Big Wave Media Blog | The latest and greatest from Big Wave Media

What’s in the Google Cannes Lion Festival box?

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Simon Beer

We had an exciting delivery from Google today. A box arrived via courier from LA. Exciting we thought!

We became a Google Engage agency earlier this year and from time-to-time Google do something off the wall and invite agencies to sign up for it. We popped our agency down to register for a Cannes Lions Festival pack. It was limited to about 100 from what we remember.

Each year, around 11,000 members of the global creative communications industries come together to be inspired and educated at Cannes Lions. It is a world-class seven day learning programme. This year’s Festival: 16 – 22 June 2013 is in Cannes, France. You can read more here.

The idea of the party kit is to watch some of the live stream events from the festival and take in a bit of the atmosphere by getting a taste of Cannes.

The box has everything we need to get into the Cannes spirit!

Inflatable palm trees, sunglasses, a frisbee, sun cream, balloons, paper cups and beach balls.

You can view each day’s session on Lions Live or watch interviews and footage of live events via the Cannes Lions YouTube Channel.
Here’s the list of live sessions that you can watch:

Monday, June 17th
Mindshare & McLaren F1
How to Be More Adaptive and Why It’ll Make You More CreativeTuesday, June 18th
Leo Burnett & Contagious
Wildfire / Full of Tomorrow: How Brands Can Embrace Miraculous New Technologies to Create Small Wonders That Will Change Our Daily Lives

Wednesday, June 19th
LinkedIn
The Next Big Challenge: Creativity in Social Media

Thursday, June 20th
Dentsu
Happy Hacking: Redefining the Co-creation Frontier

Friday, June 21st
Publicis Groupe and Heineken
Maurice Lévy Invites… Jean-Francois van Boxmeer and Alexis Nasard

Saturday, June 22nd
LatinWorks
Being the Underdog: Building an Identity Through Creativity

Photos of the contents:

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Twitter Introduces Keyword Targeting

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Florence

Social networks are constantly looking for ways to monetize their sites without needing to pass charges on to their users. For most, the majority of their income comes from brands and advertising wishing to promote their services to targeted users.

Last week, Twitter announced a major new update in their offering to brands and advertisers, which some estimate could earn the company $1 billion a year. Brands will now be able to promote their tweets based on keywords in users’ tweets and the tweets they interact with, plus the user’s location, device and gender, meaning advertisers will be able to market their products and services more precisely.

For example if someone tweets about a favourite band, which happens to be playing locally to them, they may see a tweet from the concert organiser promoting tickets. Or if someone tweets about wanting a coffee, they may see a tweet from a coffee shop near to them.

Twitter previously promoted tweets in a less focused way. Users were targeted by who they were following, how they interact with other users and tweets and what they retweeted. Twitter claims that the new algorithms will improve users’ experiences as they will see more relevant Promoted Tweets. In advertising tests, the micro-blogging company found that users were significantly more likely to engage with keyword-targeted ads than other forms of timeline targeting.

The profiling of subscribers to networks such as Facebook and Twitter and the use of targeted advertising is no longer a growing trend in online marketing; it has become a key a part of it. The opportunities to businesses to market to specific audiences is unrivalled with other media, as social networks hold so much data about our interests, feelings and precise locations – data which marketers have forever been clamouring for.

Big Wave can help you with social media and online marketing. Get in touch with simonbeer@bigwavemedia.co.uk for more information.

Posted in Advertising, Digital Marketing, Facebook, Social Media, Twitter | Tagged Advertising, Marketing, Twitter | Leave a comment

Pushing marketing boundaries – our presentation at the FitPro conference

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Simon Beer

‘Pushing marketing boundaries’ looks at digital marketing in the health and fitness/leisure industry.

It should be of interest to personal trainers, facility managers and sales staff looking for new marketing avenues and ways to increase membership and awareness using the latest digital marketing methods.

The presentation also looks at some of the recent digital marketing trends as well as future trends and what to look out for in 2013.

Each section features an actions slide to give you some action points to help you navigate some of the suggestions and digital trends.

You can view the presentation below, but if this doesn’t show in your web browser you can view the presentation here.

Pushing marketing boundaries – Big Wave Media from BigWaveMedia

Posted in Digital, Digital Marketing, Email Marketing, Facebook, Leisure, Mobile App, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Technology, Social Media, Twitter, Uncategorized, Web Development | Leave a comment

Why should I pay to advertise on Facebook?

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Florence

Since floating on the stock market in 2012, Facebook has been introducing more and more ways to monetise the site.

Over the last year, you may have noticed an increase in adverts on the side of your news feed, plus special offers friends have claimed and suggested pages within in your news feed. Facebook has always stated that it wants to be 100% free for personal use, so it has introduced a variety of advertising features for businesses to promote their pages to offset this.

Here’s a guide to some of the features they’ve introduced:

Facebook Ads and Sponsored Stories
If you are looking for a really targeted method of advertising then Facebook ads are really useful. You can either choose to promote an external URL, so to drive traffic to a website, or a page, place, application or event on Facebook.

You are able to tailor your advert to your budget and you can choose whether to be charged according to the impressions the ad gets or by clicks, although it defaults to cost per click. You can also choose whether you want to add a total budget for the lifetime of the ad, or a daily budget.

Facebook ads are particularly effective at reaching specific audiences. There is the ability to tailor by gender, age and geography. You can also add keywords to target people with certain interests, who have liked other pages, or who have mentioned keywords in their recent Facebook posts. For example, a leisure facility could target the population of the town/city/district the facility is located, aged between 18 and 30, who have mentioned the keyword fitness.

Once people start liking your page as a result of the ad, this will appear on their friends’ newsfeeds who are part of the audience specified as a sponsored story. This adds to the effectiveness of the advert as these also appear on the mobile version of Facebook, whereas the original ads are only visible to users on a computer.

Offers
The ‘offers’ system has been rolled out over the last few months and now pages only need to have 100 likes to have access. Facebook Offers is a feature that is an official way for company pages to create promotions and discounts on their services and offer them to their fans.

There are three kinds of offers: In-store, where people can print the offer email off or show it to staff on their smartphone, online only, where the offer can be redeemed on your website, and a combination of the two, where people can redeem the offer via either method.

For example, you could offer customers a free gift or discount the next time they visit you or set up a discount code that they can redeem on your website.

Facebook Offers have three key advantages over its competition of daily deals such as Groupon. Firstly, there’s no minimum required number of purchases for the offer to go live. If people claim it, they can redeem it. Another advantage for fans is that they don’t have to buy anything up front. This helps with the third advantage, the viral potential. As soon as someone claims a Facebook offer, their social graph is notified, triggering online peer recommendations that appear on newsfeeds, similarly to sponsored stories.

Offers have the benefit of increasing footfall, as well as promoting your Facebook page.

Promoted Posts
Promoted posts are another feature which have only recently become available for pages with 100 likes or more. You can pay to target particular posts to countries/regions/cities or languages, and the post will appear on newsfeeds of people within the chosen demographic, regardless of whether they like the page or not.

You can promote any post type including photos, status updates, links, questions, offers or videos and can either create posts specifically to promote, or choose a post from your Timeline which is no older than 3 days.

One of the top reasons people like a Facebook page is to obtain special offers and discount, so if you do create a Facebook offer, it is probably worth making it a promoted post as well. This will broaden your audience, as friends of your fans are more likely to see it. Competitions and high-value content are also prime posts to be promoted.

Big Wave Media can help with Facebook advertising and other social media marketing. Contact Simonbeer@bigwavemedia.co.uk for more information.

Posted in Digital, Digital Marketing, Facebook, Social Media | Tagged Advertising, Digital Marketing, Facebook, Marketing | 3 Comments

Quest and NBS Conference ‘Digital Marketing’ presentation

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Simon Beer

Here’s our presentation from the Quest and NBS annual conference. It’s on Digital Marketing in 2013 with a focus on its usage by health and fitness facilities and is based on our previous post which you can read here.

If the presentation doesn’t display on your device you can either view this presentation on an iPad by visting this URL - note you will need to install the prezi app – or you can view a crude pdf of the presentation here.

Posted in Devon, Digital, Digital Marketing, Email Marketing, Facebook, LinkedIn, Mobile App, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Technology, Quest, Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media, Twitter, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

5 Essential Google Analytics Statistics

Posted on February 18, 2013 by Florence

Google Analytics is a free resource which, when linked to your website, can provide a wealth of incredibly useful information about the visitors to your site. From things as simple as visitor numbers and search terms used to reach your site, to more complex data such as the monetary value of your social media referrals, Google analytics can answer a lot of questions about your website. Here are five statistics that you should be checking on Google Analytics.

1. Mobile traffic
Google Analytics can tell you what percentage of your web traffic is from a mobile or tablet device (you can even see which particular models have been used to visit your site if you so wish!). You may be surprised how much of your traffic comes from mobile sources. If it’s more than you imagined, and your site isn’t mobile friendly, now may be the time to re-assess this!

2. Frequency and Recency

The frequency and recency data is important if you want to find out how useful your visitors find your website. A high percentage of returning visitors suggests that they know to come to your website for a particular service or piece of information. Conversely, a high percentage of one-time visitors indicates that the information people are visiting your site hoping to find, is not there.

The frequency and recency table collates how many time each visitor has come to your website, the total of page views looked at, and the percentage of the total the visits and page views make up.

This example shows that although 35% of visitors have just visited once, the majority have returned to the site: a sign of positive engagement.

3. Goal setting

There is a bit of a myth that goal setting is only useful for eCommerce sites; there are so many other reasons to set up goals.

Basically a ‘goal’ is a way to track individual actions, such as someone visiting a set number of pages on a site. Each time a user completes a Goal, a conversion is logged to your account. You can see the Goal conversion rates in the Goal reports, and get further analysis in other reports such as the Visitor Report or Traffic Report.

There are four different objectives you can choose for a Goal:

URL Destination: This records a conversion when someone visits a specified location. So for example, if you have a form registering interest for a product or service, you could set up a Goal for the ‘Thank you’ page, which would track how many people had filled in the form.

Visit Duration: You can set a goal for visits that last a specific amount of time.

Page/Visit: You can set a goal to find out how many visitors go to a number of pages or screens in one visit.

Event: This goal can only be set once ‘Event Tracking’ has been set up. Once this has been done, you can set up goals to record actions you’ve defined as an Event, such as a social recommendation or an ad click.

To set one up, visit the admin settings and bring up your profile. ‘Goals’ is one of the headings in the menu.

4. Bounce rate

The bounce rate of your site represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave it, rather than continue to view other pages within the same site. The metric can be found on the landing page of Google Analytics, or Audience Overview in the menu. The bounce rate is often used to help determine the effectiveness of an entry page. An entry page with a low bounce rate means that the page effectively causes visitors to view more pages and continue deeper into the website.

According to KISSmetrics, the average bounce rate for a website is 40.5%. As a rule of thumb, if your bounce rate goes above 60% you should be concerned that your website is not providing the information that your audience are looking for.

If this is the case, take a look at your search referrals and what terms are being used to reach your website. If you have Google webmaster tools linked to your website as well, have a look at your keywords. This should give you an idea whether the content of your website is reflective of the service you provide, and whether you need to re-assess what’s on there.

However, a high bounce rate does not always suggest a poor performing website. For example, a visitor looking for the definition of a word may enter an online dictionary on that word’s definition page. Similarly, a visitor who wants to read about a specific news story may enter a news site on an article written for that story. These example entry pages could have a very high bounce rate, but still be considered successful.

5. Social media referrals

If one of your objectives when using social media is to drive traffic to your website, you are able to track this on Google Analytics.

You can also ink this metric with your goals. So for example, if you have a new downloadable document that you are only promoting through social media, you can set this up as a goal URL and precisely track how effective your social media marketing has been.

For more information on the content marketing and analysis service provided by Big Wave Media please contact Simonbeer@bigwavemedia.co.uk.

Posted in Digital, Digital Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media, Web Development | Tagged Analytics, apps, Google | Leave a comment

Why is planning ahead so important in marketing?

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Freya

University of Exeter student, Freya Carr, is currently undertaking work experience at Big Wave Media. Here, she explains the importance of planning ahead when constructing a marketing strategy.

Reassessing the needs of your audience
A huge part of planning ahead in marketing involves having an intimate understanding of your customers and their changing needs. Through market research and tracking sales it is possible to establish what is most important to your customer and then delivering upon that theme. Planning ahead therefore allows you to modify your marketing plan to reflect the requirements of your customers and ultimately increase returns.

Creating focus
When you plan ahead you are forced to identify what exactly it is you want to accomplish and how you intend to do it. With a plan in hand you are able to focus more on exactly what you need to do to deliver your service to your customers. This helps to create a bigger picture, which in turn can help to improve communications and share responsibilities by identifying who needs to do what and when.

Reducing stress and increasing success
Even the most basic planning can save you time, money and stress. Just plotting dates on a calendar helps give an overview of the year ahead and can help increase success rates. With more time up your sleeve you are able to eliminate many potential problems before they ever occur and reduce the number of rushed decisions that are made without reference to an overall marketing plan.

Staying ahead of the competition
Through careful planning you can often get in first, putting you ahead of your competition. You could be the first to announce or launch something new and desirable. For many businesses, there are specific times of the year that you need to be in touch with your customers. By planning ahead and getting everything ready in advance, you can ensure that you don’t miss out on vital marketing opportunities.

Embracing the digital era
The end of 2012 saw the opening of a number of social network sites including Microsoft Socl and the re-launch of MySpace. With 2013 set to see the continued growth of social media, marketers need to plan their social media activity to ensure they are ahead of their competitors in taking advantage of these promotional platforms. However, not all social media networks are going to be useful for everyone. Planning ahead allows you to establish the social media preferences of your consumers and tailor your activity to match this.

Posted in Advertising, Digital Marketing, Social Media | Tagged Marketing, marketing plan, planning, strategy | 1 Comment

Digital Marketing in 2013

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Simon Beer

Here’s our presentation from the sporta Annual Meeting. It’s on Digital Marketing in 2013 with a focus on its usage by health and fitness facilities and is based on our previous post which you can read here.

Posted in Branding, Business Development, Creative Design, Devon, Digital, Digital Marketing, Email Marketing, Facebook, Graphic Design, Leisure, LinkedIn, Mobile App, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Technology, Reporting, Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media, sporta, Twitter, Uncategorized, Web Development | Leave a comment

5 ways to get the most out of InDesign

Posted on January 11, 2013 by Dan

Dan Tofield, one of our senior designers, gives 5 valuable tips for optimising use of InDesign.

White lines on your PDF?
If you are getting white lines on your PDF and want them to be removed before sending to your client there is an easy fix that normally works. All you need to do is export the PDF as Acrobat 5 or later.

Typically these white lines are only display errors from the transparency flattening and do not print. You can check these lines by opening the PDF in Photoshop; the white lines should not be visible now.

Master Pages
Master pages are a great time saving tool when designing a multipage document and are perfect for repeating headers and footers, watermarks, graphical shapes and page numbering.

Instead of inserting the information time and time again on each individual page you can insert them just once on the master page(s). The content on the master page will appear on every page within the document, saving plenty of time. To use master pages, go to the Pages panel and double-click on the page next to the words A-Master.

Automatic page numbering is the most important part of Masterpages to avoid numbering errors. First of all, go to your master page(s) (as explained above), create a text box where you would like the page number placed then go to type>Insert Special Character>Markers>Current Page Number. Next, do the same for the adjacent page; it’s that simple!

Find/ Change
This tool is a massive time saver, especially when working on a document with multiple pages or with large amounts of text. It works really well when looking for errors, such as double spaces or amending a word that has been spelt wrong throughout a document.

To use this function go to edit>Find/Change then type the word you are looking to correct in the FIND space and the word you are correcting it with in the CHANGE space.

There is also a ‘Change All’ feature that could save more time. However, I would highly recommend not using this and going through each change, as the changes you make might move words on to the next line and potentially alter text layout over several pages.

Preflight
This is an essential tool, which can help stop embarrassing and potentially expensive errors. It’s great for customising to your exact needs too. At Big Wave Media the key elements we check for are missing links, missing fonts, RGB photographs, RGB and spot colours, imagery less than 300dpi, overprinting and overset text.

To add a new profile simply click on the preflight tab then the down arrow in the top right. Then to define profiles, you then need to click the plus button (New Preflight Profile); finally you can rename the Profile and choose all the boxes you wish to have checked.

Having the preflight on all the time can significantly slow your machine down, so just remember to only turn it on when you finish the piece you’re working on to check for errors.

Shortcuts
Whether using a PC or an Apple Mac, InDesign has many of the same basic keyboard shortcuts as Photoshop and Illustrator have, which are a great way of speeding up your work. Some of the following shortcuts will work in other packages such as Microsoft Word and Excel.

Screen Mode (Between Normal and Preview)        W
Scroll around the screen                                     Space Bar
Constraint Proportions                       (Hold Shift while pulling corner handle)
Cut                                                                   (Command X/Ctrl X)
Copy                                                   (Command C/Ctrl C)
Paste                                                  (Command V/Ctrl V)
Paste Into                                                       (Command, Alt V/Ctrl, Alt V)
Paste In Place                                          (Command, Alt, Shift V/Ctrl, Alt, Shift V)
Export/Pdf                                              (Command E/Ctrl E)
Package                                            (Command, Alt, Shift P/Ctrl, Alt, Shift P)
Place                                             (Command D/Ctrl D)
Print                                                (Command P/Ctrl P)
Select all                                        (Command A/Ctrl A)
Group                                                (Command G/Ctrl G)
Ungroup                                         (Command, Shift G/Ctrl, Shift G)

Move Object:
Move Forward                                                     (Command ]/Ctrl ])
Move Back                          (Command [/Ctrl [)
Move to the Front                      (Command, shift ]/Ctrl, shift ])
Move to the Back                                                (Command, Shift [/Ctrl, Shift [)

You do not need to know them all its all about knowing the ones that will help you increase your working speed.

Posted in Creative Design, Devon, Graphic Design | Tagged Creative Design, Graphic Design, InDesign | Leave a comment

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