What are the best marketing methods for a small business?

I’m running our small web & design agency for almost two years now. There are many marketing methods I was considering and even tried out, however I’ve decided to concentrate on two of them only:

1) SEO - Search engine optimisation

2) Word of mouth - Client recommendations

I’ve looked at effectiveness of all other marketing methods we tried and I’ve came to a conclusion that the above two are the most effective by far.

Google brings thousands of highly targeted audience to our website every month. Those who like what they see, get in touch with us. Compare this to networking events where you have to attend on regular basis to first create connection and then maybe get a commission one day. How much time and energy this requires… Besides, most everyone knows a web design agency so the chances that they will need us one day are really tiny. Plus, and this brings me to another point, almost everyone knows someone who had their logo or website done by someone. And most of us will probably do the same thing if we needed new logo or new website: go and ask our friends if they could recommend anyone  for our project. If our friend was happy with the service he got from his supplier, he will most likely recommend that supplier to us.

And that is why my top marketing priority is customer satisfaction. Delivering work on time, on budget, providing excellent support, doing the extra mile. So that our customers are our best marketers.

Have you found the same to be true?

WordPress conference - WordCamp UK

WordCamp UK starts tomorrow (16 – 17 July 2011).

WordCamp is the UK’s largest WordPress weekend conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organised events that are put together by WordPress users. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other.

I will be there and tweeting from our Twitter account @MooveAgency.

Updated website, The Apprentice, WordCamp UK

Just a few updates from me on what I’ve been up to lately:

1. Launched an updated version of our website: www.mooveagency.com

We’ve updated homepage and portfolio page.

2. Apprentice - didn’t get to the next round

3. WordCamp this weekend

Adobe Creative Suite CS5

Our Moove team visited MediaPro conference some time ago, in November 2010. Uff, the time flies!

I’ve been really impressed then by the Adobe’s efforts to stay the course despite Apple’s efforts to wipe out Flash from the web.

So what is it that Adobe does now? What they have always been doing!

Imagine there used be print as the main “marketing” medium - and to help designe’s Adobe brought Photoshop and InDesign to enable them to design business cards, flyers, brochures that were eventually printed on paper. Then technology improved and we had the Internet.  Adobe introduced Dreamweaver, Director and Flash. Great, now we don’t want flash anymore nor Director. What do we want then? We want tools that will allow non-programmers and designers to create apps for Iphone, Ipad and other smart phones. Is it a remote dream? Why should it be? Website designing or flash animations  also used to be for hardcore programmers only until companies like Adobe developed tools making it easy to create stunning animations without the knowledge of any programming language.

Now we have the Adobe Creative Suite CS5 that makes the transition: helping designers to move from print and flash to smart phone devices… InDesign CS5 can now create and export interactive magazine for iPad and other devices using the Adobe Digital Magazine Solution.

I find it truly inspirational that this company does not sleep just to become one of those who forgot to innovate and one day finds itself forgotten in the history.

So the business lesson of today is: make sure you keep in touch with current trends (business, technology, your industry-specific) and that you innovate (your products, processes, everything). Not because everyone else is doing, but because who’s not doing it will be out of the game soon.

Latest news

I’ve been quite busy with all sorts of projects at Moove and also my personal activities (holidays, events) recently.

Moove Agency brings me a lot of joy now. We have many interesting projects in the production and the whole team now works very well together. We found a new graphic designer almost two month ago (replacement for Charlotte who left earlier this year). It was quite a challenge to find the right person but all worth it. The right people are the core of this business.

We also had a very unpleasant encounter with a company who did not pay our invoices from the beginning of this year.  It always astonishes me how someone can ask another person to work for them and then not having enough moral to pay them for their work. Money are important but what about personal integrity? Something I can’t understand.  In every case, I will dedicate a whole blog post about this topic with some tips on how to recognise clients who may turn into a nightmare.

Another good news is that I started to play around in Photoshop coming up with the new design for this website. Being a designer and a client to myself, the whole process is quite fun and enormous challenge at the same time. This project will most probably take me a while but rest assured, it will be worth it

Lastly, I keep pushing myself to spend more time writing blog posts and I’m really hopeful that I will be able to dedicate a few moments here and there to actually do that. I struggle to perceive it as high enough priority to dedicate too much time to it. So my new strategy will be to write just short posts with few thoughts whenever something crosses my mind. Let’s see how this goes.