Posts

Each year the hysteria seems to increase with these key internet shopping days, and like it or loathe it, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are now established here in the UK. If you are an online retailer, can you afford to miss out, and which one do you target?

Key Dates for 2015

Black Friday this year is on Friday 27 November.

Cyber Monday is on Monday 30 November.

History of Black Friday

This originally started out as an American fad, the Friday following Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday of November). Thanksgiving is basically the US version of our Harvest festival, but where everyone has a day off and has a big turkey dinner.

According to Wikipedia, the term Black Friday came from the 1960's when retailers traditionally broke profit and "went in to the black".

The day after thanksgiving has apparently always been busy, as Thanksgiving is a (rare) public holiday. In recent years stores have opened earlier and stayed open later to capture the next day sales, and the online age has fostered and turned Black Friday into a shopping frenzy, mainly fuelled by the media.

As we have a global economy, Black Friday is turning into a world wide epidemic, and has grown and grown in popularity in the UK, to the point that it is reaching hysteria levels for bargain hunters,

History of Cyber Monday

In contrast, Cyber Monday is just simply a clever marketing stunt created by online retailers. It seems it came about by looking at buying patterns, and as people went back to work and accessed their much better internet connections, they decided to buy lots of stuff online. So Cyber Monday was born.

Marketing spin says it is aimed at smaller retailers who don't have the marketing clout of the big boys to capitalise on Black Friday. Again due to global economics, Cyber Monday is now an important day in the UK retailers calendar.

Should I discount and join in?

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are nothing but good news for consumers. That said, you have to be streetwise as old lines and stock are offloaded at what seems to be bargain prices, which would have been discounted anyway.

There is an argument that Black Friday hurts retailers as people hold off buying products, expecting them to be heavily discounted during these two manic shopping days, which then screws up retailers sales figures. There is already a backlash by some major stores refusing to join in, so maybe the bubble is finally bursting? No doubt there will be plenty of post Black Friday analysis in the media.

Should you join in is down to you. There is a lot of hype to piggy back off, so if you have stock you want to dump, it's a good time to do it  

Obviously it's not going to applicable to lots of business types, can't see a rush to buy discounted advertising  But if you are an eCommerce shop and/or bricks and mortar, then there is a huge opportunity to be had if you can sell volume and have the margins to play with.

Sources:

Wikipedia Black Friday and Cyber Monday

So will anyone be taking commercial advantage of Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year? Has anyone had a success in the past? Or maybe horror stories to beware of? 

Interesting, do you think your logo needs updating for a reason, ie changing brand, image to push up sales, or is it you just fancy a change? Just curious what the motivation is for changing your logo, which is potentially can have a huge impact if people no longer recognise you, or mistake for a competitor.

Also, in this modern age, there is one argument that logos actually detract from online stores and with so much competition, it is better to just shout your name/web address so any browsing traffic will remember to come back, or spot you in future search results. Or have your wording as the logo.

Our logo is all that remains of the original My Local Services which I bought in 2005, albeit in different colours. We've toyed a few time with dropping it, but analysing our back link profile, lots of people use it to link to us, and it seems to be visually familiar.

Always good fun to look at some of the competition if you do a search for your industry as that can be a great pointer for ideas.

Then there is the most obvious logo in the world, Google!

To be honest logo designers aren't very expensive versus a competition, plus you can give them a brief with your ideas and they will come up with concepts. Even if you do a competition, you will still need someone to create high resolution versions for you, which a logo designer will do as part of the job.

What you could do is get a designer to come up with some concepts, and hold a competition to see which is peoples preferred one.

If you do want to do a competition style logo post, maybe shove it in the website review section.

Had a pleasant surprise today from a healthcare salesman 

To be fair, rarely respond to cold calls, especially around insurance, but the appointment/lead generator was very professional and pressed the right buttons, so decided to agree to an appointment.

After some diary scheduling, arranged a meeting in the office today, only to realise I'm working from home today. Humble apology over the phone, and luckily the chap was heading my direction anyway, was actually 30 mins early, so offered to swing by my house.

Was in anticipation/dreading a 2 hour full on sales pitch, which in reality lasted about 10 minutes. Looking at my current policy and circumstances, his advice was to stick with my current provider for now, and he would touch base next year at renewal time. 

Thoroughly nice chap, proper old school, with customer service and reputation coming first. Would most definitely recommend if anyone is in the market for health care insurance or advice.

10/10 Keith Iliffe from www.wpa.org.uk

Great post Paul. (Your web links tripped our filters, as its seen as self promo).

Very good point on SEO, so many people have been bitten so many times. To do some courses yourself and take charge is very proactive and a great strategy if you have the time.

Holding the top for Florists in Middlesbrough is a good achievement, does that convert well for you? It sounds like a logical and profitable search phrase for your business. A lot of people fall in to the trap of optimising search phrases they haven't fully researched, or are railroaded by seo companies looking for easy wins, rather than terms that will genuinely generate leads and sales.

Following Google webmaster guidelines is sound advice and as old as the hills, but very few people seem to listen 

In March this year, the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act received Royal Assent (green light from the Queen) and it's primary purpose is to cut red tape for business owners.

The propaganda is that it will help boost the economy and make the UK be seen as a destination to do business.

The act is getting rolled out gradually, the first stage abolishing Bearer shares (shares not assigned to an individual) happened in May. October saw a change to partially suppressing the date of birth for directors on companies house, as well as accelerated strike off procedures for non trading companies.

December 2015 will see a simplified process for director disputes and registered office disputes, with the next changes scheduled for next April when businesses will need to disclose anyone who has "significant influence or control over the company, trust or firm".

I can see that having some interesting interpretations. 

So something else to keep on your business radar 

A full breakdown of all the changes can be seen here:

Gov.uk - The Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act

Yep, good lesson in life there, you get what you pay for. Steer clear of cheap Indian or East European based resource as it normally ends up costing more in the end!

I guess it depends on the definition of "IT". Most small or micro businesses need nothing more than a laptop, printer, simple accounts software, maybe Microsoft Office and an email service like Gmail. Any website will be managed by their hosting provider.

If the laptop breaks they take it back to the shop. As a business scales, then obviously you need to think and consider some kind of budget, so I'd be surprised to hear most small/medium have zero budget.

With most services now available very cheaply in the "cloud", what sort of IT services in particular are you referring to? Office hardware or software services?

You can get it from Ocado apparently. Googled it out of curiosity just to see if it was made of Rhino hoof or Elephant dung

https://www.ocado.com/webshop/product/Cadbury-Lunch-Bar/95493011

A great infographic from Motor Codes as we meander towards Winter  How many of us leave it to the last minute, or don't bother at all. Guilty as charged...

Some more seasonal motoring advice on their site as well:

adr.motorcodes.co.uk/motoring-advice/seasonal-advice/

Once in a while someone in Google comes up with a really good idea, and this time someone thought to put the PPC, analytics and Google My Business help forums and advice under one roof.

It got rolled out yesterday and is called the Google Advertiser Community.

It's a quite a good and intuitive layout, but more importantly there are lots of experienced people there to offer sound advice. It's also a good resource if you want to take your analytics or adwords knowledge to the next level and start playing with some advanced techniques.

It's well worth a look, and worth bookmarking if you run in to any problems, as well as coming here obviously 

https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/

So it's that time of year again when marketing departments have a chance to show off their latest efforts in Christmas creative, and see if they are worth their salaries.

It's a tough one for Cadbury, as it is against a backdrop of being featured this week on Watchdog for shrinking chocolate bars and less chocolates per box, whilst visually retaining the  same size. Then with the possibility of job cuts at the Bourneville site in Birmingham according to the news this morning.

Maybe not the best timing, as the advert went live this morning, but with a marketing and creative head on, have Cadbury been thinking outside the chocolate box (sorry ) or does this advert leave you thinking "fast forward".

It's harder and harder to impress us fickle consumers, especially as fewer and fewer of us sit and watch live TV, so what do you think?