Open your eyes to the benefits of eMarketing
... and get connected to the Google Generation

We have heard that Alun John, who used to work with us on EMCOE and now heads up his own digital marketing company called Marketing Tom Media, has been selected as one of only 5 centres in the UK to deliver a new pilot marketing programme through the CAM Foundation. The Diploma in Digital Marketing builds on the old Emarketing Award and offers students a higher qualification. It has three elements to it: Digital Marketing Planning, Digital Marketing Essentials and Marketing and Consumer Behaviour. Students who have studied and completed the eMarketing Award have an automatic exemption on the Digital Marketing Planning course, whilst those who have completed the CIM professional diploma are exempt from the Marketing and Consumer Behaviour module.

For all students who completed the eMarketing Award under Emcoe, there is a special offer of a FREE course book for those signing up for one of the digital marketing courses. For more information, visit the CAM Diploma in Digital Marketing page of Marketing Tom or call Alun on 02920  263655.

After 5 years with the Swansea Bay IT Support Centre, 3 of which were spent heading up Emcoe, Alun John has now now left the Centre to head up his own Internet Training and Consultancy company, Marketing Tom Media. The business will offer the eMarketing Award, Social Media Marketing and Google AdWords courses and also provide Internet Marketing Solutions. We would like to wish him all the best in his endeavours and look forward to possibly collaborating with him in the future.

Good luck Alun!

Bryan Eisenberg has an interesting article over on Clickz - How To Use Customer Reviews To Increase Conversion - where he explores how companies are now using the power of their target audience/customers to create product reviews, which in turn can lead to conversion.

As he says we are all swayed by product reviews when we purchase holidays, books, music, etc from online stores. On our eMarketing course clients, without fail, all our clients say that customer reviews play a huge role in their customer buying decision. Here are some of the stats he comes up with:

1. According to JupiterResearch, 77 percent of online shoppers use reviews and ratings when purchasing.
2. Reviews drive 21 percent higher purchase satisfaction and 18 percent higher loyalty, according to Foresee Results.
3. In a study of 2,000 shoppers, 92 percent deemed customer reviews as “extremely” or “very” helpful, finds eTailing Group.

Bryan goes on to offer some useful advice on how to make your customer reviews even more effective. If you don’t sell products online, you may want to look at customer testimonials, case studies and even blog comments. All of these are very good for adding value to your product, service and/or company and for generating customer buy-in.

It’s a subject that we cover in both our eMarketing Award course and our soon-to-be-launched Search Engine Optimisation Workshop: Meta Descriptions. According to Wikipedia:

Unlike the keyword attribute, the description attribute is supported by most major search engines, like Yahoo! and Live Search, while Google will fall back on this tag when information about the page itself is requested (e.g. using the related: query). The description attribute provides a concise explanation of a web page’s content.

Generally speaking people tend to either not use Meta Descriptions or use the same one for every page of a website.

Well, be careful! You might be missing out on a great opportunity to convert would-be customer into buyers from the search engine results themselves.

To make sure you’re creating the right meta descriptions, head over to the Google Webmaster Central blog, which offers some good advice on how to create good meta decriptions and even tells you what makes for a bad description.