Archive for Search Marketing
February 14, 2008 at 4:19 pm · Filed under SEO
Both myself (Peter Young - Head of Online Marketing) and Will Graham (our Online Marketing Manager) will be attending the SES (Search Engine Strategies) Conference being held in the Business Design Centre in London between the 19th and 21st February 2008. It is the first time we at Connectpoint will be attending one of the UK SEO showcase events, and definitely not the last.
Speakers at the event include Mike Grehan (Searchvisible), Andrew Girdwood (BigmouthMedia), Jon Myers (Mediavest), Adam Lisnik (Google), Steve Kaufman (Digitas), Lee Odden (TopRank), Andy Beal (Marketing Pilgrim) and Dr Ralph Wilson, and will provide both advanced SEO specialists and newbie SEO’s alike with a plethora of SEO knowledge.
We are travelling down the night before so feel free to have a chat if you see either of us. No doubt if you haven’t heard of us before SES, you soon will.
June 13, 2007 at 11:33 am · Filed under Search Marketing, SEO, PPC, Online PR, Trends
According to a recent survey for the Online Marketing Show, online marketing spend in the UK has continued to see dramatic increases in spend over the course of the last year. The survey follows close on the heels of a recent IAB/PWC report which showed that spend on Online Marketing had broken through the £2bn barrier.
The survey by the Online Marketing Show highlighted that the commitment displayed to the online channel by advertisers over the past year “will continue over the next twelve with over a third of respondents saying they will increase online budgets by up to 25% in the coming year. ”
The survey also highlighted a number of other significant trends
- One in five respondants now spend over 50% of their marketing budgets on Online Marketing
- Agencies look likely to be the primary beneficiaries - with 47% saying that they will increase their spend on Online Marketing by up to 25% over the coming year.
- ROI or Return on Investment is still a primary metric for online marketers with 61% saying they get a better ROI from their online marketing efforts than any other channel, however interestingly a large proportion of respondants highlighted the requirement for more data online
- SEO, PPC, E-Mail Marketing and Banner Advertising were the key areas of investment over the past year
- Social Media and Online PR have grown significantly and are expected to receive more investment than more established investment areas such as mobile and iTV
- Interestingly, 40% of respondants are still having trouble integrating their online and offline communications - however we would suggest this may be due to many of the respondants using a number of different solutions providers rather than one integrated agency
Other Key Findings
- 52% of retailers suggested they would increase their online spend by up to 25% in the coming year
- 27% of travel companies said they would increase their online marketing budgets by up to 50% this year. This does mirror the interest in search as a significant area of investment for the sector with 80% of respondants already actively involved in SEO/PPC and the figure expected to increase to just under 90% in a years time
- 34% of financial services organisations said they would increase budgets by up to 25%. 47% currently invest in search as a lead generation tool, and this figure is expected to grow to 63% over the course of the next year
- and interestingly …. just under 20% of marketing agencies said they would increase spend by up to 75%
To read the full survey, visit http://www.onlinemarketingshow.co.uk/Survey-Results.html
June 5, 2007 at 3:02 pm · Filed under Trends
According to a recent report by Hitwise UK, the 55+ age demographic is set to overtake the 35-44 year olds as the demographic age group with the largest representation online. According to the report, in the 4 weeks up to the 12th May, 22% of UK website visits were done by the 55+ age group, up 54% since 2005 and 40% since 2006. In comparison, the 35-44 age group accounted for 23.5% of visits during the same period.
According to Heather Hopkins, VP for research at Hitwise UK, the most searched categories searched by the 55+ age group were as follows:
- Search Engines
- Adult
- Shopping and classified
In particular , the 55% age group spent a lot of time browsing Travel (27%) and News and Media (24%) sites, particularly cruise, lifestyle, stocks and shares related sites. For example, 55% surfers were responsible for circa 48% of the Cruise related traffic in the month prior to 12th May.
To read the full release from Hitwise UK, click here
September 5, 2006 at 4:24 pm · Filed under Design, Advertising, Public Relations, Digital/New Media, Search Marketing
Welcome to the Connectpoint WordPress blog.
This is our first post.
We (the interactive team) have setup and designed this blog template based on the Wordpress blogging engine. It allows you to Login under various usernames (which you will be setup) and enter blog posts/entries.
We intend to categorise posts under the main business areas that we operate in, and should any others arise, add them also. (see the category list under the heading of this post)
Users on our blog will be able to:
- View posts:
- by a certain category
- in chronological order (set by default)
- by monthly entries
- Use the search box to search for terms within the whole blog.
- Monitor the blog with RSS feeds.
- Leave comments on posts.
- Visit our friends’ websites/blogs.
You will be able to add images, links, videos (youtube and otherwise) into each post. You can also style the content using a WYSIWYG editor, much like you do in MS word.
You can make type Bold, or italic. Maybe add a strike-through?
You can right align text
Centre text
But probably best leave it like this!
- There
- are
- bullets
- like
- this
Or
- ordered
- bullets
- like
- this
It even has a spell-checker! So no excuses…
It’s very easy, I promise. And before too long you’ll be a fully-fledged blogger!
Over time we will be adding more and more features to our blog, we could add a photo gallery for example.
The design is intended to be quite simple, so that the content we create jumps from the screen. The elements such as icons and menu bars are intended to be second nature to users, but should you have any usability suggestions, just let us know.
Regular users will also have the ability to syndicate our blog using RSS technology. It is currently set up to monitor blog entries and also blog comments.
You will also see that we have added a blogroll, which is simply a list of links to our friends. Of course set by default we have; Hasgrove, The Chase and Interel. Please add more if you see fit.
One semi-useless gimmick that is pretty funky, is the draggable menus on the right hand-side, which allow you to prioritise the order of the menus. When returning to the blog, this order will be saved (using a setting file called a cookie). Cool heh?
Anyway, there are plenty more in depth features that the Wordpress engine has. So if you have any further questions, just shout!
P.S. If you’re wondering why the date for this post says Sep 5th, that’s because it has taken this long to write the first post!
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