We wanna hold your hand!!!

Please sing this blog’s headline to the tune of the well know Beatles song!! Thank you!!

But why do we want to hold your hand – well having a hand to hold is comforting isn’t it? A romantic stroll holding hands, a walk to school holding hands with your child – how lovely! 

Yes you say but what’s this got to do with a business blog……

Okay, let’s get to the point – many clients have employed us in recent months to hold their hand as they dip their toe into the ocean of social media. We are there to guide them, teach them, develop strategies with them and answer questions which almost always begin with, “I know this might be a silly question, but………”

Whenever you are trying something new it’s nice to know you’ve got someone to turn to with those “silly questions” who can give you the answers and help you along the way. 

We work with some clients on an ongoing basis, managing their social media strategy day-to-day but with others we will work with them for one or two months, getting them started, building their confidence…..holding their hands!

If you’d like to find out more about how we can offer a bit of comfort and familiarity in what can be a scary online world please contact us via info@onetothree.co.uk

We're all going on a Summer Holiday......

......no more worries for a week or two!!!

Or is keeping in touch with your clients worrying you?

Many of our clients are like us, working mums who strive to find that elusive 'work life balance.' With the six-week Summer holiday just around the corner have you given much thought to how you will keep in touch with clients and prospects whilst you squeeze in some days out with the children and perhaps even a fortnight in the sun?

We think we've got the balance pretty spot on so thought we'd share with you how we do it!

In terms of current clients we are honest with them about how we work over the Summer - generally it is consolidated hours at our desks when the children are at sports camp or with Grandparents, catching up on emails of an evening and available by mobile phone for any emergencies.

With two of us running the business we also have the benefit of being able to cover for each other - if one of us it out of the country sipping a Cosmopolitan by the pool, the other takes on the responsibility for all clients.

This will be our third Summer of working this way and ..... well it works!

But what about keeping your own marketing afloat over the Summer months? If you've worked hard all year to build your blog, keep your website up to date and grow your social media presence you don't want to spoil that hard work with a 6-week silence!

Tools such as Tweet Deck and Hootsuite allow you to keep your online marketing ticking over, even if you don't have as much time as usual to dedicate to it. A bit of forward planning now and  you can have your Facebook and Twitter posts scheduled, your blogs written and ready to go live on your website and no-one will feel neglected.

As well as keeping our own presence up to date in this way we manage a number of our own clients's social media feeds, providing content and strategy......check out our case studies page to find out more about how we can help clients!

So relax, get scheduling and enjoy some well deserved time off this Summer!

Happy holidays!!

Hands up who REALLY evaluates their campaigns?

Hmmm I can see some half-hearted hands being raised at the back there! Are you the ones who have "evaluation" on your to do list but never seem to quite get around to doing it? Don't worry we're not here to tell you off - just to give you a gentle nudge in the right direction.

When you are busy putting a campaign together, working on strategies and developing content and nose to the grindstone getting information out there, it is all to easy to forget to evaluate just how well (or not) your campaign is being received.

For a PR campaign, tracking press coverage is the obvious evaluation tool. There are many ways to track coverage, the most fool proof is to pay a cuttings agency to do the reading for you. A daily report of coverage in the press (trade and consumer) lands in your inbox. Easy! These services will also cover broadcast media if you need them to. Then there are Google alerts which, if you use the right keywords, will pick up any coverage online. Of course effective PR isn't just about the number of mentions or the column inches - it is about the messages, the response from the public and what you do with it. Do you circulate your press coverage to your team? I bet you'll see lots of smiles and "oh wow we're in the newspaper" if you do! Great for morale.

If it's a new website (or an old one for that matter) there is the genius Google Analytics. Find out who is visiting your site and when. Where are they coming from? Searches, Facebook, Twitter....which pages they stay on and which makes them switch off in a nano-second. Used wisely this FREE tool can give you a real insight into how your website is performing and how it can be improved.

For social media campaigns you can track your "likes" and "followers" and see how the numbers grow. Check locations here - if you are a UK based company but all of your followers are from overseas you may want to re-think your strategy for building your network. How much interaction are you getting? It's all very well having a great big bunch of followers but if they're not commenting on your posts, retweeting you or interacting in anyway they're not hugely valuable to your business.

So why not make it your mid-year resolution to take the time to evaluate the marketing work you are doing. We promise it will be a real eye opener and you might even be able to pat yourself on the back for a job well done!

Nothing quite like a good old chin-wag!

For those of you who have met Lisa and I personally you'll know we LOVE to talk! (As it's Claire writing this I can say Lisa REALLY LOVES to talk!!) We think that meeting or talking on the phone with our clients and contacts and chatting through their objectives, needs and marketing dreams is so much more productive than relying on email.

Of course email has its place and most of us would be lost without it but I have once again today been blown away by the power of picking up the phone!

I am "selling" a story into the regional press for a client - it's a great story, a huge amount of money raised for charity, some great pictures but it's never easy getting coverage in the press.

The lazy way to send out a release is to just email it to the generic newsdesk@ email address of the publication, wait and see if there's any coverage.

But here at One to Three we don't do lazy.

We pick up the phone, we chat to the journalist, we remind them they ran a piece on the build up to the event last year, we are charming, helpful and we send well written press releases and clear well captioned images.

The result is not only coverage for our clients but relationships being built with journalists.

So why not try peeking out from behind your email for a change and you might just see a whole new world!!!!

Bite size chunks.....

.....is how we recommend our clients approach their marketing. We work with a huge variety of industries, from funeral directors to vets, stylists to HR consultants and the size of companies is just as varied too. Our biggest client is a global pharmaceutical company our smallest are sole traders working from their home office. The industry or size of a company makes little difference to our initial advice however - bite size chunks is the way to go.

Marketing is one big puzzle made up of many small pieces - websites and SEO, social media, PR, brochures, events, your brand........no business could (or should) tackle all of these at once.

For starters a strategy should be set out that includes clear objectives, messages and targets. Who in your team will be responsible for delivering results and do you have a budget in place to outsource some of the more specialist areas?

One of our most popular services is social media marketing - our two hour workshop provides all of the basics of what to say, how to say it, how to build a social media strategy. This is a classic example of one of our "bite size chunks". Our clients go away understanding more than they did when they first sat down with us but we are careful never to overwhelm.  You can find out more in our Social media case study

Our PR offering is the same - one of our bigger clients has two very separate audiences to connect with. Professional and consumer. We set out clear objectives for both, decide on a quarterly basis where the focus needs to be and map out a strategy that fits both in terms of being on message but also within budget and capabilities of the team.

So, think "canapes" rather than "all you can eat buffet" and you might even have room for dessert!

STOCK UP ON STAMPS……..or consider other methods of communication!

A first class stamp will cost 60p as of the 30 April 2012 and its second-class pal will rise to 50p!

If like one of our clients, you have up to now preferred to communicate with your clients by post (direct mail is still big business in some sectors) perhaps now is the time to consider new ways of spreading your message.

E-newsletters are becoming more and more popular as even the most basic web based email systems have become more sophisticated and design-led content can be viewed easily.

They can be set up quickly, easily and cost-effectively. Systems such as Mail Chimp even allow you to track who is opening your newsletter, who is linking back to your website – who doesn’t like statistics!!

Social media – Facebook for business, Twitter and LinkedIn are all fantastic platforms to tell potential clients all about you and what you can do for them. We have worked with a number of businesses lately who had been a bit scared of dipping their toe into the sea of social media but once its benefits were explained and tools like Hootsuite introduced, which is a great time saving device, there’s been no stopping them!

Getting your website spot on is also important – if you are running an event, for example, you could have all of the information neatly stored on your website – simply email your targets and ask them to take a look online. Anyone who isn’t able to do this can still be offered the chance to receive a copy of the information in the post but you are bound to save costs by giving email a try.

The team at One to Three won’t abandon good old snail mail altogether – we still get excited receiving a nice card in the post! - but we will continue to embrace all of the other ways of communicating that have been so successful for our business and for so many of our clients. And we may well stock up on our 1^st and 2^nd class friends (as long as the price isn’t printed on the stamp they will still be valid!)

What do your clients mean to you?

As we “march” into Spring we wanted to take some time to recognise the fantastic people who make what we do a pleasure – our clients!

We are lucky enough to work with some fantastic people and it means that we really enjoy coming to work every day and genuinely want to do a fantastic job for them. In our first two years we have worked with over 30 clients and this figure is growing on a weekly basis - in March alone we have worked on various SEO, social media and PR projects for new clients including a country pub, a hairdresser, a jewellery maker and a healthcare company in Australia!

We work for a wide variety of companies in industries as different as funerals and interior design, pharmaceuticals and recruitment. One of our clients has almost 1,000 employees others are sole traders.

What they all have in common is a desire to be forward thinking when it comes to their marketing and PR strategies – they are not frightened to take the leap into social media or to put themselves “out there” by using PR. They value us as part of their team and we take the time to really understand their business and their specific objectives.

One of our longest standing clients, Companion Care Vets (www.ccvets.co.uk) was listed as one of The Sunday Times Top 100 Companies To Work For on Sunday 4^th March. We are so proud to work with this fantastic company who have always treated us not as consultants or freelancers but truly part of the team.

Our clients mean the world to us – they are the life blood of our business, the reason we love what we do and the day that we stop getting excited about getting a client in the press or getting them on the first page of Google is the day we will stop what we’re doing….but we don’t think that’s going to happen, do you?!