How do we remove barriers for women in business? The answer lies closer to home
Did you know there are approximately two billion mothers in the world and it’s estimated that only one per cent of them are entrepreneurs? I am in that one per cent and can’t help wondering why there are so few of us.
It’s not just mothers, though. Women generally are badly under-represented in entrepreneurship. Latest figures show they’re half as likely as men to be involved in starting a business in the UK, despite the Federation of Small Businesses estimating that there are 2.7million women that want to start one but have been put off by persistent barriers.
It’s hardly surprising then that Government has recently launched a review into barriers for women in business. The Treasury have rightly expressed deep concern at the large pool of untapped entrepreneurial potential going to waste and want to do something about it.
But shouldn’t Manchester be doing something about it too? This is after all a region built on can-do culture and we’re more than capable of making change happen. With a study earlier this year showing Manchester trailing behind Birmingham, Leicester, Liverpool and Bristol in a list of cities with the highest number of female entrepreneurs, perhaps we should be asking why we don’t have a better environment that encourages women to set up businesses?
While Government can help with many things like improving access to alternative forms of finance, childcare and targeted business support, there’s a lot that can be done locally, especially tackling cultural reasons that act as a major barrier.
Certainly a macho business culture can be off-putting to women. Last year a Northern Powerhouse event in Manchester celebrating the brightest businesspeople and executives was labelled “embarrassing” after all 15 advertised speakers were men. The Mayor for Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has said our region suffers from a “traditional macho culture” and from my experience business still has to improve.
I work in tech and have lost count of the amount of industry events I’ve attended where I’m the only woman in the room. Last year’s annual digital skills audit carried out by Manchester Digital showed that over half of the businesses surveyed had all male tech teams.
Fostering a more inclusive culture is just the start. Amplifying the great work of Northern Power Women and others, we need to celebrate our female success stories harder. And strengthen and join up existing business networks to ensure would be female entrepreneurs know how to easily access support, advice, mentoring and training.
Our region has a very big public sector procurement spend and improving the diversity of suppliers would also send an encouraging message. As would establishing better local partnerships to close the gender funding gap. And with research showing that 72 per cent of women in Britain can’t identify entrepreneurial women or role models building a business like the one they’d like to start, collectively we all need to do more to create and promote female role models.
So instead of waiting for the Government’s review to conclude, as a region I say we should all be upping our game to reduce barriers and create a better environment for female entrepreneurs to flourish. And if we need any further incentive, let’s not forget that Manchester’s adopted symbol is the worker bee – and worker bees are female.
Factory Advise Business to ‘Go and Grow Online’
This year We are part of a campaign called Go and Grow Online. Even now, in 2017, almost 50% of business have no online presence.
That’s why we have joined the team at Enterprise Nation this year to advise business in all things digital.
What is the Go and Grow Online Campaign?
The Go and Grow online campaign, has been created in partnership with Microsoft, Verizon and Curry’s PC world and is aimed at giving those micro start ups the best advice possible to help them reach customers online. The campaign launched with a cool party in the Shard, but here’s what It’s really about.
We will be offering two workshops, (Maybe more) in Manchester. It’s a twelve step program. Well, actually, it’s eleven, but we could add one on! Heres’ what we will cover.
The eleven step programme
Hardware
What kind of devices are you using? If you are trying to be the next Amazon with your trusty Packard Bell from 1994, It may be time to switch.
Domains
Do you have a domain? bestcompanyever.wix.com with an email address of entrepreneur@gmail.com just may not make the cut!
Hosting
Hosting. Make it fast, make it secure. Consider your storage, traffic and platform. We can give some sound advice in this area.
Office
Office Software. Choosing the right options. As a digital Agency, we don’t use Office much. For some of our clients however, it is their spinal column.
Web Presence
Your website. We develop bespoke webs and applications. Now, We could have you online in a couple of hours. Could we have you visible? No. So we don’t make quick websites. Does that mean though, that having a quick and dirty website is rubbish? Not at all. you should have some presence, to send your contacts to. We can advise on some of the cheaper ways to get yourself online, without making it hard to extricate yourself later on.
Legals
Legal stuff. we will talk about what you need to be legal online. This will depend largely on what you do and where you do business.
Email marketing. That old chestnut! How do you set up your campaigns for success? how do you stay relevant? We can show you how to keep clicks and opens high, by using simple segmentation.
Social Media
Social Media. Many start with this. But if not, how can you get set up? In the sea of networks, which ones should you use?
Online Visibility
Rising up search. Ok, this is where we are experts. We will tell you what works, what doesn’t, and where you could potentially do it faster.
Marketing Automation
Automation. We can demonstrate some of the tools you can utilise to make life easier!
Measurement
Finally, nothing is any use if you can’t measure your success. We explain the basics of analytics and other measuring tools and help you make sense of the data in it’s simplest form.
Finding Your Feet In The World Of Business
I come from a small satellite town in Manchester. Big business vacated our little homestead a long time ago when the cotton trade, nut and bolt works. Coal mines moved away from town. Growing up we got very little exposure to big corporations around here, until we ventured to the big city. This is a story about my transition from believing I’d never make it working for myself, or that people would ever take me seriously, to being the qualified, confident, Google Certified, Trusted Digital Media Advisor that I am today.
Back in September…
Back in September last year my business partner Andi and I embarked on a journey to the Netherlands. We were on a trade mission with a number of other delegates in the homewares industry. It was a jam-packed two days. We both arrived back in Manchester late one Friday evening absolutely buzzing from the two-day mission. It’s taken me 6 months to pluck up the courage to edit this article, and have the nuts to just bang it out there. Here goes nothing (it’s been sat in my WordPress drafts since October).
We’d been on a mission with Enterprise Nation’s Go Global before, so we didn’t expect to get much rest. (Or food as has become a tradition on our missions). This is to be expected as we had a lot of ground to cover. However, we both came back absolutely thrilled and inspired to get back in the office get cracking on some new ideas.
It’s never out of your reach …
The mission was centred around the homewares market. So you’re probably wondering what the hell we were doing there?! We go on these missions as a business to network, meet people, and try to find out what’s generally going on out there. But personally … I guess I’m always seeking acceptance into a world that I felt was too far out of reach. Let me explain. I’m from a small town in Manchester. The kind of place that looks to the big city with aspirational eyes. It’s easy to forget your place in the world. Back in the day, I found it hard to ask someone for £200 to build a website. I didn’t value what I did.
How on earth could I make enough money to pay the same as a stable job at a big company? The world of business seemed like a place that was reserved for men in crisp suits, not a modest young skipper from Atherton. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you look at the big city. When I look back at what we’ve managed to get through over the last two years I really didn’t have anything to be afraid of. I just needed a push to get me to change the way I thought about work and life in general. I never felt like I belonged in a place like the city.
In Amsterdam
It always seemed out of my reach. But then when you’re sat at the top of the World Trade Centre in Amsterdam with around 30 other entrepreneurs looking to get their products into one of Amsterdam’s biggest department stores – and you find that they have the same questions as you – it kind of blows that feeling of overwhelm out of the water.
We are a part of this world
I spoke to so many business owners, professionals, government officials, and countless other legendary people. It brought home that we are a part of this world, a world that seemed a long way away from my humble upbringings in a Manchester satellite town. It made me realise that everyone is in the same boat. We are all in this together. At one point in the past, we’ve probably all been stood in front of our bosses nervously clutching at a resignation letter.
You Do Belong Here
Some of the brands and companies that we were with are award winning. We were speaking to, and rubbing shoulders with some of the big players in the homewares industry. Lead buyers from De Bijenkorf (Dutch Selfridges), and John Lewis, The UK Ambassador to the Netherlands Also the founder of Makerversity. When you look at the magnitude of their positions, and their organisations, it’s easy to lose perspective. The view that in fact, we’re all just people. They didn’t care that I was from a small town in Manchester. Or that I have a rather unusual accent, or that I use daft Wiganese slang words most the time. They wanted to learn the way of the web, and about our business, about Manchester, about us as people. There was nothing scary about any of it.
Do What You Can’t
Everyone who we spoke to was buzzing about what they did. They do what they love, and in most cases turned their hobbies into jobs. Life’s too short to spend your days staring at a keyboard, doing something you don’t want to. Slogging away at a 9 to 5. Change the norm, break the routine, escape the traditional constraints to what society tells us “work” has to be like. To quote Casey Neistat … Do what you can’t. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG7dSXcfVqE
Links and Thanks
Thanks to Enterprise Nation and Emma Jones (@emmaljones) for their hard work and for making all of these missions possible. Shout out to Makerversity and Tom Tobia (@TomTobia) for showing us round their place, and for being just straight up legends. Same for @Iamsterdam! And an even bigger shout to all the mission delegates who were an absolute pleasure to meet and be around for a few days: @UuniHQ & @Conor_Garland(awesome pizza oven), @_repeatrepeat (sexy bone china mugs), @Goodordering (retro chic bags for all uses – should be bossing it in Amsterdam), @XLCORK (total leg-end and massive cork manufacturer), and loads of others that I’ve forgotten tags for but you can see more at: #GoGlobalAMS
WordPress Contributor Day for Dummies
I want to demystify WordPress Contributor Day. I’m currently working on organising and shouting out about the contributor day for WordCamp Manchester so I thought I would come to Paris and see the biggest WordCamp Contributor Day in Action.
When I first heard the term ‘WordPress contributor day’ I imagined it was a day for all the volunteers and speakers to get together. I’m not sure to what purpose, I didn’t think that far. But in case you did have any strange notions like me, here’s what it is. A contributor is anyone who wants to contribute to WordPress.
When I learned this, I thought I would have to know how to code the hard stuff and I don’t have that level of proficiency. This is not the case at all. l. In fact there are a dozen or so ways you can be a contributor.
Contribution isn’t limited to WordPress Contributor Day
Joining the slack community first is always a good idea. That way you can see all the different things going on every day. WordPress Contributor Day isn’t aren’t just limited to WordCamps. Do get yourself a wordpress.org account if you haven’t already and sign up to slack to join the dialogue like thousands of others. Here’s how to do that!
WordPress Core
Although you need to know some code, you don’t have to be an expert. There are contributions available at all levels. you can report bugs, test patches and fix bugs. There are even a list of newbie bugs available for you to look at if you are just getting started. You can see them here. For more reading see the contributor handbook on WordPress.org.
Design
Has core spooked you a little? You are more of a front-end type of person right? Why not join the design team where you will be able to input on how the user intarface of WordPress is shaped. This includes user testing. Remember, developers can make everything work, but without an intuitive user journey, it won’t be that great. That’s why thousands of designers have contributed to make the UI what it is today. So you can see just how far WordPress has come, this blog post shows 8 years of WordPress Dashboards and how it evolved
Mobile
This is suitable for Java, Objective-C or Swift Developers. Again, it’s good for anyone with an eye for UX design too. Mobile also needs testers, especially on Android, See the call for testers here.
Accessibility
As you may have guessed this team work on making WordPress as accessible to all as it can possibly be. This includes coding standards, audits, testing and also accessibility of the handbook and other resources. This group meets weekly on Slack.
Polyglots
You may not know a shred of code, but you may be able to speak and write more than one language. If so, The WordPress Community need you! Aside from joining in at WordCamps, there is also a global translation day you can join online.
Support
You can join the forums on Slack. Everyone knows how do to something, so from supporting users up to developers. Here is a quick start guide to what the support forums are all about.
Themes
If you create themes for WordPress, there is a team dedicated to reviewing themes that are submitted to the theme repository. This group is open to anyone who wants to help out. Read more about them here.
Documentation
Everything needs documenting and in a way that people understand. The documentation team make this possible. This could be contributor documents, developer documentation or the WordPress Codex. Again they have their own slack channel and regular meetings.
Training
If you know how to use WordPress, then the community would love to have you! It doesn’t matter where your skill level lies. There is the need to edit, write, audit, copywrite, teach and even review lesson plans for content. The team meet regularly in slack.
Meta
It’s the meta team that keep the wordpress.org websites up to date. This team work on a number of projects so the best way forward is to have a look and see if any of them match your skills and interest.
TV
All things video, A lot of learning, announcements, talks and training is available on wordpress.tv. The WordPress TV Team keep this maintained. If you know anything about video, join this team, but If you don’t, well they need captioners and translators too.
Flow
As the name suggests, this team are responsible for the whole WordPress experience, across all platforms, ensuring user experience is synchronous, seamless and well, flows. Because their description is a little arty, I would join in the Slack channel and see what’s involved! Details of how to do that are here.
CLI
WordPress-CLI for anyone who doesn’t know is the Command Line Interface. Making installation, automation, staging and deployment much breezier. If you are intrigued, check out their contributing guide for more information.
Marketing
Last but not least, The best product in the world is nothing without an audience. Even WordPress in all it’s ubiquitous glory still looks for ways to reach more people. If you are an ideas person this group could be for you. WordPress are looking for ways to market to agencies, the end user, and the community at large. So many users and developers still don’t realise there is an active communitu out there and what it is that they do. Hence this post. So if you have some marketing skills, it could be on the sales side, or the data analytics side, this team needs your help!
Not every WordPress contributor day involves all teams so the best way to get involved with WordPress at any stage is to join the slack team and jump right in!
The Consumer Path To Purchase. Why SEO is Never Quite Enough
If you are a business with an online presence, the end goal of your online presence is for people to buy your product or service right? Most of us know about SEO, but is that enough?
Are you relying on SEO?
So you have a website. Great! How are people going to find it? Ignoring all the offline methods, they are going to do one of two things. Search for you, or see an advert and click on it, or a mixture of both. Despite the data that is right in front of us, many website owners still distrust the power of digital advertising and rely on SEO. As a business website owner, you may have been told outright that advertising online is a waste of time and you need to rely on SEO. Whilst its an important strategy, most business owners would agree that in the offline world, one channel alone is not the way to grow customers. So why would online be any different.
Someone finds you, so what? What happens when they go away and find someone else? Its important to understand how consumers behave online. understanding this can help you reach them at the right moment. That micro moment.
With this is mind Here are some of our main considerations when it comes to the consumer path to purchase.
Your audience are informed.
Count on an audience that know their onions. On average we will research ten products or services before we commit to one. And many of us will spend hours and dozens of searches researching the best camera bag, the best climbing gear, the best car to drive if you have a family, the safest car seat. The list goes on.
Moral of the story is don’t just advertise your product. Be helpful. If you are seen as the one providing help along the customer journey, it can go a long way towards influencing that final purchase or sign up. Create informative content and advertise that content. Make sure you give consumers relevant information
Think Outside The Box.
We always ask people who they think their target audience are. Most people know who they want to sell to, but there may be audiences out there you haven’t considered. A permanent make up artist recently approached us. Her target audience was “Women 18-35 in the whole of the uk” of course this is pretty broad, yet also quite narrow. What about women over 35? Would they be more likely to have over plucked and misshapen brows. And the money to pay for them to be redone. And what about people suffering from hair loss. Our artist in question has had people fly across continents to use her. We explained that a little out of the box thinking could open up a whole niche market where she could add amazing value to people’s lives.
Moral of the story: Your audience may not be who you thought it was.
Never underestimate the power of Mobile.
Our mobiles are now our digital friends. People expect data at their fingertips. We get annoyed when it’s not there. Google data shows us the following: Smartphone use has risen exponentially in the last few years. 2014 was the year that mobile traffic surpassed desktop traffic. As of now 52% of searches take place on a mobile. Mobile is not the future. It’s the now.
Despite many customers and advertisers still denying this and saying most or all of their conversions take place on a computer, they may be leaving out the obvious fact that mobile was where they were discovered, and where the customer spent an hour doing their research, in a queue, in bed, in the bath. Well anywhere!
Be There.
So your customer found you online. And then they fell asleep. Or it was out of hours, or they put it out of their mind as something they might look at later. Chances are by tomorrow, they have forgotten and moved on to something else. Now this is where the power of remarketing comes in. And this is why organic search is never quite enough. No amount of organic search is going to haunt you around the web whilst you look at other stuff.
The usual answer we get here is “I don’t like those ads” but here’s the thing. They are getting smarter, more relevant, less obtrusive. So for anyone who thinks they haven’t been influenced by an ad, think again. You probably don’t even realise it because the average website conversion rate is 2%. 2 visitors in 100 do something. That could just be filling in a form, It depends what you measure. Retargeting can boost your conversion rate up to 400% read more about that in these 15 mind blowing stats about retargeting.
To conclude
In conclusion, if you think you are all set with your organic reach, or even that your search campaign is doing everything it needs to, think again. You are missing out on the market share, and so long as you are, someone else is taking all your custom.
We are Made By Factory. An award winning digital Agency in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, ran by design expert Andi Wilkinson & Ex Googler Ben Tennant. We advise business on all things digital including Google Ads & have ran workshops with The Business Growth Hub, Google & Enterprise Nation. It’s our mission to help business ‘grow online‘.
We were selected in 2017 as one of UK 30 Google Partner agencies to attend Google’s elite coaching programme ‘Elevator‘ and one of a select cohort of agencies with high growth potential to take part in the Business Growth Hub’s Greater Connected programme.
For some top notch quality marketing, without all the mystery, talk to us today!
Insights from Google AdWords August 2016
Everyone is a genius. But if you ask a fish to climb a tree it will spend the rest of its life believing it is stupid. How does that relate to Google AdWords?
Practically every client who engages us, spends a good portion of our meetings apologising that they aren’t really that good with the digital stuff. It’s funny. I explain that I never apologise to my mechanic that I don’t know much about car engines, I simply find a reliable one and trust their expertise. What is the point of that story? I will get to it as I go along.
At our latest training day at Google London this August we focussed on some of the latest developments in the digital landscape. Here are some of the insights we took away.
Advertising in the UK
Advertising is a £20 billion pound market. At 43% Digital marketing now takes the largest share. It is the highest value and is the fastest growing area of advertising. This article from The Telegraph last year showed we were already well on the way.
The fastest growing area within this is display advertising. With search engines such as YouTube being the second most popular worldwide, the potential for having your advert seen is growing daily. Although many businesses will use a search campaign, the amount using display is now growing faster than any other.
What is display and how is it different from search?
Simply put, think of search advertising as the yellow pages, where you can be in the moment when someone is looking for you. Think of display as the billboard, the magazine advert, the leaflet.
The Mobile Landscape
75% of mobile phone users in the UK are now using smartphones. Even with this percentage mobile advertising as a platform is still massively undervalued with people spending on average 2.5 hours daily on their mobile phones. Every time a user engages with content online, we think of this as a “micro moment”. All of those little moments are an opportunity for a potential client to engage with your brand, product or service.
Even things traditionally bought in stores are switching to mobile devices, for example, fashion. 55% of fashion purchased online is bought through mobile devices. In fact 49% of all goods bought online are now purchased through a mobile. Yet there is a discrepancy in the amount of mobile advertisers and expertise. The percentage of small business focussing on display is also a weak area. The great news about this is that there is a playing field with relatively little competition in some areas and display advertising still remains one of the cheapest options.
Google AdWords Display Advertising
So what can we use display advertising for? One of the great suggestions we took away was building a lead portfolio. When linked with Google Analytics, your Google Adwords campaign is collecting data with every impression. Every click to your website, whether or not they are an immediate customer become a remarketing opportunity, where you have the opportunity to advertise to those visitors as they visit many other sites on the display network, effectively building up a lead portfolio. So even if you are not fully “open for business’ there is opportunity to collect that audience for when you are.
Remarketing with Google AdWords
If you do already advertise with Google, are you taking advantage of remarketing? This is the single biggest converter with buyers clicking on adverts on average ten times before making a purchase. As a business, if you have been savvy enough to make use of a solid remarketing campaign, then currently you have chance to be streets ahead of your competitors and land those clients or customers that other people are losing. We advise all our clients to have a remarketing strategy, otherwise they are missing out on valuable custom.
Mobile conversions are on the up. So it’s vitally important to ensure you are getting your share of conversions by having a ‘mobile friendly’ website. This doesn’t simply mean it needs to be responsive, or look good on mobile. It means the customer journey needs to be simple and optimised for conversion. What do you ultimately want your user to do? How simple is it for them to do it?
Find customers similar to the ones you already have.
Are you making good use of your mailing list? Some businesses have been collecting email addresses for years but they still have no idea about the power those lists hold. With Google Customer Match, you can add your mailing list to your Google AdWords account. Then Google AdWords can match specific adverts to specific mailing lists or even sections of that list.
The amazing thing about remarketing is the ability to generate a similar audience from your existing visitors. Imagine if you have a thousand visitors to your site. Not the ones who just clicked and left but those who spent time looking at your content. We can take this data and generate many more leads who have never even heard of you. In a campaign like this that we run for one of our clients we generate six times as many brand new visitors. The power in customer match and similar audiences is immense & if you aren’t tapping into it you really should be!
Finding people who buy similar stuff
There are other ways we can find new visitors and leads too. We can find people who have intent to buy a product or service like yours. This is especially great if you sell products online or offer an online programme for example. As advertisers, we can track the browsing habits of users who research similar products or services. We can see if they display an good intent to buy or have purchased similar in the past. We can then show your adverts to those people.
One of my personal favourite Google AdWords tools is Gmail sponsored promotions. With the promotions tab, you can sponsor a Gmail promotional ad into the gmail inbox of the people you target. These could even be people who have bought a product or service from one of your competitors.
The landscape is changing, its fast, its unpredictable. But one thing we do know is that the GDN reaches 94% of the Global Internet audience. So if you aren’t on there you need to be and you need to do it now!
Made By Factory are a Digital Agency in Rochdale, Manchester. We are badged Google Partners. Call us on 0161 826 1222. Or drop us a line at hello@madebyfactory.com and speak to one of our Google AdWords experts today.
The Mobile Advertising Landscape.
Lets talk mobile advertising. We live in a multi-screen world. And that’s not just digital devices it includes TV, computers, mobile, tablet, desktop, laptops and an array of other devices we may use to connect to the outside world. In order to connect with our customers, then business must engage consumers in their multi device life.
Back in 2013, TV was still the forerunner, with mobile usage creeping up behind. Last year mobile had increased exponentially and taken over, dominating the time we spend engaged with major media. This article shows figures from the USA, but the trend is similar in the UK and increasing worldwide.
The time we spend on a mobile is 85% in Apps. Read More. We don’t use our phones as phones today. They are our own personal assistants. Usage of internet on computers is also decreasing. Tablet usage is highest amongst the older generation aka “silver surfers”
Smartphones are now the UK’s Number One Device
It’s official. We spend more time on our mobiles than any other device. The main reason for this has been the surge in 4G. See Offcom report. We spend at least on average 2 hours 51 minutes a day engaging with mobiles.
How does this relate to mobile advertising with Google? The Google Display Network (GDN) and its partners provide opportunity to engage with your existing, considering potential customers in app, whilst browsing and on You Tube to name a few.
Where are we spending our time?
One of the many lightbulbs to come from this event was recognising where our customer base is and how we need to engage with them. For those of you confident with Facebook campaigns, it may be that you have not considered the value of sponsoring your video onto the YouTube platform, which currently is the worlds second largest search engine. Four billion videos are viewed on YouTube a day, and six billion hours of video are viewed a month. Think its a waste of time putting an ad there? Think again. For the 85% of mobile device time spent in-app, only 20% or so of that is spent in Facebook. A well rounded digital campaign with multi channel options will give you the best chance at reaching people wherever they are.
Its common to think because your favourite app is Facebook, thats what everyone else does too, but thinking like this and ignoring the data can hinder your advertising strategy. For example most people I know use an iPhone. because of this am I to assume that iPhone has most of the market share in the UK and I should discount Android? In fact iPhone has around 15% of the market share. Android has over 49%. Think about it before committing to those limiting self beliefs I hear quite often, like no one uses an android, or AdWords is just a waste of money. Do your research.
Platform to Platform: Comparing Mobile Advertising.
A typical complaint is mobile conversion rate is higher, or not as many conversions happen on a mobile full stop. There are a few reasons for this, the most obvious of which you may not have considered. Our mobiles are our own little pocket helpers and they may be responsible for far more clicks than you realise.
Over 65% of us start our activities on a mobile and then continue on a laptop. 66% of UK Adults use smartphones daily, compared with around 40% 2-3 years ago. Over 90% of 16-24 year olds using one and the largest uptake being the 55+ demographic with over 50% now owning smartphones compared with about 15% three years ago.
77% of mobile users use said mobile for research. 46% of us have purchased on their mobile, but here’s the one we often miss: 40% have researched a product on mobile later bought on a computer and staggeringly 90% of people who research stuff on mobile go on to make a purchase. In fact Mobile devices are shopping assistants for consumers.
The “Showrooming” Phenomenon
This is when you go to view a product physically, in a showroom and then go on to complete the purchase online. Whilst mobile advertising you can reach customers at that critical time whilst they are in that all important “research” phase.
IAB reports on the digital AdSpend for 2015. UK spent over £8bn last year on digital advertising. Display is growing exponentially. Don’t take our word for it. look at the statistics here. 65% of people notice ads on their mobile.
Mobile Advertising: What can you Do?
One of the first things to do is ensure you have a well optimised mobile site. If you don’t have a mobile optimised site, why are you sending traffic to it?
Also remember most activities begin on mobile but don’t end there. 82% went on to purchase in store, 45% purchased online desktop / tablet, only 17% purchased directly on mobile phone. This means mobile has gone on to help with many purchases that ended up elsewhere. 40% of us went to a competitor if we landed on a site that was no good on a mobile. An Adwords Mobile specialist like ourselves will be able t0 show you how your mobile assisted in those valuable conversions by using cross platform reporting.
Mobile speed is important. On average one second improvement in mobile site working can improve conversations by 27% Try testing your speed with this handy tool from Google. Speed can depend on a variety of factors though, such as your hosting company. Our own site fluctuates on speed due to hosting. We keep file sizes to a minimum and for that reason we are currently moving to a much faster platform.
Mobile Site Optimisation
Some other things you can do is ensure your mobile site has click to call buttons for complex interactions. Do you have a complex form or extensive research on your desktop site that could be handled by a call if someone was in that critical research stage on mobile?
Make it easy to continue on another device. Perhaps by allow users to log in to your site with Facebook or Gmail. People move between devices during the day.
The best advice of the day was simply this. “Be there, Be relevant, Be optimised.” 40% turn to competitors after bad mobile experience. Ensure you do everything to make your customers as comfortable as possible when they are with you on a mobile.
With our changing landscape, we plan to offer much more advice on Mobile Site design. We always advise implementation of mobile best practice in our projects. We are a Manchester Digital Agency & badged Google Partners with specialism in mobile advertising, search and display. Talk to us today about your campaign strategy. Call 0161 826 1222 or drop us a line at hello@madebyfactory.com
Digital Marketing Jargon Buster – Our Handy Guide.
If you don’t know your PPC from your Pixel tracking, your SEO from your SERPS, your CRO from your CPC then this is the post for you. It’s a quick and handy A-Z of digital marketing terms, you may hear when talking to a digital agency and you may find it handy to speak their language.
Analytics
As the name suggests, the analysing of data based on people’s browsing activity on the web or mobile. Not as sinister as you may think, it’s a way to improve the customer journey by watching what people do and looking for ways to make it better. They have been doing it in supermarkets for years!
Apps (application)
Those things on your phone right? Not quite. It can be a program that runs on your phone or tablet, but it can run in a desktop browser too. Most people however think of mobile apps when they hear the phrase.
Banner ad
As the name suggests, an advert on a web page or mobile device. In the form of visual banner. It could be any shape or size. like a real banner.
Blog
Short for Web Log. A website you update regularly with content. usually on a specific topic. Like this website. its web, web, Google, company news and tech. It can help populate your site with relevant content and make you look a little more authoritative to those all important search engines.
Browser
That thing you use to surf the internet with. You may use Chrome, or Firefox, opera or Internet Explorer (Edge). You might even be reading on a mobile, they are also using a browser.
Click-through rate (CTR)
Mostly used in Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) How many times did your advert appear, and how many times did someone click on it? If it appeared 100 times and 10 people clicked, this is a 1-% CTR. It’s great we can measure this stuff since you would never know this from placing an advert, say in a magazine.
Content
The stuff you write and put on your website. or maybe its video or products. It can be anything. It’s all content.
Conversion (Also known as Goals)
Any action you decide that’s a goal for your user to perform on your website. Common goals are form fills. phone calls, email sign ups and monetary transactions. They could also include length of time spent on site. It really depends on the content and purpose.
Conversion optimisation
Getting more customers to complete the goals you identify above. This is where analytics comes in. You may find that you have a high rate of shopping cart abandonment. This could be because your website is too complex and confusing for the user. It doesn’t always matter what you might think of the customer journey, It’s good practice to see what the analytics reveal.
Cost-per-click
How much money you pay when someone clicks on your digital advert. Careful setting up and optimisation of campaigns can help to bring this down.
Crawler or Spider
A program that trawls the pages on the web to collect the information on them and help to index them in the right place so people can find them. A big reason why content and properly coded websites are a must.
Desktop
That big boxy computer in the corner. Not the laptop or the iPad or the phone. The big tower. the one that heats the room when you turn it on. Unless it’s a nice iMac.
Email marketing
Sending a nice email to advertise your goods and services. Keep it relevant and don’t spam.
Homepage (Can be referred to as splash page, index or landing page)
The main page of your website. The first one that people would see if they typed your web address into a browser.
HTML – Hypertext Mark-up Language
A markup coding language used by wenb designers to create web pages. See also Tim Berners Lee for his part in it all!
Impressions
How many times a digital advert might appear, regardless of whether its clicked or not. It’s important to get impressions in front of the right people. That way you can expect a higher Click Through Rate
Index
Literally an index of content. Like on Yahoo or Google. Not to be confused with the index page, which is also known as an index page, though this is largely webspeak.
Keyword
A word (or phrase) that you may expect your prospective visitors to search for in order to find your site or particular campaign. for example, “summer handbag sale”
Landing page
This is the first page of a website you land on. It may not be the home page of the site, but it should be relevant to what you are searching for. You will see this quite often with signup websites, or member websites where the landing page is the signup form.
Link
It could be text, image or a video but anything that you can click and it will take you to some other content.
Mobile
A device which is mobile. A tablet or smartphone.
Organic listings
Where your web page ranks on a search engine naturally. “Oh I am top of Google when you type in Plumbers in Timbuktoo”. Remember organic listings are really only useful if people are searching for that keyword. It’s pointless ranking naturally for a phrase that only you will type in to a search engine.
Pay-per-click (PPC)
A form of advertising where you pay for users to click on your advert. Highly effective if set up and managed properly.
Query or Search term
Whatever you type into the browser when you want to find something. “Where can I buy tickets to Burning Man”?
Ranking
Where you sit on a search engine for a particular phrase or term. – See also “organic listings”.
Search engine
Popular ones include Google, Bing, Yahoo. A tool that allows you to search a word or phrase and return an index of content based on your search.
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
Enhancing the content of your website so that it improves the visibility in the organic listings of a search engine. For a comprehensive 101 guide, see Moz Beginners guide to SEO.
Search engine marketing (SEM)
Where you can bid for your ad to appear alongside organic search results. (See also Pay Per Click). A good way to get found and fast.
Search engine results page (SERP)
What appears on a page when you search for a key word or phrase. The results of your search.
Session or Visit
Basically content you create and share across the web with others. Videos, blogs and posts to social networks.
Social network
An online community. The most popular of which is Facebook but is in no way limited to the above. Networks exist everywhere and for various reasons.
Traffic acquisition
How you get traffic to that there website. Is it via Organic listings? Social media? Email Marketing or PPC? Ideally it should be a range of all of the above.
Unique visitor
An individual visitor to your page.
URL or Uniform resource locator
The web address where we will find your content. for example madebyfactory.com
This list is by no means exhaustive, and credit goes to our Google Partner insights for the index, although the explanations are ours. If you think we have omitted anything in this guide that could be useful, please drop us a line at hello@madebyfactory.com
Logo for a fiver? The Real Evolution of a Logo
“But that site will do my logo for a fiver!!”… Some of my graphic designer friends are feeling their noses rightly put out of joint by the revolution of ridiculously cheap graphic design – how on Earth can any of us compete with that? And how come we want to charge what we do?
I’m just working on a project I’m really rather excited about! They, I might add, have not asked if I can do their logo for a fiver (in case you were wondering), but the creative process has inspired me to write about what your friendly neighbourhood designer can do for you.
Jackson Pollocks to it all.
After meeting with a prospective client, who tells you they feel they are in need of a good old rebrand, you have the oh no second and panic. It’s like someone giving you the responsibility of looking after their two year old triplets all day, whilst at the top of a castle with no real safety rails – you panic. You panic because you want to make sure you come back to them at the end of the day and they can say to you ‘thank you so much for taking such good care of my triplets, I’ll recommend you to ALL my friends. Oh and by the way, my triplets are good now for the next few years! That said, you know you can do it and do it well.
“thinking time”
Then you go home. Now me, sometimes I draw, sometimes I don’t. Mainly, I think. I thought about this one on and off for about three days. Yes three days of thinking time, where my mind was mulling over what this design should look like. Although you can’t charge for lying in bed thinking, your fee does involve the ability of your creativity, and this is all fed by the thoughts you have. Whilst I was thinking I also had a flick through the logo books I keep on my shelf, and looked around the logos of the same industry. One thing we know as graphic designers, is that you can’t just whizz out a logo because you think it looks good; people who can make a logo for a fiver think that.
“Hey I’ve been waiting for ages to use this AWESOME skull Mr accountant!”. There are conventions and rules and they have to be followed. You might assume Jackson Pollock just threw paint at a canvas, but he didn’t. He thought about it first and then he looked at other paint thrown at canvases et cetera. … I also refreshed my colour theory. Though I do know this: it’s good to have a re-read on what colours are good for which industry and why. And I really wanted to use orange.
“I had a vision”
As I was driving home from North Wales on a Sunday evening I had this whole idea mapped out in my head and I just needed to get it on screen, so after going to sleep with it fixed firmly in my head, Monday afternoon and evening was spent getting the first idea down.
I couldn’t get punchy Helvetica out of my mind, even though some now feel it’s highly ubiquitous and even cliché, it happens to just work here and since so many famous brands use it, it has that familiar shape that we have come to love and trust. I saw orange, black, white, helvetica and a gavel. Here is what it translated to. I saw it being white on orange signage and being on t shirts, mugs, pens, the back wall of the office and so on, I had a vision. I spent a good four hours playing about with this.
No items found.
“Make it Green”
I put the vision to my fellow creatives. The general consensus was good, with a few suggestions about the gavel. “Face it forward so it looks to the future”; “Make sure the hammer and the tlh are always the same colour, they are two elements that should always be inexorably linked”, “MAKE IT GREEN!”… All suggestions I took on board and went back and spent another hour or so tweaking. I made it green. I also made it yellow. I’m not too good at choosing greens, so shut my eyes and thought, who’s green? Pets at home, Asda, Go Compare. Finally i plumped for Go compare and took my eye dropper to it and asked “Whad’ya think”?
“Hmm – it looks a bit like a car garage” – I knew it!! Who says colour choice isn’t important and why does Go Compare Green make people think of cars? It’s not by accident I can assure you. A kindly designer came up with a nice velvety classy green for me and this was the next idea. The logo was ‘facing forward to the future’. Now at this point I’m not entirely sure why, but it did.
And the winner is…
I sent my ideas off to my client, quite excited about them and feeling accomplished. I then experienced a period of doom, like on a reality TV show where they pause whilst they announce the loser… and then came the moment of truth. “We really like them but can we have some more ideas” – Naturally I expected this, & I had more in the bag. The next day I sent the kids on their way, came home, made myself a freshly ground coffee and spent the next five hours creating ideas. one after the other, some good some bad, some really ugly.
This was when I reached a low point. In my head I saw eighties pool hall, first year student and “Irish Pub” all that was missing was a four leaf clover.
I did like the Gotham font of “Irish Pub” though. So I took it to a new screen and just wrote TLH. I had researched some multi colour logos I liked, and I wondered how they would look as a tessellated design, so I began to push and pull on those handles and these ideas started to form.
“I don’t like it”
Amongst other concepts I was fairly pleased with this one although not as fond of it as the Orange. I asked my fellow creatives once again. One thing I love about my fellow designers is they are direct, like me. Some people hate that, but we need it in this field.
“I don’t like it, it looks car industry based” came the first critique. He immediately put me off my design and I knew he had a good point. Although well executed, it was kind of logistical looking. The client liked it though – and the client is the one you are aiming to please. they also liked the Orange but maybe in yellow. I wondered if there was anything I could do subliminally, maybe some kind of mind control? Naturally I wanted my client to be super happy, but I wanted them to have the right fit for their business too. I had a vision remember?
Another meeting later and an hour spent with the client, they liked the tesselation but wanted to know if it could it stand out more, the TLH? Maybe take the extra squares away? Maybe put a black outline round it? I did stamp my feet at the outline to be fair, and pulled a whiney face, but i took on board what they were trying to achieve and translated it into a design. Here’s how that went: I actually liked it.
“It looks like Top Gear”
I liked it until I posted it to my fellow creatives. “Does anyone else get car from this?” When my son breezed passed, he said “Why am I thinking about Top Gear?” I have trained him well of course, since Helvetica is the Top Gear typeface. I still like this, but I do get that it looks automotive. Luckily for me at this point, I got an email saying “we know which one we like!” – You guessed it, the first one! Faith restored in myself! It didn’t stop there; I just tend to create designs, get caught up in it, create loads of iterations and they will be out by a few pixels.
So at this point, I recreated the whole thing from scratch in Adobe Illustrator; I saved it out as an eps, a jpeg a png and everything else needed to create a a variety of formats to stick on hats, pens, t-shirts, cups, the moon.
“A Logo for a fiver?”
So with all of these amazingly cheap services being offered, are we being put out of business? Can you really get a logo for a fiver? Like everything else, it seems to be a huge con using a lot of black hat techniques. All you have to do is a google search for reviews of sites offering this service; You will see loads of people offering to build you backlinks and give you fake book reviews. I found it to be full of shady dealings. What could be shady about a logo for a fiver though? Many of the ‘designers’ are simply plagiarising other people’s work and passing it off as a new design.
I thought about employing these services myself until I read this article on the $5 logo by Folyo Blog – especially interesting is hows he finds the original versions of the designs that were submitted to him. It may have only cost you £5, but what if you then went on to pay thousands for signage, van graphics or stationery? In summary, if you try and get a logo for a fiver, you get what you pay for. In fact it may end up costing YOU a lot of money; so, you wouldn’t get what you paid for at all.
So if you don’t want a logo for a fiver, but you would like to employ the services of a friendly designer – one who will work with you at every step of the design process until you are happy with the outcome – then feel free to hit us up.
View some of my other ‘makes’ so far. Trip Festival Poster. Purple Radio Poster. Almumia Poster. Nicky Siano.
About Factory
We are Made By Factory. An award winning digital Agency in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, ran by design expert Andi Wilkinson & Ex Googler Ben Tennant. We advise business on all things digital including Google Ads & have ran workshops with The Business Growth Hub, Google & Enterprise Nation. It’s our mission to help business ‘grow online‘.
We were selected in 2017 as one of UK 30 Google Partner agencies to attend Google’s elite coaching programme ‘Elevator‘ and one of a select cohort of agencies with high growth potential to take part in the Business Growth Hub’s Greater Connected programme.
For some top notch quality marketing, without all the mystery, talk to us today!