Marketing as an Art

The art form of marketing involves many non-verbal communication processes involving subtle and subliminal messages addressing specific audiences. The art form of good marketing consciously and unconsciously creates connections by playing on emotional ties and utilising certain aesthetics, creating involvement between consumers and the advertising. For example the Andrex brand uses some fundamental tools to create emotional ties to their adverts. Their image of a golden Labrador puppy connotes cuteness, playfulness and loyalty, initially from the dog but this symbolises their brand, so ultimately from the company as a whole. This results in unconscious and conscious emotional ties being developed between the consumer and the brand.

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Social media flourished in 2009 and this year it’s going to become an even bigger player in the way we browse, consume and share information online. Below are my predictions for the biggest trends regarding social media’s development in 2010. (more…)

Google has unveiled its new service to aid searchers who are looking for specific requests in their local area. If you type in the word restaurant or pub then Google will automatically try to predict where you live and give you the best results for your area.

This service was brought about by the fact that the most people searching were not inserting the location when posting a search query, just inserting “restaurant” and not “restaurants in London” for example (more…)

After announcing it at the Mobile Congress event in Barcelona back in February Yahoo made its mobile website and iPhone app available for this past week.

Yahoo has managed to integrate its oneSearch, Go, oneConnect and onePlace together to provide an easy to use mobile service. (more…)

The developments of the mobile web are akin to those of the Desktop Web back in 1998 according to research conducted by Jakob Nielson in his alert box web page at www.useit.com.

Testing mobile websites through various means he found that they failed on most of the tests he worked on. For starters the sites tested were found to have very large pages with large images or long pages that were impossible to see clearly on the smaller screens of mobiles.  (more…)

Microsoft has beaten rivals Google to secure being the default search provider of America’s soon to be largest wireless carrier Verizon. The deal was cited as a major victory for Microsoft with both Google and Yahoo! bidding for the same service. Verizon are currently closing on a takeover of Alltel to give them 78 million subscribers in the US taking them past AT&T as the number one carrier in the US. 

Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer announced the deal in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electrics Show after a long period of speculation. The deal also allows for Microsoft to manage the search and display advertising on Verizon’s mobile internet service as well.  (more…)

So 2009 is upon us so what do we think will happen within the search engine optimisation (SEO) industry in 2009? Will it follow the economic trend of the past few months or be the exception to the rule and see a rise in popularity. What other directions should we be looking towards for our clients in this coming year?

How will the fortunes of standard search engine marketing such as pay per click (PPC) stand up now that people are tightening belts? Growing trends have shown us that the way forward for a lot of our clients is to pursue higher organic search listings. This trend occurred even before the economic slowdown had begun. (more…)