We only need to look to the changes in our High Street in recent months and years to get an understanding of the growing importance of a business's online offer. When considered alongside the fact that OFCOM reported a doubling in the use of bandwidth by mobile devices in the last year, we can see the trend is not about to reverse. Although for many business owners the digital media territory may seem complex and confusing. However there are some simple ways of getting ahead of the competition without having to invest large sums of money. 

The first and perhaps most important step is to have a website that says all the right things about your business identity. If it looks bad and it feels bad then there's no point spending money on SEO or other advertising to get people to it ….it's not going to encourage them to buy.

By the same token there's no point having a beautiful professionally designed website with great functionality that no one can easily find. SEO (search engine optimisation) is the science of optimising your website so that it can be found by your target market. However it's not a science at all, it's a marketing exercise, as is the whole design and functionality of your website. It's all about the needs, aspirations and behaviours of your target market and if they're not fully understood by your web designer or SEO agency then you could find yourself spending time and money but not seeing the return on investment. 

At Morph PR and Marketing, we are an all service digital marketing agency based in Southsea, Portsmouth and we can ensure that your online presence is coherent and focussed and in doing so gives you the return on investment that you need.

By Jamie O'Reilly

Making the most of your Contact list with e-Mailshots

Most business owners understand the value of former customers as potential new customers - hence the widespread use of loyalty schemes. However there are still a lot of businesses in the UK and we see it here in Southsea, Portsmouth and more widely in Hampshire that are not taking advantage of new ways of marketing to their customer list - ways which are significantly cheaper than their printed counterparts. I'm talking here about e-Newsletters or e-Mailshots.

Why are e-Newsletters so useful?

• They're cheap
• They fast and direct
• They're very flexible
• You can see what works and what doesn't work very easily and adapt accordingly

What's more there are some great systems out there that enable you to create one of these fantastic e-Newsletters yourself. The market leading systems for the development and distribution of e-Newsletters such as Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor are great but be warned all US based systems are subject to very strict anti-Spam laws. Whilst legislation controlling Spam in the UK would not categorise as SPAM emails sent to a genuine list of your former customers, the Can-Spam law in the US would. This  means that if you use these US based systems to send out your e-Newsletters to people such as former customers who did not sign up explicitly for such emails on your website or at your busines, then you could fall foul of this law and at best see your account suspended or at worst find yourself in trouble with the US authorities. 

So if you're only sending e-mailshots to those people who have explicitly signed up for them, then the leading US based systems are probably the most sophisticated and easiest to use. However, if you're planning to send to a list of your former customers dating back for quite a number of years, then you need to opt for a UK based system.

If you'd like any advice on e-Newsletters/e-Mailshots and how they could help your business or want to discuss website design then don't hesitate to call us at Morph PR and Marketing. We're always happy to provide such advice free of charge.

By Jamie O'Reilly

We created this web design for the lovely Ros Norton's Hampshire Cosmetic Treatments based in their lovely clinic in Emsworth. We also created an e-newsletter template for them and a google places page.

We love running social media campaigns and have recruited a fab new member to our team to help us with all the extra work we've been doing recently. We'll be able to offer a whole new raft of services soon alongside our website design work, social media management we'll also be offering special hosting packages and search engine optimisation services along with our blogging packages. Of course we still look after PR for clients but our digital services are expanding to meet our customers growing needs. 

If you're looking for help with social media, web design or search engine optimisation or blogging

Call Jamie on 07825 872 079  or 02392 830 804 or drop us an e-mail via our contact page.

We've created some fantastic mood boards on PInterest for Conquest Fine Furniture in Portsmouth and then embedded them in the web design.

It's a great way to show off your mood boards and it links stright back to Pinterest where you can show off your other designs and mood boards. It's a lovely interactive tool for business and customers to interact and create designs together. 

The Pinterest boards look really cool when embedded in the websites too.