SpeedieConsulting

Competition starts today! Say what you’d spend £250 on right now – and stand two chances to win it!

To celebrate having 10,000 applications since their launch, payday loans company Speed-e-loans.com are offering visitors to their website two chances to win £250 – and all they need to do is to send in a short video describing what they’d do if they had £250 to spend right now!

The competition starts today and there are two ways in which submissions can win. The first is by being voted the Best Video as judged by Speed-e-Loans themselves.

The second £250 winner will be the video with the most views by the closing date (all videos will be uploaded to the Speed-e-loans YouTube Channel).

Gary Miller-Cheevers, CEO, from the company says: “To celebrate having 10,000 payday loan applications since our launch in February and because £250 is the highest amount first time visitors to our site can borrow as a payday loan, we thought we’d celebrate by running our video competition.

“We also really like the idea of using web video as a way for our visitors to interact with us. Finding out in a fun way what kinds of things they would spend their money on is a great way to carry out some customer research. The competition idea is not only as a way to celebrate our success, but to incentivise responses and to make more people aware of our business in a fairly novel way.

“We hope this will become more than a one off event and become an integral part of our reaching out to the online community.”

The competition starts today and closes at midnight on May 28th. For more information, full competition terms and conditions and to see two example videos, please visit: http://www.speed-e-loans-blog.com/competition/.

Having a product differentiator can be a great way to capture more business when premium discounting is no longer and option or possible.  We have a new client who offers a great range of low cost addons that can enhance any insurance product offering.  Here are just three of the innovative product offerings available.  If you would like more information or wish to discuss any of these options please get in touch.

Family Alert

Family alert is a clever little tag that can actually save lives and hours of wasted police man hours while they try and locate family in an emergency situation.

The tag is attached to the customers keys, in the event of there being an accident the police / paramedics are able to call the hotline numbers wherever they are in the world and speak to the operators to obtain the nominated family contacts. In some cases vital medical information can also be held, which could prove to be lifesaving.

On the back of the tag is a free lost key recovery service. Also provided is a sticker for the mobile phone, a sticker for the passport for overseas travel and a membership ID card.

Pet ID

Many pets are micro chipped these days, but that’s only beneficial if the dog has been taken to a rescue centre with a microchip reader. The general public do not have these, so a traditional tag is always going to be a far simpler way of contacting the owner. The downside to a traditional tag is it usually holds one number and needs engraving. The DogID tag stores up to 9 telephone numbers, vets details, home address and even medical notes – and it doesn’t even need engraving. The information is held on the central database where the operators can contact the owner when the pet has been found. Simple!

SuperTAG

Super Tag is a simple concept for returning lost property such as a Handbag, a set of keys, luggage etc. The unique tag attaches to just about anything, made from hard wearing metal coated with a clear resin. There are 2 hotline numbers, a Freefone number for the UK and an international one for items found abroad. The Super Tag has its own ID number which is linked to the owner. (1 is issued per customer)

The same principal applies to MP3 players, mobile phones, cameras and even passports but in the form of a label. 35 of these are sent as a free extra.

Ideal to be shared around the family.

There has never been a better time than now to build an online community around your product, service or business.  With a huge range of free usable tools to create a community that can run itself, you really need to look into this as a marketing and communication stragrey for your business.  Here are a few options for running a community online for free.

Facebook Groups

Using one of the biggest portals online you can set up a free Facebook group or Fan page to run your own community. Using Facebook means that it is also easier to attract members virally.  You can even pay to advertise your group on Facebook via Facebook Ads. This can be a good easy low cost way to attract people interested in your business but are not ready to become clients.

Find out more using the links below

Facebook pages: http://www.facebook.com/#!/advertising/?pages

Facebook Groups: http://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/create.php

Facebook Advertising: http://www.facebook.com/campaign/landing.php?placement=pf&campaign_id=402047449186&extra_1=1

LinkedIn

If your product or service is Business to Business (B2B) related, it may make more sense to run a group on one of the biggest B2B network sites.  LinkedIn allows you to create and run your own group.  like Facebook, you can also pay to promote your group within LinkedIn using Direct Ads.

Find out more using the links below

LinkedIn Groups: http://www.linkedin.com/createGroup?displayCreate=&trk=hb_side_crgrp

LinkedIn DirectAds: https://www.linkedin.com/directads

So why build a community in the first place?

Using one of these two tools or even both can create a great way to add value to your business as well as:

• potential research tool;
• customer feedback tool;
• product support mechanism;
• develop a sense of community around your business;
• a marketing platform that can by pass email;
• search engine benefits of having user generated content appear within Google search;
• website content syndication mechanism;
• and much more..

To celebrate having 10,000 applications since their launch, payday loans company Speed-e-loans.com are offering visitors to their website two chances to win £250 – and all they need to do is to send in a short video describing what they’d do if they had £250 to spend right now!

There are two ways in which submissions can win. The first is by being voted the Best Video as judged by Speed-e-Loans themselves.

The second £250 winner will be the video with the most views by the closing date (all videos will be uploaded to the Speed-e-loans YouTube Channel).

Gary Miller-Cheevers, CEO, from the company says: “To celebrate having 10,000 payday loan applications since our launch in February and because £250 is the highest amount first time visitors to our site can borrow as a payday loan, we thought we’d celebrate by running our video competition.

“We also really like the idea of using web video as a way for our visitors to interact with us. Finding out in a fun way what kinds of things they would spend their money on is a great way to carry out some customer research. The competition idea is not only as a way to celebrate our success, but to incentivise responses and to make more people aware of our business in a fairly novel way.

“We hope this will become more than a one off event and become an integral part of our reaching out to the online community.”

The competition starts on March 31st and closes at midnight on April 30th. For more information, full competition terms and conditions and to see two example videos, please visit: http://www.speed-e-loans-blog.com/competition/.

We have a range of niche insurance microsites for sale as well as having a clear out of our domain names. There are some goodies in there. To make life easier I have created a PDF with all the details about all the sites.

If you are interested in any of them, please save the file below, have a look and then get in touch via the contact form with any questions or offers. To give you a steer we are looking for £xxx offers

Insurance and Finance Sale

Now and again I come across these little tools that allow you to see how well your site performs again a bunch of criteria, in the vague hope that it highlights something wrong with your site that you can fix and suddenly your site rockets to the first page of Google.  Recently I have just finished reading the Inbound Marketing book by the Hubspot guys and found their Grader System.  Now I normally take these things with a  pitch of salt but I must say I have found the report run from this to be very useful indeed. The data and report shown is top level stuff and doesn’t drill down into too much detail (after all it is a free tool) but it does give you some good pointers about what you could be doing better.

And I am not saying that just because of our score!

Have you checked your grade?  Why not do it now, it is free and only takles a few seconds.

Don’t like your score? Well get in touch, send us your score card and we will be more than happy to help boost your grade!

See our Latest Payday Loans Client Video

Online marketing specialists Speedie Consultants have launched a new, dedicated website aimed at helping insurance and finance companies leverage the power of affiliate marketing as part of their online marketing strategy.

Jason Hulott, Director of Speedie Consulting says: “Affiliate marketing has always been a part of larger companies’ online strategies. With barriers of entry coming down, the small to mid-sized businesses can now take advantage of the low risk methods of attracting business that affiliate marketing can offer.”

Our new site (SpeedieAffiliates) aims to help both companies and affiliates connect with each other in order to refer business and build a profitable online income. The site is aimed at companies looking to start a new programme; companies that have a programme that may have stalled; and also affiliates that can be sat on lots of potential business without a home for it.

Hulott concludes: “We have been in this game a long time at each level. Since the beginning of the year, we have been approached more and more by companies that require a low risk solution to increase their own business without a costly dependence on search engine marketing.”

The site currently has a range of tools and guides to help maximise programmes. There is also a broadcast tool to allow programme managers to spread the word about the programmes.

For more information about SpeedieAffiliates visit: http://www.speedieaffiliates.com

There are several tools available that can help you manage your online “presence”, from tools to manage your Twitter account requests and auto tweet on messages. From those to help you manage your many various social media profiles and those simply there to deal with customer support issues or enquiries.

Getting your website to work harder for you is a great way to maximise efforts while minimising time. Talking with potential clients in the last two weeks has reminded me of the real benefits of running a website using Wordpress. Not only do you get a state of the art, updatable, feature rich content management system (for free), you get a whole raft of plugins which allow you to automate some of the more mundane processes.

Now a quick message from the dark side before we continue. Some of the techniques we will discuss can and have been abused. This is not the goal. The goal is to allow you to produce marketing messages or web content and then consistently syndicate them in the right places, all the while building your business in the long term.

Wordpress for example has plugins that will allow you to upload a huge amount of content or convert data files into blog posts, so you “could” build lots of web pages really quickly and then syndicate that across the web. That is a bad idea. What we suggest you do, is have content prepared and then uploaded it so that the content goes live every few days. Making sure the content is unique and not just a churned spreadsheet. In this way, during a lean period or when you get a bit of time you can prepare content, add it to your site and then forget about it for a while.

Other plugins will take a post and notify your twitter followers as soon as it goes live. This is a great tool as it cuts out the little things you will not do consistently. There are other plugins that will notify Facebook too.

Sitemap plugins will automatically update themselves when new content is added and then send themselves off to the major search engines, plus they can create a useful page on the site for visitors too. These are all automatic.

There are tools to auto submit your content to a random selection of social bookmarking accounts. Again this can and has been abused.

The Wordpress RSS feeds that are automatically created and maintained by the system also have huge potential for syndicating your content across the web. We wrote about some “tricks” with Wordpress RSS feeds here:

http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/a-couple-of-tricks-with-wordpress-rss-feeds/

As you can see, we really rave about Wordpress. For a small business, we can’t think of another system that can do some much for you automatically and consistently.

Another tool you can and should look into, autoresponders. These are great tools that do a lot of your initial customer contact, support and deal with enquiries. We have written about these before:

http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/how-would-you-like-to-have-an-extra-pair-of-hands-to-help-handle-your-incoming-enquiries/
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/using-autoresponders-in-your-business/
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/services/autoresponder-courses/

You can also integrate Autoresponders with Wordpress like we do on our websites.

Finally,  we have been trialling Hummingbird for Twitter and Hootsuite.  Hummingbird is a great little tool as you can set it to search the “Twitosphere” looking for tweets and people who have a  common interest and then sends them a follow rewquest, if they follw you back it keeps the link, if not after a while it will remove it.  This is a good way to manage some parts of your twitter account.

Hootsuite has a huge range of tools  but the one we love is the ability to preload a spreadsheet of tweets and set them to go out at a a date in the future.  So you can set up daily or weekly marketing messages to be published on your twitter account.  This is not to replace your normal activity but gives you a way of being consistent.

Hopefully this ramble has given you some food for thought. Want to share a useful tool that does some heavy lifting in your business? Please share…