Blog

With the festive season in full swing, we’d like to introduce one of the wonderfully exciting new clients we’ve been working with this year. Internationally renowned, German Christmas decoration retailer, Käthe Wohlfahrt opened their UK shop in the heart of York this summer. Now occupying the beautiful medieval building on Stonegate, formerly Mulberry Hall, Käthe Wohlfahrt is bursting with unique, hand-crafted Christmas decorations, gifts and collectables. Not only are their products brilliant, the company is a shining example of how to build business success by living your brand values.

In this blog, we’d like to share with you a very exciting branding project we’ve been working on this year with one of York’s most respected local charities. We worked with York Against Cancer (YAC) to develop a new brand that truly reflected the organisation and its values as it approaches its 30th year in 2017.

I recently delivered a workshop at the Welcome To Yorkshire Y Business Hub event on the secrets of content marketing. I’ve talked about this subject before on this blog, but this time I’d like to focus on ensuring your content marketing aligns with your business strategy.

Now most of us are back at work, school terms have begun and life is returning to its familiar patterns. With Christmas looming, now is the perfect time to take stock, to think about your business with a renewed perspective. Don’t banish those inspiring thoughts that bobbed to the surface while you were lounging in the sun or hiking through the mountains. Now is the time to capture those thoughts that emerged while your mind was clear – and act on them – before the daily fire-fighting begins.

While the politicians argue among themselves about how to go about exiting the EU, we must get on with running and growing our businesses. So what should we do?  

Everyone talks about the importance of marketing for any business, but how many people really understand what marketing is? Some think it’s all about the way a business looks: its logo, corporate colours – its ‘brand’. Or about the ‘mission’ and ‘values’ of a business. Others think it’s about generating sales leads, from creating brochures to designing adverts. All of these are elements of marketing – they are manifestations of the purpose of marketing – but they are not the whole story. Marketing is not something you can add on to a business plan or strategy as an afterthought. It needs to be integral to everything your business does. To understand why, you need to understand what marketing really is.

We had a chat with Colin, our SEO expert at Edge45  who we work closely with, about Google’s latest algorithm known as ‘Phantom’ which basically aims to identify and separate out high quality websites from low quality ones and ranks them accordingly. So reassuringly, this means that companies with websites that send out the right ‘quality’ and ‘trust’ signals, and provide a great user experience will rank higher than those who don’t.

Why should I work with a marketing agency? What can they do for my business that we can’t do ourselves? Why not just employ my own marketing person?  These are some of the questions we hear a lot. In this blog, we’d like to demystify what agencies do, dispel some of the misconceptions and highlight the benefits of outsourcing your marketing activities. 

These days marketing is ‘social’. If you want to get more social and but don’t know where to start here are some top tips to help you unravel the social media maze. In a nutshell the aim is to attract followers and develop engagement through likes or shares of your posts. You want ‘engagement’ and remember it is ‘social’.

Last month we talked about the importance of content marketing. But how do you generate the content you need to fuel your content marketing machine? Where does it come from?

If you’re a business owner, you’ve probably heard that content marketing is the sure-fire way to win and retain customers these days. But what exactly is it – and why is it so important? We think this is one bandwagon that’s worth jumping on, so here’s our quick and simple guide to why it matters and how to go about it.

It’s that time of year again, leaves are turning golden brown, the nights are drawing in and the kids are back to school. Many businesses we work with see September as that time of year when you ‘start afresh’. Time to write your marketing plan. Sounds simple, but where do you start? Here are 13 steps which we use when helping our clients to think ‘outside the box’ and get organised.