by Yannis Marcou 
|August 19th, 2010
News International Commercial launched a week-long campaign to boost brand awareness of The Sun amongst planners and buyers from London’s top media agencies.
The strategy was for 5 days to immerse the audience into The Sun brand, to engage them with daily entertainment and to present them with cold, hard success facts about the newspaper. The campaign was extremely targeted and included product sampling, daily quizzes, prize draws and plenty of factual information. Skyron created, hosted and supported all the digital assets including 5 quizzes, registration, winner selection facility and a series of email announcements and reminders starting a few days before the campaign kicked off and ending a few days after.
The B2B campaign was extremely well received with over 75% of people visiting the microsite registering for the daily prize draws.
by Yannis Marcou |August 12th, 2010
We have been commissioned to create some engaging interactive advertising for a global B2B brand that will run on a publisher’s iPad application. Having spent some time reviewing the best and most adventurous advertising on iPad apps it feels like we are back in the late 90s when a few pixelated GIF banners went on to profoundly transform the advertising industry. At the moment most iPad app ads are simply print ads that magically rearrange themselves when the iPad changes orientation. Some brands have started experimenting with more interactive formats but so far they are the exception.
The opportunity for B2B brands is enormous
Demos of solutions or products are very often a critical part of the B2B marketing and sales process of many organisations. But what does it take to stick a prospect in front of the product/solution demo you spent days creating? If you go through your usual sales process it might take months of hard work to set up the demo meeting; if you advertise on your industry’s portal, you’d be lucky if more than 0.3% of users click to see your online demo; if you try to gather a crowd for a Webinar, the reach is extremely limited.
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by Yannis Marcou |July 12th, 2010
We have banned the use of “mailto” links at Skyron. “mailto” links are costing you leads and there is absolutely no reason for their existence on your B2B website. “mailto” links give you no control:
- No control over the user experience. Your prospect arrives to your well designed, carefully written and lovingly maintained webpage and she decides to get in touch. Great! But then she clicks on your “mailto” link and suddenly it’s all gone; gone are the branding, the messages, the effort and the consistent feel. Outlook (or whatever) comes up and she is off on a new journey dictated by Microsoft (or whoever).
- No control over data collection. So the prospect managed to send an email via Outlook. Do you remember who the listed recipient is? Sales? Support? Recruitment? What was the topic? Was it a lead or was it an existing customer expressing a concern? Will it be entered into your CRM system? Will the recipient act? If you care about such information, “mailto” links can make your life very miserable.
- No control over quality. “mailto” links are easy to use and as a result the quality and relevance of the email enquiries is likely to be low.
Stay in top form
Replace all “mailto” links with forms; well structured, written and designed and featuring a strong call to action. You will fully own the user experience (even the confirmation page can be an opportunity for further engagement), all form data will be saved in whatever way is meaningful and useful to you and the enquiries will be of much higher quality and relevance. You can have a large single form with a dropdown menu of subject options such as Recruitment, Customer Service, Media, Sales, etc. Alternatively, you can have multiple shorter forms peppered across the website, where they are most relevant.
by Yannis Marcou |June 29th, 2010
The Sun Classifieds team are targeting the recruitment sector with a new message and a lead generation campaign. At the heart of the campaign is the microsite designed and built by Skyron.
The purpose of the microsite is to communicate the wide and diverse readership of The Sun, to share insights about reach and engagement and to encourage new business enquiries. The microsite’s rich interactive content has been composed to resonate with and appeal to professionals in the recruitment industry.
Visit: www.themisconception.co.uk
by Yannis Marcou |May 30th, 2010
Crossing arms has never been the same since I read Persuasion (James Borg, 2007, Pearson Education). I strongly recommend the book for its great insights into body language, memory control and conversational dexterity.
This great infographic is another reminder of how important both mastering and interpreting non-verbal communication is and also how many times we come across people in meetings who get it so wrong. Showing some renewed interest in the topic, I also dug up this recent and fascinating BBC documentary on persuasion – remember S.P.I.C.E.!
by Yannis Marcou |May 25th, 2010
Good branding, relevant content and clear navigation lead to valuable user experiences that can drive revenue generation.
Within two months from launch, the Baker Tilly International website (designed, developed and supported by Skyron) landed a substantial new business opportunity. A Global FTSE 100 company looking for tax compliance and advisory services in 25 European countries reviewed Baker Tilly International member firms’ relevant credentials on the new website. The experience and content provided on the website were compelling enough for the prospect to contact Baker Tilly International and initiate discussions, despite having little previous knowledge of the accountancy network.
The purpose of the website is to capture new business and interest and channel these to the appropriate Baker Tilly International member firms around the world.
by Yannis Marcou |May 9th, 2010
Your organisation is an unstoppable content generation machine. Whether you are in technology, telecommunications, publishing, financial or professional services, think about how much content you produce: news, press releases, research reports, white papers, case studies, insights, sales presentations, proposals, copy for your brochures, websites, products, solutions, manuals and the list goes on. Usually, content appears to just happen; nobody plans it, nobody owns it and nobody is checking to see if anyone out there is reading.
Typical pains associated with arbitrary content generation are:
- Product managers focus on feature jargon only they can understand
- Strategy people tend to turn thoughts into dissertations
- The company website’s copy was more or less copied from the previous website
- No one knows if anyone reads the case studies on the website and if they add any value
- Is a white paper better off as a registration sweetener or reward?
- The PR agency is writing some stuff for the news section, but they don’t understand SEO
- A work experience person wrote the LinkedIn company description; he even misspelled the company’s name
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by Yannis Marcou |April 16th, 2010
The website of News International Commercial (NIC – the trade marketing arm of NI) is a typical B2B exercise. It promotes the brand, showcases products and features case studies, news, insights and contact information. And like a lot of other B2B websites it could easily be left to its own devices condemned to a sad life of brochureware insignificance. Such neglected B2B sites, and there are quite a few around, act like a black hole where an unspecified number of users go in and out, but nobody knows what they get up to – and consequently nobody has with any idea how to make any money from them. So when the strategy behind the NIC website was drafted, Skyron advised the marketing team on the commercial benefits of analytics. Everyone agreed that to extract maximum value from the effort and money invested, a closer monitoring of the website’s performance would be the way forward.
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News International Commercial launched a week-long campaign to boost brand awareness of The Sun amongst planners and buyers from London’s top media agencies.
