Nortech IT is one of the leading IT Providers in the North East of Ireland providing a range of IT Solutions to Schools & Colleges in Ireland.

Nortech IT approached 10thstep with a brief to redevelop the businesses corporate brand identity and design and produce a brochure which could help take the business forward. As always at 10thstep our creative department stepped right up to the challenge and started off with a workshop with the client to really find out just what made the company tick and just want they wanted from their new identity. Once we had helped the client get the vision in place we began our creative process and as our clients know this is a step by step process. One of our main goals with the Brand Refresh was to develop a new identity to reflect the new business proposition, which focuses on the benefits Nortech IT can deliver to its growing client base.

Everything from the typography used to the tone of voice in the brochure copy relates to the audience’s business needs and supports the message ‘Bringing Lessons to Life’

Why is blogging important?
• It creates awareness – it gives your business more chance of being found online and makes you visible among search engines who just love content.
• Demonstrates the business or your authority, passion, expertise and experience in your business industry.
• It drives traffic to your website
• It refreshes or updates your website’s content on a regular basis; major search engines such as Google love nothing more than new content.
• It helps spread your business message beyond the reader by making it sharable on social media platforms such as Twitter & Facebook
• It shares links about your regular blogging and is another great way to drive traffic back to your website and for users to find out more about what you do – you could look at this as lead generation.

For many businesses the next questions can be “Where will we find the time?” or “What will we blog about?” . Here are a few tips which I have found helpful along the way..
• Blog regularly – When I started out blogging I won’t lie, it took it a little while to think about what it was I wanted to blog about and trying to make it interesting. Reading other blogs and getting ideas makes the process a little easier.
• Give your blog a personality
• Keep the topic relevant, picking something which is currently in the media or fashionable is always good
• Engage your reader
• Try to write it so that people can understand it, nice simple flow always works best – but people need to be able to read it.
• Don’t over think your blog & aim for 350-400 words
• Keep SEO in mind – use keywords as often as possible.
• Write in the same way you talk – let your blog be flowing, friendly & conversational

Now it’s your turn. Blogging is one of the most effective organic ways to improve your visibility on the web but blogging regularly will also help build trust with your customer. It will help you become a recognized voice in your industry which can and will open doors for your business.

These things are great, all fine in principal and have a role to play. But for many businesses actually approving any spend on this sort of marketing activity depends on what bottom line this will generate, if any. For me, many of the well known Brands and indeed those smaller businesses using the platform as part of their marketing efforts are missing the key element.. ‘Engagement’. Many of the pages which I visit just don’t engage with me as a consumer. I may go onto the page, have a quick look and then I’m gone without even liking it. Typical of the bounce rate on your website if you will. There are also those Brands who have used Facebook very effectively and run a campaign which has ticked all the boxes, and been engaging, only to let activity dwindle away to nothing once the campaign has finished. It’s one thing to ‘Build it and they will come’ but what about sustainment after the campaign?

To get it right and offer more rich engagement with your target audience, not just on Facebook, but other social platforms, it can’t all be a one way street. Businesses need to adopt a two-way communication process, which allows both the business and the consumer to engage. Way to many businesses are using Social Media as a way to Sell, Sell, Sell.. with very little, if any, listening to their customers.

Engagement is key not just during the campaign but ongoing.

Using social media as a way to communicate your businesses message can prove very effective if you are open to listening to your customer. Have a think about your actual quality of likes and what they mean to the ROI of your business. For me, I would rather have the businesses which has 2500 Likes or Followers (whichever platform your using) of which I am regularly engaging with the users, building relationships, and converting leads into sales than the page with 20,000 Likes with no return to my bottom line. Which category is your business in?

To sum up, as mentioned earlier in the blog, don’t get hung up on pushing out content with a sell, sell, sell approach on it. Nor focusing on increasing your number of Likes. Bottom line is, if you have good, engaging content this will naturally happen, likes or followers will increase organically as well users wanting to share content from your page. The rule of thumb is that ‘Content is still king’ so think about your customer base. Good content on your website and in your social platforms will reward you with stronger search engine rankings and most importantly higher conversation rates adding towards your businesses bottom line.

We like to keep our clients up to date on the latest marketing tips and tricks so if you want to find out more, let’s grab a coffee and discuss. Have a fantastic Christmas & New Year.
Follow on Twitter @waynedenner

We’ve also been exploring the power of Twitter. One of our most recent clients – Connect Logistics in Warrenpoint, decided to take the plunge and sign up after reading our blog.  A logistics company on twitter? Yes that’s right, you heard it here first. No matter what your business is we’d recommend getting on there straight away. It’s a great marketing tool that is waiting to have you, and if you need any help with it, just ask.

You can follow us on @10thsteps, (Myself) @thelittleun, and Johnny (the graphic design) @johnnykenna.

We’ve had a Spooktacular Halloween this year. Working together with Newry and Mourne District Council and Peace 3, for this years Halloween celebrations in Newry City  - Spookfest 2011, which was headlined by JEDWARD.  We worked on the Brand Identity, Print, Social Media & SMS for the Halloween campaign.  The event was a great success for both Newry and Mourne District Council and Peace 3. We thoroughly enjoyed working on this project and look forward to working with Newry and Mourne District Council again in the future. If you haven’t already seen what we did this Halloween..don’t be scared, head over to our facebook page.

No matter how wonderful your brand, product or service is, if you don’t advertise people wont know about it. Time and time again we hear companies saying ‘We don’t need to advertise, we’re doing well without it’ but not everyday is the same, especially in the current economical climate we are living in. Not every customer you serve today will come back for more tomorrow.

Here are 5 steps to get you thinking about advertising your brand, product or service this Christmas…

1. Research – But don’t just hop onto the World Wide Web (facebook & twitter included). Look at how & where your local competitors are advertising. What can you do better? Look at local press, local billboards. Ask all the customers you serve today a simple question like, what’s your favorite product? Collect adverts you’ve seen, even if there is only one thing you like about them.

2. Plan – A plan for any advertising campaign is essential. Doing this at the start will save you a lot of time and money throughout the overall project. How long do you want this campaign to last? Where do you want to advertise? How much money are you willing to spend? As this will help make sure every penny you spend is used correctly.

3. Engage – Many companies miss this out completely but this is most important as it’s where you connect with all your customers (both old and new) get feedback and MAKE MONEY! At this point if you’ve just thought about blowing up your company name to fit a 48sheet (3m x 6m) billboard for your next advertising campaign. Don’t expect a big turnover, Why? It’s just your name but bigger and that’s not engaging.

Engagement starts at the planning stages of your campaign. Tell customers and clients, that you are about to do something BIG (don’t tell them what exactly, obviously). This will create a positive buzz about your company even before you yourself, have thought about what exactly you want to advertise and could even lead to a mini campaign leading up to your big campaign.

The language you use should be creative and draw peoples attention. Using local slang, being blunt or even just ‘Thanking Betty at No.22 for coming in every Thursday for a paper and a pint of milk’. It all works and before you know it the whole town will be talking about YOUR BRAND PRODUCT or SERVICE because of YOUR NEW BILLBOARD.

4. Call of Action – You have less than 10 seconds to get you message across to your consumer. So forget addresses, phone numbers and opening times. This is where the online world comes in, web addresses, facebook and twitter mentioned anywhere on your campaign is enough to get your customers in BUT make sure your campaign follows through to them as well. It has to be consistent, and if you don’t already have a website, facebook or twitter page GET ONE, if you don’t know how? 10thstep is here to help!

QR codes (which have been introduced to the 10thstep service) are the newest way to engage immediately with your customers. I’ve seen them used recently in a lot of print adverts and I am a big fan. In advertising less is more, so always keep it simple.

5. The End – When your campaign is finished TAKE IT DOWN! Nobody wants to see an out of date, faded billboard. Your next campaign should be ready and waiting to go. Even if it is just a facebook/twitter competition, you need to keep those customers engaged with your brand, product or service.

Advertising doesn’t like to wait. Waiting loses you customers and money. So lets get together and see how 10thstep could help grow your business through your next advertising campaign.

At 10thstep we’re passionate for working with new and exciting small businesses looking to make their mark and stand out from the crowd.  We love nothing more than rolling up our sleeves, sitting down with our clients and getting stuck and coming up with creative branding concepts.  Our latest client Local Deal Detector had been on the look out for a design agency with a difference and one which could make ideas become reality all qualities which they found in us.

The Brief

Sometimes the simplest of briefs from our clients are the best to work with.  In a nutshell we had to develop brand positioning with an offline and on-line visual identity.  With anything we do we like to take it back to basics and our creative team set 3 goals to be acheived;

1. Create a new brand identity
2. Write & deliver brand guidelines for our clients business
3. Apply the new brand identity to a set of marketing communications such as business cards, stationery and signage.

Due to the competitive nature of our client’s businesses it was paramount that we delivered a brand identity which stood out from the crowd in its overall look, feel and tone as well as effectively communicating the Local Deal Detector message “We do the looking so you don’t have to”

Our Solution

As with all our clients we like to start off with a workshop our creative team and client so from the very start we can both be on the same page this helps focus what it is they want from their new brand identity, how it’s to represent and just how they want it to look.  We then set off as we always do mixing up a variety of options, Typography, Colour palette, as well as Tone of voice and brought it all together as one complete brand identity.  The result was a bright, clear illustrative style, brand identity which our client was extremely proud and pleased.

Using social media to help market your business, product or brand has opened up a whole new channel of communication for businesses and one which needs to be listened to and tracked.  It has become a great way to increase the market reach of any business both locally and globally and is cost effective way for businesses of all sizes to engage with their target audiences and customers alike.

Social media platforms such as Twitter & Facebook have become an essential for businesses to listen, discover and learn just what their customers are talking about in relation to their products, services or indeed their brands.  It has also given those already monitoring these channels an insight into just what customers are saying about their products and services.  There are of course, other reasons why as a business you would want to monitor communication via social media in relation to your business, brand, products and services.  These include:

• Customer Service – Twitter in particular has become one of the real time platforms for customers to reach you and get answers.  In the past week alone we have used twitter as a way to get quick responses to queries.  We recently contacted a businesses support department via email and four hours later had still no response. We then contacted the same company via Twitter, had a response 3 minutes later and within 5 minutes the issue was resolved.  This example clearly shows that the company are constantly monitoring their social media channels, and were enabled to deal with our query and resolve it, resulting in another happy customer.
• Public Relations – Social Media has become the essential tool to communicate to the mass and quickly.  It has now been proved to be a crucial platform for Crisis Communication in real time situations.  Take the Volcanic Ash incident, which happened earlier this year in Iceland.  Generally this caused major issues for travellers, with flights being grounded and safety concerns.  However for the Airlines using social media to engage with their customers  offering  them real time updates on flight disruptions, this became a powerful pr tool, assisting in minimising disruption, mis-information and ultimately saving them money. Despite the frustrations many travellers were at least kept informed and had access to the most up-to-date information for their airline via twitter.  Social Media served the airlines as a way for them to be the First Responders to questions and inaccurate information, providing much needed damage limitation in a rapidly changing situation.

So tracking your businesses on social media is just as important as tracking other marketing campaigns, not least for ROI.  Many businesses, particularly those small to medium in size may believe monitoring this area is not justified, but it will cost time and effort, (sweat time).  You  need to know it’s working.

According to a survey carried out by Mzinga & Babso, over 80% of professionals do not measure ROI for their company’s social media programs.

Key metrics you need to be aware of when using social media as a marketing tool:

• Measurement of both positive and negative mentions.  So you’re very active on Facebook & Twitter and your business, product or brand is getting a lot of mentions.  This in turn results in users talking about just what you offer or do
• Conversation Cycle.  Lets face it.   As a business your overall goal is to convert your fans or followers into sales.  For this to be successful you need to measure all types of conversations and chart them over time to get a picture of the conversation cycle.
• Virality – Is your content being shared on Twitter or Facebook?  Is the content being shared relevant to your company and how soon afterwards are they resharing the content and who’s doing the sharing?.  Friends of Friends?
• Loyalty/Average time on site.  Being aware of things such as bounce rate and average time on site are important to keep track of, but as a business, are you taking time to narrow this down and look at which social traffic is bringing visitors to your website.  Take the following example are visitors from Twitter spending longer on your site than those from Digg referrals? or are visitors who have come from Facebook spending more time .   Moniter where traffic spikes; have you recently run a campaign? Or perhaps posted a new engaging blog which has resulted in a surge of conversation or traffic to your website.  Having a sound understanding of  which referrals from social sites create more page views per visit and time spent on sites can provide invaluable insights to business owners.

Social media monitoring does not need to be complicated.  We believe in keeping it simple and  focused.  Monitoring activity will help you benchmark and track your efforts and successes over time and will help show you just what ROI you are receiving.    If done correctly it should help you draw comparisons and results from your posts, tweets & blogs.  Monitoring your social media channels will allow you to listen and respond in real time, and protect your brand, product or business from negative word of mouth.   We work with many different brands and businesses in a variety of sectors and can help show you just how to make the most of your social media efforts.

Warrenpoint Harbour Authority approached us with one task.  It was quite a big one.   To refresh and brand their 2010 Annual Report.  We kicked off with a number of consultancy sessions to allow the 10thstep team to get a complete understanding of the output which the Harbour required from their 2010 report.  We proposed an overall new look and feel and we led from the outset the creative direction.  Due to the locality of the Harbour we aimed for big impacting imagery while forging the start of a new brand identity.