The Gas Street team are excited to announce our newest client, The Haymarket Group! We will be working closely with the team at Practical Caravan magazine to develop a creative social media strategy which will promote and support their exciting caravan give-away. Practical Caravan magazine have teamed up with Catterick Caravans to giveaway £50,000 worth of prizes over the next 12 months, including 3 tourer caravans!

Justin Sawkins, Head of iMedia commented, ”We are extremely excited about working with such an established magazine with a loyal national following. This is to be their biggest campaign this year so we’re delighted to be involved. Our recent work with the Camping & Caravanning Club and Camping in the Forest has given us a lot of experience with campaigns aimed at the leisure tourism industry.”

The competition has now been launched on Facebook to check it out click here (and keep your eyes peeled for the animated sheep!)

The Haymarket Group are a global media company specialising in producing magazines, websites and events. Since the lunch of the company in 1957, The Haymarket Group has edited and published over 129 titles world wide!

We know what we are doing with regard to caravans but we’re less confident with Facebook Apps. That was why we got in touch with GSW. Leisure World, an ambitious caravan dealer group, wanted to co-promote the UK’s biggest ever caravan giveaway with us, and we wanted to make sure we delivered. Our lively Facebook brand presence is at the heart of this promotion, alongside print, digital and face-to-face entry at Leisure World sites. The GSW team have been great at advising, building and tweaking the project based on our feedback and we are delighted with the early results.” Nigel Donnelly, Editor in Chief – Digital.

Since the campaign was launch at the end of March the Practical Caravan Facebook fan page has already attracted 800 new fans…and counting!

Have a great day!
The Gas Street Team

@GasStreetWorks

Combine online and offline communications

Not everyone is using social media (60% according to current reports) and your marketing effectiveness can extend much further if you use it to continue the conversation with your customers long after they have seen your print or TV ad. When used to their potential both platforms can complement each other to boost your marketing effectiveness.

The main reason to add social media to your traditional marketing is to keep the conversation going. That’s why we ‘follow’ people on twitter, subscribe to newsletters and blogs, use social bookmarking sites like stumbleupon and delicious.  We find interesting content and we want to be alerted when more of the same is released.

It’s quite ‘Simples’

For example, we all know those annoying Compare the Meerkat adverts right? Regardless of what you think of the adverts they are tremendously successful. The catchphrase ‘simples’ has become so popular that it could become part of the oxford dictionary. Hitwise last year reported a 75% increase in traffic to www.comparethemarket.com. They have an extensive social media presence with 785 141 fans on Facebook and 49167 followers on twitter. These numbers may seem impressive, but when you consider their adverts are viewed by millions of people in the UK just a 5% conversion rate would increase their fan base by 100,000 (assuming 2 million views per advert).Don’t just add a ‘find us on Facebook’ line of text at the bottom of your ad as so many companies do, try and be a little more creative than that.

Engage your viewers

A great example of this is the BT campaign that encouraged users to vote on Facebook to decide the outcome of Adam and Jane’s relationship. Thousands of people were following the story online and were debating what should happen on the lead up to the wedding. The campaign gave viewers the opportunity to decide what happened next. This engaged viewers for months after the TV campaign. In fact the campaign was so successful BT spawned a series of these adverts encouraging viewers to mould the outcome of the story.  This is the evolution of marketing, using mediums that were for a long time one way in the way that they communicated.

Marketing takeaways

Is there a way you can extend the life and reach of your campaign by encouraging your audience to engage with you online? Provide your audience with offers and incentives to encourage them to part with the personal details you need to improve your marketing effectiveness and spread your message to a larger group of people. In the BT example, their audience are doing the marketing for them.
ROI in the first instance might be the creation of a marketing resource that will be used in the rest of your campaign.

If you’d like any more information please contact one of our team! Tweet us @GasStreetWorks or call us on 0121 248 0072

Have a great day!

The Gas Street Works Team
@GasStreetWorks

To give you a good sense of the various elements of an effective Facebook business page we have dissected pages we created for The Camping and Caravanning Club and Forest Holidays.

7 Key steps

1. Welcome page

Create a custom tab to welcome new visitors that land on your page. Increase the chances of visitors ‘liking’ your page and becoming part of your community by either giving them some kind of offer in exchange for a ‘like’ or granting them access to exclusive content. Set this as the ‘default landing tab’ so new visitors always see this page.

As you can see in this example, visitors are incentivised to ‘like’ the camping and caravanning Club page to gain access to the exclusive content behind the zip.

2. A compelling offer

One of the main objectives for using Facebook is to gain as much information from your community  as possible. This allows you to segment your marketing and make your communications to your demographic groups more effective. Offer fans something of value in exchange for the information you need to improve your campaign.

Forest Holidays wanted to build their email database of prospective customers so they gave fans an opportunity to win an iPad 2. To enter, fans needed to submit their email addresses. Sharing the competition with their friends gave them another opportunity to win and for Forest Holidays provided the added value of exposing the competition to more people, increasing participants and ‘likes’.

3. Keep it fresh

Just like your website should not be static, neither should your Facebook page. Make sure you’re regularly engaging your fans . Make sure you don’t over-do it though because you can overwhelm your audience. Monitor how your audience respond to your update frequency using Facebook insights. As a good rule of thumb, mix up your posts by providing pictures and asking questions. Don’t always share content about yourself, but do share valuable content from around the web. In this way you will be viewed as a good resource and a brand that is not solely self-interested.

4. Measure engagement

An effective page generates ‘likes’, comments and  shares to extend the reach of your brand and attract new fans. Use Facebook insights to measure how effective you are at engaging your fans and make it a page visitors want to subscribe to.

5. Applications and custom tabs

Do you have a Twitter account, YouTube channel or blog? Consider creating custom tabs to make these available through your Facebook page. Research shows Facebook pages with custom tabs attract 30% more ‘likes’.

You can create custom tabs that act like landing pages. Use these tabs to showcase customer testimonials, promote exclusive content and provide more information about your products and services. They are ideal for sending people to a destination for a campaign you are running.

6. Content

Offering helpful, relevant and interesting content is one of the best ways to maintain a solid Facebook presence. Vary your content from blog posts to webinars, video and ebooks. Consider rethinking your brand positioning by promoting content from aligned brands of interest  to your target market.

Create a content schedule to vary the information you send out. Ask people in the office to help you create content, this shares your workload and encourages everyone to pull in the same direction.

7. About information

Consider this space as your elevator pitch; use it to explain who you are and why you’re valuable. Provide a link in it to provide more information. Visitors are looking at your page because they are want to find out more about you. By giving them all the information they require along with sneak peeks and behind the scenes info, the relationship between you and your customers will strengthen.

Take a look at the profiles here..

The Club’s Facebook welcome tab. To view their Facebook profile click here.

The Club’s YouTube channel : To view their channel click here.

The Club’s Twitter profile : To view their profile click here.

If you’re thinking of re-designing or launching your brands’ social presence then get in touch with one of the team and see how we can help. Tweet us @GasStreetWorks or call us on 0121 248 0072.

Have a great day!

The Gas Street Works Team
@GasStreetWorks

As more and more of us start using smartphone technology smart marketers have figured out how to use this platform as a new revenue source. Here we outline how you can use smartphone technology as a marketing tool.

1. Optimise your web pages for mobile

When people view your website’s product pages from a mobile device it will normally show up in  a way that is meant for viewing through your browser. Meaning that viewers may struggle to see your content on their mobile device.  The image on the right is not optimised for web while the one on the left is. See how much easier it is to view the navigation?

2. Feed impulse buys

Mobile marketing makes it very easy to buy something straight from your phone. All you need is internet connectivity and you can make a purchase from anywhere in the world. The Amazon app is the one that constantly gets me with offers and incentives.

Try and make it as easy as possible for people to be able to buy from you. Don’t provide too many barriers to your content in the form of signups for example, make your app free or very cheap and incentivise the sharing of it.

3. QR Codes

Make it as easy as possible for people to find and share your content. Provide QR codes on all printed media, business cards, flyers and brochures ect. Using companies that create mobile optimised company information like QRKY is a good idea, they present your information in a way that is clean and easy to navigate giving you the highest possible conversion rates.

How have you used mobile marketing? What works well for you? What doesn’t? Get in touch with us on twitter @gasstreetworks

Last week we surveyed thousands of marketers across the UK, we asked them ‘when it came to social media, what would they like to learn more about?’ 38% said how to measure the ROI social media generates for their business. (full report coming soon)

There are many metrics you can use to measure your social media presence, sentiment, number of RTs, customer service issues resolved, the number of influencers following you, the number of times you are mentioned online (and the list goes on). While these metrics might be useful, if you are spending time and money on social media campaigns your boss wants to know one thing….. ‘How much revenue is this generating for us?’

All businesses have different sales cycles so measuring revenue from a social media campaign is not always easy, that’s why you need to keep track of the following 3 metrics:

Reach

This is a very important metric to track because the more twitter followers you have, the more facebook friends, and linkedIn group members you have the more likely it will be that your content will be seen, shared and acted upon. You also need to take into account the relevance of your community, there is no point building a community of people who will never buy what you sell.

Track this metric over time to see how well it is growing and how relevant those people are to your organisation.

Traffic

People are not going to buy from you directly from twitter or Facebook so your main objective here is to get people back to your site or blog for them to take the desired action there. So track your traffic sources, how much of it is coming from social media, how much of it is coming from other sources? As you improve your social media presence and engage more you should start to see this number increase.

Leads

This is the main way you can track the effectiveness of your social media efforts. How many of those people coming from social media sites turn into leads for your sales team to follow up? How many of them fill out a ‘contact us’ form or some other call to action? Only you can decide what constitutes a lead, once you have done that you know what actions your social media visitors need to take to become a lead for you.

While social media marketing can transform some businesses, it may be less effective for others. So you should look at the above metrics and evaluate what you are currently getting from social media, you may find some things that surprise you. Only then will you be able to adjust your online marketing efforts to become more effective.

What metrics do you track with social media? have you tracked any of the above? How effective have they been?

Follow us @gasstreetworks

He creatively explains how important user experience is for building loyalty with your audience and also building an army of paying customers. The term he continues to come back to is ‘relevance’; it doesn’t matter whether your design is beautiful and all singing, all dancing, it wont ever make you money if it’s not relevant to your audience.

He uses the analogy of having Lady Gaga as your lawyer during a court case – she may look amazing and get people talking but she’s not relevant for that situation or that audience… so it’s unlikely you’d ever win the case.

Click here to watch the full clip “Wanna start a revolution?” or click here to follow Jon on Twitter.

Have a great day!

The Gas Street Works Team
@GasStreetWorks

You may be forgiven for thinking that the student life style mainly consists of fast food diets, 7 day weekends, student digs and music gigs. But it also takes a lot of hard work to be a second year marketing student.

For the past month I’ve been working hard with the dedicated team here at Gas Street Works as a digital marketing intern. With an array of specialism’s, clients and empty tea cups, I have been kept busy with all aspects of the business. From marketing research to campaign analysis and creative input, I have been able to apply the marketing theories I have learned throughout university, to live campaigns with real clients. Additionally, I have been introduced to social media tools such as Bit.ly, Co-tweet and Facebook insights, which I use pretty much everyday. Observing audience engagement statistics for live campaigns has helped change my perspective of social media, as I now understand that each platform can be a marketing tool rather than just a social networking site.

The early nights and untimely mornings took some getting used too, but working within such a creative environment has given me a new appreciation for digital marketing campaigns. I’ve gained insight to what life may be like after university and it’s given me even more drive to pursue a career in marketing. Perhaps the most important and unexpected lesson I can take away from this experience is how to conduct my self in a professional environment, as I would never have the opportunity to do this in the classroom.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my time at Gas Street and I’m now about to embark on another month’s internship in London, and possibly a 12-month work placement in Leeds, which is really exciting.

As today is my last day I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone at Gas Street Works for welcoming me into their family and I sincerely hope that GSW continue your internship programme as I am sure other students will benefit from it as much as I have.

Aaron McFarlane

Feel free to contact me on Twitter: @GossipGuy2011

Or my Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/aaron-mcfarlane/28/483/a75

Apparently yes it can. But that’s not enough for the automotive geniuses at Mercedes. They have gone one step further and used the power of the social networking site, to fuel the world’s very first real life car Twitter race in February 2011. Powered by the passion of their audience and peoples tweets, Mercedes rigged up with state of the art equipment to a range of their vehicles, which drove the cars around the US.

Here are just some of the statistics that emerged from this epic event.

• 27,953 Active Participants

• 72,588 Likes on Facebook

• 77,726 Followers on Twitter

• 150,739 Tweets generated

• 1,999,927 Videos Viewed

• 24,919,118 People reached on Twitter

• 143,070,159 PR Impressions

• 545,425,558 Twitter Impressions

To see the full story, visit  http://bit.ly/lYCggM

If you are new to our blog, why don’t check out some of our previous posts.

Thanks for reading

The Gas Street Works Team

@GasStreetWorks