The Sick App!

Its a worrying time for employers when someone invents an app designed to fool bosses into thinking a member of staff is genuinely ill. British business loses millions of days through "illness" every year and it hits small business the hardest  - the ones who need "all hands on deck!"

The new service, Skiver, allows users to come up with the ‘perfect cover story’ and even suggests activities to fill a ‘sickie day’.

The developer says it’s all just tongue-in-cheek, but these are serious times, and even playing with the concept of increased absenteeism in an era when productivity is paramount to our country’s development can be a dangerous thing; after all, absence in the workplace already costs the economy reportedly around £17 billion a year.

At the end of the day (or should I say, the start) it seems certain employees will always be looking for ways to stay at home from time to time, which is frustrating for many. As Charlie Mullins, managing director of Pimlico Plumbers says, ‘You would have thought that the severe after-effects of the recession and the current economic pressure we are all under would have helped people realise how lucky they are to have a job compared to the 2.5 million on the dole; yet some will still come up with some pretty mad reasons to avoid a day of hard work.’

It seems other technology companies are taking the problem more seriously – but to equally useless effect. The other day, someone sent me a press release enthusing about a piece of software which ‘helps employers work out whether staff are genuinely sick or just pulling the wool’. It works by ‘spotting patterns in people's absence - so people who only ring in sick on Mondays or Fridays, for example’. In other words, totally eradicating the five minute requirement for your HR staff to embark, Columbo-like, on the same investigation, and subsequently about as practical as a carpeted waterpark.

There’s obviously no cut and dried solution to absenteeism, but as an employer, simply not coming across as a pushover would be a favourable start. And if that ‘cover story’ looks too good to be true, maybe it is.

Building a Community

Building a community to build a brand

Community building is not a difficult task if you have the trust of your readers or customers. One of the ways to build a community is to start one on your own. There are various places online to do that.

Your own group or forum is a community where you have complete control. It is more difficult to promote and to grow unless you offer freebies, information, or other things in return.

A Facebook group or fan page is another type of community. It is easier to promote as it is open to a very large group of people (members of Facebook) and can be shared by other members. You don’t have complete control as you must follow the rules of Facebook.

LinkedIn groups are similar to Facebook except the audience is smaller.

Fans may start their own groups which is a huge compliment and honor. There may be groups begun that are started to knock you or your company. Sometimes these can create notoriety for you. Some companies, blogs, etc. like both positive and negative reactions.

Community building is an important step to grow your business or blog and even your own website

Improving Your Email Opens

We get asked a lot of questions about email marketing and, while we always try and give clear answers, sometimes the only true response is “it depends”.

One of the questions that certainly falls into this category is: what is a good open rate? For example, when it comes to open rates, these are all determining factors:

·         What type of campaign was it?

·         Who were you emailing?

·         How is the design put together?

·         What is the objective?

·         How old was the data

·         Was this an aquistion or retention campaign?

When you think about open rates in these terms, it makes industry averages something of an irrelevance.

To be honest, the best benchmark is to look at the last campaign you sent. Any improvement should immediately show you’re going in the right direction.

But even then, it’s not always that simple…

Do open rates actually have any real bearing on the real success of your campaign?

Open rates are calculated by counting the number of recipients that download images for your campaign and/or that interacted with it in some way.

What this doesn’t tell you is anything about the result or action they took. Opening an email is all very well, but if their action is simply to then ‘delete’, the ‘open’ is useless.

So which metrics might provide a more accurate option?

Enter the humble ‘link click’! Not only does this confirm that the user has engaged with the email, they’ve also clearly found it relevant and interesting enough to investigate further.

Most clicks are direct calls to action; whether to enquire further about products or services, to contact your organisation directly or simply out of pure curiosity – all of these actions indicate a degree of conversion.

Not only this, but every time a recipient clicks on a link in your email, you learn something about what they are interested in. This is where it gets clever. If someone clicked on a certain product in your email, then maybe you could consider sending a future email related to it?

Take it a step further

Ultimately, any email marketer should be aiming to track user activity when they’ve actually clicked through to the website and then use this to determine an ROI. For example, which of your customers purchased after they clicked through or which downloaded a whitepaper?

What could be better than using a metric which lets you continue to track your recipients all the way through to the ultimate conversion? This will really tell you whether your emails are doing the business!

Small Business: Getting Paid on Time!

Of all the roles small business owners perform, the one that's most hated is that of bill collector. The reasons are many: the time it takes to follow up with late paying customers, the fear of alienating a big customer, and, maybe a deep-rooted feeling that it's just not "nice" to ask for money.

No matter how much you dislike playing bill collector, it's a job that has to be done. You can make the task less odious and minimize future collections problems by implementing some or all of these procedures.

1. Establish a payment policy and put it in writing

Collecting from customers is much easier when you have a policy in place. If you expect your customers to pay on time, you need to define what "on time" is. If you don't put your payment policy in your contracts and include the due date on invoices, you may expect to be paid within five days and the customer may figure they can wait a month or two to pay.

2. Run a credit check on customers, when appropriate

Depending on the size of your average order, it may not be practical to run a credit check on every customer who asks to be invoiced. But if the dollar amount of a particular order is substantial, do the credit check.

3. Find out in advance when big corporations will be paying you

Bigger companies sometimes have their own accounts payables procedures in place. They pay in the time frame their internal policies dictate, not yours. That time frame could be 45 or 60 days or more.

4. Find out exactly how each customer should be invoiced

Who should get the invoice? (The person who placed the order may not be the right person.) Should it be sent in e-mail or through the postal service? What is the correct address or e-mail address? What information should be on the invoice? Do you need a purchase order number, contract number or anything else to be paid? The bigger your customer, the more likely it is that some small bit of missing information could delay payment.

5. Have someone other than you or your sales people make the collections calls

It's much easier for a person to make collection calls when that's one of their duties, and they don't have to interact with the client in any other way.

6. Pick up the phone and call

If your initial friendly reminder of a payment being due doesn't produce results, call the customer. Ask if they got your invoice and if everything was satisfactory with the product or service. If the answers to both questions are yes, then ask when payment will be mailed. Record their answer along with a new date to follow up if payment hasn't been received.

7. Invoice your customers promptly

Don't wait until the end of the month (or until "next week when I have more time") to invoice your customers. The sooner you mail the invoices the sooner you'll get paid.

8. Stop worrying about losing the customer

Many small business owners worry that they'll annoy customers and lose them if they inquire too soon or too often about unpaid invoices. As long as you have delivered what you promised to your customer and make your initial collection inquiries polite, the majority of your customers won't mind.

Does Telemarketing work in the 21st Century?

Is Telemarketing still Relevant?

In the world of integrated marketing plans and performance driven marketing, is the practice of telemarketing making a comeback? More importantly is it making a greater contribution than eMarketing or direct marketing?

In the B2C environment the use of predictive dialling devices and recorded messages have given call centres and telemarketing companies a bad reputation. This has helped the growth of the telephone preference service www.tpsonline.org.uk/tps/ which is free and is the official central opt out register on which individuals can record their preference not to receive unsolicited sales or marketing calls.

Meanwhile in the B2B world, telemarketing is making a resurgence as an essential tool in the modern marketing mix. Telemarketing as one essential element in an integrated marketing campaign can really help drive up the return on investment for selected activities. Targeted messaging, lead generation, appointment setting and even event registrations are all tasks that can be accomplished via a well planned and executed telemarketing campaign.

So the Igneous Marketing ‘Top 8 Tips’ for planning and running a successful telemarketing campaign are…

1.       Database – Ensure your data is accurate, the licence is up to date and the target market is a match for the message 

2.       Data Protection – Be sure you know that you actually own the data or where the data was originally sourced. Check local data laws to ensure you comply, or pay the price

3.       Briefing – Every marketing campaign should start with a brief that then creates the overall plan. As the agents are conveying your message, make sure they are fully briefed on every aspect of the campaign and the history of the business

4.       Training – The more information the agent has the better they will perform, especially if the programme relates to a product promotion or offer

5.       References – Provide Cheat Sheets, Emails, Case Studies or even real life examples to help the agent deal with any situation that may arise during a conversation

6.       Conversation – This leads nicely on to: don’t use a script. Encourage your agents to have a conversation. They will be more successful and receive less resistance if it does not feel like a sales call

7.       Closed Loop Reporting – Success can only be judged if the leads go through this sales led process, this is where most campaigns fall over and the reputation for telemarketing not delivering is created and communicated by a weak link in the overall company chain

8.       Testing – Before launching the campaign, test every backend processes and response mechanism, because once the campaign is live there is no going back and you may lose all your responses and dent your company’s reputation

Some top PR tips for Small Business

For many traditional public relations has gone slightly out of fashion. With the immediacy of social media and the boom in self publishing the time and effort to get your story published in the local paper or picked up by radio and TV can seem a bit of waste.


But despite the huge number of people on Facebook and Twitter there is still a sizeable chunk of the population who don’t know their fans from their followers. These are not cave people unable to keep up with modern life. They just prefer to do things a little differently. One day they may join the online throng but until then it’s not wise to ignore them.


Traditional press coverage is a great way of getting your messages out and building the profile of your business. Here are the Igneous Marketing top 4 tips to getting free publicity


1. Make sure your story is news! Journalists aren’t interested in your latest 50% off sale or buy one get one free promotion. Be the first, the newest, the oldest, the biggest, the smallest, just don’t be average. If you story has a photo even better.

2. Don’t have any news? Then make some! Look at Richard Branson the master of self promotion. No you don’t need to try and cross the Atlantic in a hot air balloon. Do something interesting for charity, hold an event, win an award, become an expert in your field.  The possibilities are endless it just needs a bit of imagination.

3. Write a good press release. 99% of press releases end up in the rubbish so make sure you have a strong eye catching headline. Make sure all the key details of the story are covered in the main paragraphs.  Don’t witter on for pages, maximum 2 pages including all your contact details.  Include a boilerplate, this is a paragraph about you and your business that you can include on every release you produce.

4. Follow up. If you don’t hear anything back follow up with a telephone call.  Journalists get hundreds of releases and can often miss yours it doesn’t mean they won’t feature it, a polite nudge may just do the trick.


With a bit of effort you will soon be filling the papers, radio and TV.  Don’t be discouraged if your releases don’t get featured every time.  Keep going, build up the relationships with the local media and don’t forget to publish online too!


If you need some more help, please contact us (Here) and don't forget PR is part of our awesome pay monthly marketing bundles!

10 FREE digital marketing tools you need to look at!

A Little Present From Igneous Marketing

Which tools do experienced digital marketers rely on to develop their marketing strategies, plans, and programs?  There are many valuable resources to provide insight into target audience behaviour, competitive activity, social media mentions, search keyword volume, current marketing trends, and a host of other useful information.  But did you know that many of the very best are available online to everyone, for free?

Before building your next digital plan, be sure to check out these terrific free tools for input, support and guidance in 10 important areas.

1)    Competitive site traffic: Compete.com estimates the number of U. S. visitors to practically all the top web sites, enabling users to enter up to five website names and receive Traffic Volume for each, along with additional site analytics.  Quantcast.com provides U. S. audience composition stats, including gender, income, age group, visit frequency, and other sites visited.  Alexa.com ranks sites comparatively based on traffic  by millions of its toolbar users.

2)    Search volume: Google Trends lets you enter up to five topics and see how often they've been searched on Google over time.  It calculates how many searches occurred for the entered term(s), compared to total Google searches, and graphs the results. The Hot Searches feature displays the 40 fastest-increasing searches in the U. S., and is updated hourly.  Google Insights enables narrower analysis to compare search volume patterns across specific geographic regions, subject categories, time frames and other Google properties.  Google Traffic Estimator shows predicted search volume, average cost-per-click, and ad positions for specified keywords.

3)    SEO Evaluation: WebsiteGrader.com, a free SEO evaluation tool, grades any site on its SEO effectiveness, based on factors including title, meta description, keywords, headings, images, Google Page Rank, inbound links, Google indexed pages, directory inclusion, and Delicious bookmarks.  Entering your own url or a competitor's delivers a quick SEO assessment.

4)    Competitive search activity: SpyFu.com reports the keywords a website buys on Google Adwords and the keywords causing a site to rank in search results. It also provides cost per click, search volume, and estimated search advertising spend. Other available information includes keywords used, organic search rank, top competitors, sites purchasing specific terms, and sites ranking organically for a given query.

5)    Social media dialogue: SocialMention.com tracks the most current conversations about a company, product, or any other topic across the social media landscape, encompassing blogs, forums, bookmarks, comments, events, news, etc., by monitoring over 100 social media properties like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and YouTube. Technorati.com is the leading blog search engine, indexing over a million blogs, tracking the authority and influence of blogs, while providing an index of what is currently most popular in the Blogosphere.

6)    Twitter monitoring: TweetMeme.com aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which are popular, organizing these into Categories, Subcategories and Channels, so it's easy to filter and find what you are most interested in.  Klout.com measures influence on Twitter (and Facebook), on a scale from 0 to 100, using variables like the number of retweets, the Twitter audience size, and influence of followers, while also providing influence monitoring tools.

7)    Social media case studies:  To keep abreast of social media marketing activity by industry leaders or competitors, visit these wikis/sites, which provide a wide range of case studies.  For Social Media Cases across all industries, check out A Wiki of Social Media Marketing Examples. If you're focused on the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, read the cases at the Dose of Digital Social Media Wiki.

8)    Sample Size Calculator: If you aren't a statistician, but require a simple, quick way to quantify the validity of your results, or establish the correct quantities for an in-market test, either of these two tools will do the trick: http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm or http://www.raosoft.com/samplesize.html.

9)    Online Advertising Impact: Both DoubleClick Research and Atlas Institute Insights regularly publish valuable white papers with insightful analyses of online media performance impact, benchmarks and trends.

10) Marketing Stats and Presentations: Slideshare.com lets you share presentations, or view documents written by others, across a whole range of topics and industries. PewInternet.org is an ongoing research project providing a rich resource of trends and statistics about consumer usage of digital channels.

These are among the most powerful, free tools that equip digital marketers to plan and analyze more effectively, but if you have other personal favourites, please share them by posting or emailing.

Understanding the Google +1 button

So, if you've been living under a rock for the past few weeks and have emerged, bleary eyed and wondering "What on Earth is this Google +1 button?" Then you've come to the right place.

The Google +1 Button is like… the "Like" button on Facebook, but instead of being for people's posts, updates and photos, it's for the web. Instead of liking a post, you're liking a website, a blog article, someone's profile… anything! To use it, you have to have a Google Account and, in turn, a Google Profile. If you've just got an account, you can still +1 a page, but you'll have to click "Create a Profile" when you first try to use this new feature. Why not try clicking our +1 button at the top to get into the swing of it?

The Importance of the +1 Button

The Google +1 Button is going to be important for many reasons; Google will begin to tailor search results so that if you've got a friend associated with your Google account that has liked a page related to what you're searching for, chances are, Google are going to rank the page they 'Plus-Oned' above the pages that they didn't. The other thing is, even if none of your friends have Plus-Oned a page, chances are the pages that have more will rank better.

It's for this reason, and this reason alone that we deem this new +1 button as very important. People are starting to speculate that if the +1 button kicks off a lot, Google might start to favour the pages using it over the pages that aren’t...

We also know that the +1 button is a surefire way to make sure Google knows about your page. All +1s will be stored, somewhere, in Google's complex database systems, but Google's algorithms will be looking at this list to make sure it is regularly spidering the pages people are 'Plus-Oneing.' (How many of these have we created?!)

If you have any questions, or need any advice, give us a call at 24/7

Learn more on the official Google +1 Page.

Creating a Strong Brand - Small Business

Creating a Strong Brand Name

The name is the brand trigger. When it is said or read or thought, all the impressions, experiences and promises of the brand are brought to mind.

Creating a new brand name, whether is a new company or a new product line, is an opportunity to take a deep breath, take stock of who you are and where you’re headed, figure out what new things you need to add to the marketing mix, and what baggage you may be ready to leave behind.

The following key attributes should be present in every company name:

■Position the company/product within the markets it serves.

■Attract customers and prospects, usually by stating a benefit, specific or implied.

■Be memorable

■Be easily pronounced

■Have positive verbal associations and connotations.

■Be unique, not at all like competitor names.

■Be protectable.

Next is a list with some five things to be considered when you start naming a new company, product or service:

1. Determine How Important the Name Really Is

Having a clever name isn’t always important. Many companies thrive in industries that are based on government contracts, bidding wars, business friendships, etc., and their name is often just a unique identifier to be placed on legal paperwork.

For most companies, however, their name can be an integral part of their marketing process. A clever, memorable name can make a potential client think about the company for a few extra moments, which may be all you need to get the edge on your competitors.

2. Stand Out…

The most common mistake made when naming a new business endeavor is to make it sound like the others in that industry. This is based on anxiety about whether the new business will be taken seriously. In reality, it’s critical that you stand apart from your competition, and that you look to your competitors as examples of what to avoid.

There are literally 30 or 40 wireless companies called Mobile-something — Mobileum, Mobilocity, MobileOne. Make a rule and don’t pick a name with ‘mobile’ in it, if you name a wireless company.

3. …but don’t get carried away.

A name that doesn’t mean anything, or it has no depth won’t work ussualy. A name should connect with something already in the collective subconscious. Don’t forget, you’re trying to make an emotional connection.

4. Test your tolerance for going ‘out of the box.’

If you’re looking for something unusual, usually when it comes down to it, the obstacle is always fear. Make sure that the fears aren’t based on what happens to brands out in the world. It’s like Banana Republic. People don’t see the name and think, ‘Whoa, an ugly racial slur — I’m not going to shop there.’ It’s all contextual.”

5. Don’t involve too many people

Most corporations have no problem delegating marketing and advertising issues to the marketing department, but when naming is involved, especially naming the company itself or key products, suddenly everyone wants to have a say in the process, and it can quickly become politically and emotionally charged. Therefore, it is essential that you keep the number of people involved in a naming project to a minimum, that they have real authority, and that they all understand the ideas outlined above.

Creating Great Sales Copy

What’s the difference between a good piece of direct mail and a “junk” piece?

Not all direct mail is junk mail. A clear message, with a good offer, sent to those who want to receive it is not junk mail. But there are some howlers out there that’s for sure.

Here is a quick list of things that make for a dreadful sales letter:

• Poor targeting that consigns the piece to the bin – immediately
• No copy on the envelope that encourages me to open it and read more
• Contains copy that only talks features and not benefits
• Copy that doesn’t follow the AIDCA principle (Attention, Interest, Desire, Conviction, Action)
• Doesn’t get to the main point within 3 paragraphs
• Littered with poor grammar and punctuation
• Line lengths that stretch from here to infinity
• No subheads to make me want to read on and on and on and….
• Printed in an unreadable typeface that’s so small I need a magnifying glass
• Type printed over a picture (with a drop shadow) because it looks “trendy”
• Doesn’t repeat the offer several times (because the writer assumes I’m an elephant and never forgets what I’ve just read)
• Doesn’t put explanatory captions under any pictures or illustrations (because the marketer knows what they are and assumes the reader is as knowledgeable as he is)

Stick to these and you won’t go far wrong

6 Things to try to improve sales

Things that can be done quickly to improve your sales today!

So a quick blog today on how to make a few tweaks to your sales and marketing approach which can result in some major shifts in fortune. So here are the Igneous Marketing top tips for today!

1. Your Website’s navigation

There’s little point having lots of wonderful, valuable content on your website or blog, if people can’t find it.  Many sites have pages within pages and information on the same subject, which is scattered all over the site.  Keep your site clean and clear.  Make sure it loads nice and quickly and that all your links work.  The easier your prospective clients can navigate your site, the more likely they are to find what they are looking for, and get in touch with you / buy from the site.

2. You need to make it easy for people to contact you via your website too.

That DOESN’T mean a contact box on a contact page, where you tell people they have to give YOU their email address, name, company name etc – just to get in touch.  Many people (me included) will not do that!  If that’s the only way for people to contact you, I can assure you 100% that it is losing you business inquiries.  To be easy to contact, give people your phone number, email address, social networking accounts and if you want people to trust you, I suggest you put a postal address down too!

3. The benefits of using your services need to be easy to understand.

This means short, information rich content that’s written in plain English.

4. Make it easy for people to trust you.

Use testimonials from named people, who had great experiences with you.  If you have won an award or reached a certified level of achievement within your industry, make sure people can easily see it.  You need to mention associations and affiliation to breed trust

5. Let your Personality shine through
If you use your blog or social networking accounts as a way to broadcast what you think, rather than engage people and communicate, you will attract very few inquiries.  Prospective client’s find it a lot easier to email or call a potential provider, if that provider is personable and approachable. Be human and make it easy for them to see the real you.

6. Make it easy for people to call you.

This means never, ever using a premium rate phone number or cell / mobile number as your contact number.  No one wants to have to pay you, via a premium rate number, to find out about your services.  Many small businesses use non-standard numbers because they want to disguise where they are located, in case it puts people off.  That’s nuts.  I suggest you use a normal number.  Mobile phone numbers, when used as the only contact number, make you look less stable.  As a consequence, this will reduce the number of calls you receive and by extension, the number of inquiries you get.

Don’t forget to visit our brand new marketing bundles page – everything you need, every month for one low monthly payment – talk about ROI!!

Why a small business MUST use the power of PR

We often get asked why PR? What can PR do for my business that advertising or marketing can’t.  Whether you are a small business, start-up company, or simply expanding into a new country or geographical area, PR is an important tool for you. Here is what we think…

Credibility – Public relations holds a powerful position in the communications suite. One of the major impacts of PR is media relations, which assists you in achieving editorial coverage. People in your target market may see editorial as an independent and objective evaluation of your company. Due to the perceived objectivity of editorial coverage, PR is said to hold more credibility than other forms of marketing communication. Editorial coverage is trusted more than running an advertisement.

Cost Effectiveness – Public relations can be less expensive than other forms of paid communication, even if you hire an external public relations agency rather than performing this task in-house. Whilst you are paying for the services of a PR specialist, what you are achieving in the way of media coverage and changes in public perception may have otherwise cost you much more.

Exposure – Media coverage achieved through PR is likely to be more extensive than that which you would achieve through advertising, given a similar budget. Specialist PR people know which media to target for which message (and often have cultivated incredible contacts), what content the media want, when to pitch them which story and what is the best way to deliver your message.

Flexibility – Public relations has the benefits of being flexible in message content and being responsive to news. A skilled PR professional can turn around media releases in reaction to news or crisis situations within hours

Check out our site for some PR ideas

10 Common Small Business Marketing Mistakes

If you’re a small business owner, you’ll usually have to wear a number of different hats during the day to day running of your business and it’s not easy to be an expert in many different areas.

Marketing your business effectively is critical to its short and long term success, so here we’ve identified 10 of the most common online marketing mistakes small businesses make.

Not identifying a target market

Before you do any marketing at all, it pays to have a clear idea of who your product or service is aimed at. When it comes to designing your website and writing the content for it, you need to appeal to the people you want to buy your product or service and connect with them.

Not doing enough research

If your small business is offering a new or innovative product or service, how do you know that people will either need it or want it? The time to find out is not when you’ve had a website designed and spent a fortune on Google Adwords with little or no return; it’s at the planning stage.

Building a poor quality DIY website

In 2009, almost £50 billion was spent on internet retail sales in the UK, so if you want a share of the online market, your website will need to be up to scratch. There’s fierce competition online in almost every market sector so a poor quality website that looks homemade will not do you any favours at all.

Communicating features rather than benefits

Confusing features and benefits when it comes to website copy is a very common mistake. Let’s say you were selling golf balls online, a feature could be that they have a titanium core but why would that interest the reader? The benefit would be that you can hit them longer distances which of course would appeal to most golfers.

Advertising once and giving up

It’s widely accepted that people often have to see an advert or brand name 6 or 7 times before they will act on it. So if you decide to advertise your business online via Pay per Click, it pays to run a campaign consistently rather than doing it once and deciding it’s the wrong way to market your business.

Copying your competitors

Whether you’re trying to compete at a local or national level, copying your competitors is never a good idea whether it’s having very similar content on your website or using the same words on your Pay per Click adverts. Be innovative, do something different and people will notice your business.

Focusing all your attention on getting new business

It’s all too easy as a small business to concentrate on gaining new customers and forgetting about your previous or existing ones. Email marketing is a cost effective way to communicate with your client base and help keep them as loyal customers.

Not advertising when you’re doing well

If you fail to market your business when things are going well then you will find it difficult to expand as well as potentially missing out on lucrative orders for the future. For example shutting down a successful Pay per Click campaign or deciding to stop emailing past customers doesn’t make good business sense.

Having separate online and offline messages

It’s important to treat your online and offline marketing as one overall strategy. Too many small businesses fall into the trap of not combining their marketing efforts and end up with a haphazard approach that’s confusing to customers.

Failing to measure your marketing results

If you don’t measure your marketing results, how will you know what marketing efforts are worth continuing with and what’s losing you money? A simple “How did you find us?” option on an online contact form or analysing your Pay per Click statistics regularly can help you measure your return on investment.

Ethical Marketing

Marketing has expanded far and wide in the past few years. The continued growth of social media marketing and rise in mobile marketing will see this trend increase rapidly in the coming months. The internet is often seen as a dark and scary place with tricksters, hackers, cheats and swindlers hiding behind each click. Therefore,  it’s more important than ever to be trustworthy. As a starting point, here are the Igneous Marketing seven rules for ethical marketing:

1. Tell the truth. Don’t write or say anything, anywhere, that isn’t true. True is not a relative term—it’s black and white. If it looks grayish, don’t say it.


2. Say it nicely. Don’t write or say anything, anywhere, that you’d be ashamed to see on a billboard or on the front page of the newspaper.


3. Give credit and say thank you. It’s so easy to get information and much of it is free. But if you use information from the Internet, credit the source. If possible, link to it.


4. Protect your customers. Never use a story about a client, even if you’ve removed the name, without asking for permission.


5. Treat your blog like journalism, not marketing. Pretend the editor at the The Times is going to fact-check you.


6. Use ghostwriters with integrity. If the ideas come from an expert, and a writer builds an article, blog post, newsletter, or seminar content from those ideas, it’s the expert’s work.


7. Respect your competitors. It’s just bad form to say negative things about competitors. Differentiating your company means saying positive things about yourself that are truthful, can be supported with evidence, and make a difference to clients. Don’t lie to get competitive intelligence. Instead, consider asking your clients who switched or employees who moved. Follow competitors on social media, and set up Google alerts.

Don’t be tarred with the same brush – make sure your website or social media presence is seen and trusted

Subject Line Inspiration

We all know this:

Subject lines are the key to getting your email read. Once you get through the firewall and into the prospects inbox, the next big hurdle is getting your email opened and this relies 100% on your subject line. It must interest and intrigue the recipient enough to make them click open.

So the main piece of advice here is to cheat! Yep, you heard me –cheat. Copy and “borrow”. You need to see what others are doing and see what works. I spent 4 hours the other day scouring my inbox to which emails I had opened. This would have been due to the title and made a list of them. This gave me great insight into what works and I strongly recommend you do the same.

The key seems to be providing an intriguing offer and personalisation. A great one was “Simon, can Igneous Marketing profit from this simple, cost effective tool”. What a great line!

Below are the MarketingMixer’s top 50 opened subject lines.

Enjoy this Special Offer at Our New Location

25-40% off - Email-Only Offer – Today Only

Invitation-Only 2 Hour Event Starts 11:30 AM CT

Ends Today! 20% Off Friends & Family

Top 10 under $10

Free shipping - offer ends in 3 days

Free product with purchase of [product name]

[New Product] has arrived. Order now before we run out.

Earn double points for [insert product or action].

Last Chance: Get up to $25 now

Save 10% on your next order

Enjoy [season] with rates from $65

Service Notice: Exciting new changes at [your company]

An Exclusive Offer for You

[Your company] October Specials

Last minute deals, special offers, and new [product name]

Act Now to renew your [subscription name]

Online only: 25% off friends and family

Introducing our latest…[product/feature here]

[Product name] Promotion week. Save 25%

Extended for a day! Get Free shipping through Friday

Stock up and save 15%

Limited Supply: Limit 2 [product name] per customer

Ho-ho-ho: The [your company] holiday catalog is here!

Email subscriber exclusive: [Product name] sale is here

Ends Today: Take 20% off your entire order

Private Sale Ends Today

Your choice of amazing items $50 + under

Great gifts for [Dad, Mom, etc]

Best Sellers every [girl, boy, man, woman, dog, etc.]

Everything you need when the temperatures [rise, fall]

Free Shipping--Limited Time Offer

Another great source of inspiration is newspaper headlines. What gets read? What makes you read on? Apply this principle to your email marketing subject line. I have also been looking at twitter to see what inspires me to click the link.

Which marketing practices generate the most results

In my usual search for marketing news and insight, I stumbled across a report with some very interesting stats on business marketing practices. Here at, Igneous Marketing, we are often asked which of the millions of marketing practices, strategies and techniques give the best result and why. This is obviously impossible to answer in generalist terms but a report from MarketingSherpa seems to provide a few answers on this topic.

The report itself focuses on SEO but also offers some interesting insight into what other organisations (B2B) are using and what is bringing them success. According to MarketingSherpa, the top concerns of B2B Marketers revolve around getting more value and revenue out of limited resources – all in a fast paced world of increasing competition. Prioritizing resources for maximum impact is critical.

The graph below provides some interesting insight

The report also highlighted that obviously combinations work more effectively than single practices in isolation. The report also advocated regular activity, refinement and measurement.

Does this sound familiar? Have a look here!!