Category: Blog

When I first saw the whole #icebucketchallenge thing (seems months ago now…), my first reaction was “Great piece of marketing by a relatively small charity”. Except that it wasn’t someone working for either charity – either the ALS Association in the US or the Motor Neurone Disease Association in the UK – who thought it… Continue reading What Charities Need to Learn From #icebucketchallenge

In Part 1, I showed you how social media marketing wasn’t necessarily the right thing for your business. I used four principles (and it’s important you understand these): Know Thyself – Are you the sort of person who loves using social media already, and is constantly tweeting and posting facebook status updates? Or do you… Continue reading Social Media Marketing: Part 2 – Which Networks Are Right For My Business?

Eight years ago, I had an idea while watching BBC’s ‘The Apprentice’ – “Wouldn’t it be fun if we could run a competition like this for local sixth form students?” The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Schools are brilliant at identifying academic talent, or sporting talent, or musical talent or… Continue reading You’re Hired!

Google recently introduced an extension to its Google Partners programme for online marketing agencies – Video Advertising. Clare Associates has been a Google Partner since the introduction of the programme and is now one of the first agencies in the southwest to gain the advanced Video Advertising certification. The certification covers YouTube and Google Display… Continue reading Clare Associates one of the first southwest agencies to gain new Google Video Advertising Advanced Certification

We talk to a lot of small local businesses, and something we usually recommend is that small businesses should claim their ‘Google Places for Business’ record.  This is the record that should show up when you google your own company name, with a link to your location and the opportunity to enter other details –… Continue reading Google rolls out ‘My Business’ – what a relief!

K9 Meals on Wheels is one of our smaller, local clients. They came to us following a chance meeting at a local business networking group – which demonstrates why old-fashioned face-to-face networking still has a place in our modern world… They told us they had a website but not an online shop. The business sold… Continue reading Tiny changes to your website can make a big difference to your AdWords campaigns and how likely people are to buy from you!

For many years, website owners in the UK have had a choice of domain names.   Commercial companies registered domain names in the form  myname.co.uk  domains, while non-profits were encouraged to choose .org.uk, universities branded themselves .ac.uk and schools had addresses in the form myschool.sch.uk But all that is changing.   Nominet, the organisation responsible… Continue reading .UK domains are coming – does it matter?

Here’s an interesting graph: What this shows is the astonishing surge in interest in ‘social media marketing’ and ‘facebook marketing’ in the last few years, as measured by the worldwide number of Google searches. I spend a lot of time talking to business owners about their online marketing. One of the most common statements I… Continue reading Social Media Marketing: Part 1 – Time to Jump off the Bandwagon?

Otherwise known as: the Wonder of Whitespace. I see so many otherwise professionally presented facebook or twitter profiles where an organisation logo has ended up with the ends chopped off, or squished to fit, that I thought I’d write this quick guide to getting that right. A standard Facebook or Twitter icon, is square, like… Continue reading How can I make my logo fit nicely on my Facebook / Twitter page?

It’s a mean old world out there. You may be running a smallish local business, focussing carefully on delighting your local customers and doing the job better than your local competition, but if you are connected to the internet – and who can afford not to be these days? – you may inadvertently connect to… Continue reading Protect your reputation & customers : be aware of security issues