Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing

Because Every Little Helps!

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Dectek - Best Ecommerce Site in Wales

I heard some great news yesterday - one of my clients has just won an eCommerce Award at Wales' most important Business Awards. Dectek is based just outside Cardiff, capital of Wales, and makes resin badges for businesses across the UK.

The work that I have done with them has focused on tuning their Site Structure, Search Engine Optimization and Pay-per-Click campaigns. As recognised by their Marketing Director, Dave Beese, the company now generates more than 90% of new business through their website. Over the past year Dectek Spain has opened, they will shortly be adding new premises and taken on more staff to cope with demand. I am currently working with the business to look at ways that SEO and Pay-per-click can be used try to tap into the North European market.

Costa Coffee and Managing Customer Relations

Going back 4 months I wrote an article on Customer Relations at Costa Coffee. I was prompted to write the article after finding that the Contact Us page, of the company's website, displayed a "Coming Shortly" sign - 5 months later it still does!

You may be asking yourselves why I was prompted to contact the people at Costa Coffee. Well, here's how it all started:

Around Christmas time I took my 2 year-old daughter to Costa's in Cardiff - she was in a pram, I was dying for a coffee. I told the 'barista' that I had a pram and asked if someone could bring the coffee over to me. He looked at me as if I had sworn at him and said that he couldn't. After pointing out that my daughter was in a pram and it would be a little dangerous to push the pram and carry a boiling hot cup of coffee, he asked one the other staff to bring the coffee over to me. She did - slamming it down on the table in the process!

Anyway, what's interesting is that over that 5-month period Marketing Tom has logged 224 visitors who used the search term "Costa Coffee" on the search engines to arrive at my article. Worryingly, from a Costa perspective, many hundreds of people have been unable to get in touch with the company to complement, complain or even to offer them advice about their company or business through this page.

With a vast array of Web 2.0 products available, and bottomless marketing budgets, I find it amazing that so many companies (Costa Coffee is just one) are not monitoring the blogosphere and the wider web to find out what their target audience has to say about them. I suppose that we must also assume that they're not participating in these conversations either.

How Small Tweaks To Your Weblog Can Make Big Differences To Visitor Numbers

For about a year now, I have been toying with the idea of improving the page titles on this site and my other site - Mad About Madrid. Well, last month I finally took the plunge and changed page titles across both sites. I work with TypePad Advanced templates and, not being a coder myself, was daunted by the prospect of having to do it myself. I had identified a company that could do it - for a price - but decided to dig a little deeper to find a free solution.

I spend a great deal of time advising clients on how to create well tuned page titles and now thanks to Wal Mart Files I have now managed to change the page titles on individual blog articles, category pages and archives.  The process outlined by these guys was idiot-proof and took little time to implement. In the past a blog post would have had a page title like this:

Marketing Tom - Google Adwords Seminars USA

the new page title reads like this:

Google Adwords Seminars USA (click to see for yourself)

This may seem like a small change but just try a Google search for the terms "Google Adwords Seminars of "Google Seminars" and see where this page appears. Google did take a little while to spider most pages on the sites but the effect is still clear - increased traffic. Just to give you an idea of how effective this has been, here are the stats on both Google Analytics and StatCounter for the last 5 month - notice the increase from April.

Google Adwords Seminars USA

If you're a beginner or intermediate user of Google AdWords, and you're based in the USA, there are a number of opportunities for you to get on one of the Google AdWords seminars. The seminars are reasonably priced ($249) and over the course of a day it looks like the trainers cover quite a bit of material. It's a pity that they don't run these seminars in other parts of the globe (like the UK!) as I know quite a few people who would benefit immensely from them.