone, and hey, you might use us again further down the line.

We’d love to meet you so please do contact us if you think we can help you out with anything.