Whilst there, one of the speakers told a story which really struck a chord with Chris and demonstrated how the simplest concepts are sometimes the most effective.

Apparently, the speaker’s father was a world class chess player and taught him to play chess. One of the most important and valuable lessons he was taught was to always take the time to walk around to the other side of the chess table and take a look at the game from his opponent’s point of view. Seeing things from a different perspective often helped to spot the winning moves.

Need I say more? This can be applied to all aspects of marketing, from web design and user experience through to advertising and direct mail; taking the time to understand your market and see things from their point of view can help you to spot those winning moves.

Adrian Lomas Blueleaf MD and Paul Daniels Host of The Best of Chester

Adrian Lomas, Blueleaf’s MD was recently invited by Paul Daniels, host of prestigious networking group The Best of Chester, to speak at an event held at state of the art Riverside Innovation Centre based in the Old County Hall, Chester.
Adrian shared ten tips to energise not just websites but also to help with business growth. He concentrated on why business leaders should implement these changes and not how, as Adrian passionately believes that if leaders can understand the why then the how will become clear. The tips included, keeping websites fresh and up to date, ensuring your message and positioning is clear and making a special effort to share everything via blogs and social media.
The seminar was well received by the members of The Best of Chester, who enjoyed lunch provided by the venue and had ample time to network.

Here’s a taster…

Coming soon – a vibrant digital and creative hub with inspirational meeting rooms and workspace for hire.

We’re just in the process of designing this fantastic space in the style of our own office and working next door to Blueleaf, you’ll have the chance for mentoring and coaching from Cheshire’s Employer of the Year. It’ll all be ready very soon, when we’ll have photographs, layouts and costs. We’re also offering very cost-effective ‘address only’ packages. Please email us below to register your interest and we’ll let you know when you can come and visit.

Email kay@blue-leaf.co.uk for more details.

Chris is first up, having been asked to speak at the Future of Web Design Conference in London on 16^th May. Featuring a mixture of workshops and presentations by well-respected industry figures, Chris has been selected to take part in FOWD’s Rising Star programme. Find out more here.

Rob is speaking at the very successful Bolesworth Business Lunch on Friday 1st June, part of the Bolesworth Classic weekend. Find out more here. He will then be sharing his knowledge at a business breakfast on 14^th June, hosted by Forward Ladies networking group, where he will present his ‘10 tips to improve your website and grow your business’ seminar, which has already benefited many organisations. Find out more here.

To complete the triumvirate, Adrian will be presenting with Olivia Stefanino of Be Your Own Guru at the 27th June meeting of The Chester Business Network. They’ll provide helpful hints, tips and techniques on making the recession an opportunity to take stock, investigate what’s working and stop what’s not. Both Adrian and Olivia take the view that if through their learning AND their previous mistakes, they can make your journey more successful, more quickly, then their work is done!  Find out more here.

You may also be interested in learning from a recent UK Fast roundtable that Adrian attended at Richard Branson’s London Kensington Roof Gardens, where industry experts discussed the digital revolution. Visit our YouTube channel here and subscribe as Rob will be taking part in another UKFast round table in a couple of weeks about Cookie Law which will be really useful.

Within our industry, there’s been a tendency for companies to be insular and worried not just about direct competition, but also about other agencies that may be growing into their area. Blueleaf MD, Adrian decided to take a different approach:

• He has met with over 50 creative and media companies within the past year to discuss ways we could help each other
• Over 20 of those meetings have turned into solid partnerships, with work passing both ways
• Over 80% of Blueleaf’s new work comes from strategic partnerships

Following on from this, he created an informal, not-for-profit networking group called ChIMPs (Cheshire Innovative Marketing People) for owners and founders of creative, media and marketing companies.

The group meets bi-monthly – at the ChIMP’s Tea Party – to eat, drink and most importantly share thoughts and ideas with a view to stimulating business in the region.

There are three main areas where we believe SME’s fail with their websites - the scoping process, the use of ongoing marketing expertise and the assignment of appropriate internal power.

The scoping process

I’ve run many scoping sessions for our clients over the past few years because it’s a great time to start thinking about how to run your website once it’s launched. The main issue is that as much as we try to educate them,  business owners or managers are often not looking far enough ahead. They don’t consider how they are going to use their website in the future, and how it forms the basis of a lot of their marketing activities. My advice here is to think at least one year ahead and consider all the marketing activities you may accomplish in this time. How will you use the website to support those activities? Think about email newsletters, news items, expertise pieces, events, landing pages, updating work and skillsets – the list could go on!

Use of ongoing marketing resource

Once your website is built, it’s true that you should be able to easily update it yourself. What is not true is that your investment should stop at that point. SEO, as much as it’s frequently misunderstood and confused by many, is a powerful tool to get the right traffic to come to your website and convert this to enquiries, sales, or whatever your goals are. PPC can also help, as can email marketing. Not setting aside budget for these is a frequent mistake and leads a lot of SME’s to come to conclude a year later that their website ‘isn’t really working for them’ and probably, never has in their view. My advice here is to budget at least 50% of your website build budget for online marketing following its launch. If you can budget nearer 100% that will give decent momentum for the 6-12 months following launch. This of course depends on what kind of site you are and that’s based on a standard lead generation b2b site for an existing business. An ecommerce site may need slightly deeper pockets to get off the ground quickly if it’s brand new and needs to gain trust.

Assignment of appropriate internal power

This, above all else, is probably the most important part. Very often, the website is assigned to a marketing manager who already has a lot of other projects and responsibilities. This is the correct place for the project, but often it’s an area woefully under-resourced. Your site should be given attention almost every day. Whether that’s chatting with your agency about the progress of search engine rankings (and if there’s anything they need on the site to help), creating new content, keeping an eye on social networks, spreading your website content across these networks, and so on. There’s a lot to do to keep a website well maintained and above all, successful. The more likely route unfortunately, is that no extra resource is assigned. The site gets a burst of activity every few months and the company generally sees the new site they loved when it went live, as a failure.

In summary

This is not a general attack on SME’s. We’re an SME ourselves and we have the same challenges as any other business, but we make sure we set our website and team up to be able to win, and to win consistently. If you’re about to embark on or launch a new website, and the three tips above make you squirm a tiny bit, now is the time to take action and set your website up to succeed. It is your website after all!

For a quick introduction to Pinterest, please click here to watch my video showing you the basic features.

This tip is for those of you with websites that have a lot of images and want to see if any of them are being used on Pinterest, as it has an easy way of tracking the source (or website) that an image was pinned from. As an example, one of our great clients Laura Ashley is reasonably popular on this burgeoning social network and you can see what images have been pinned by following the links below.

Simply go directly to the URL below, replacing [WEB ADDRESS] with your website’s address

http://pinterest.com/source/[WEB ADDRESS]

So for example, Laura Ashley have two (one for fashion, one for home):

http://pinterest.com/source/lauraashley.com
http://pinterest.com/source/mto.lauraashley.com

It’s just a quick and easy way to see how your images are being used and gives you some information to indicate whether it may be worth interacting with the network further.

I recently attended the second annual Manchester Design Symposium at the splendid Town Hall, which in itself is an inspiration for any designer.

Arranged by the Design Initiative, the day was advertised as bringing together leading design thinkers and practitioners to speak on the subject of the value of design and its effect on the economy. Sounds good.

The speakers were Jason Smith (Fontsmith), Dave Kirkwood (3hundredand65), Morag Myerscough (Studio Myerscough), Will Hudson (It’s Nice That), Vera-Maria Glahn (Field) and Adrian Shaughnessy (ShaughnessyWorks / Unit Editions).

Each speaker presented on their own specialist area including type design, illustration, architectural graphics and digital installations. All were clearly accomplished in their field and each spoke passionately and knowledgeably.

Despite this, I left disappointed. Adrian Shaughnessy was the only speaker who I felt really touched on the event’s theme of how design affects the economy and vice versa, and was certainly the only person to point out that the main growth area of design at the moment is digital. So where was the digital industry speaker? Where was the social speaker? Where was the digital marketing speaker? Where was the Creative Director of a leading web agency (I was in the audience, ha ha)? There was a huge gap in the programme where a web expert should have been.

I’m not blinkered enough to believe that digital is the only area of design that matters, but consider this; during Jason Smith’s presentation, I watched lots of students diligently taking notes on type design, but as Jason himself pointed out, his company is one of only a tiny handful in the world. Jason’s work is fantastic and he’s clearly making a decent living if his client list is anything to go by, but I couldn’t help but be concerned that for the next generation of designers in the room, the wrong message was being sent out. Maybe one or two will work in type design or another niche area, but for the great majority their future surely lies in digital.

Inspiring it may have been, but it was also a largely irrelevant event. Come on Manchester, we’re the greatest city in the UK and a constant source of fantastic design. To have barely any mention of the web at such a high profile event is inexcusable and at worst risks showing the world that we’re behind the times and out of touch with the commercial realities of design. Let’s have more emphasis on digital at 2013′s symposium or else I may just have to start my own. Now there’s an idea…

We’re delighted that Rob has been asked to take part in a UKFast round table about this very subject. Subscribe to our Youtube channel here to be kept up to date.