Granite Expo, get your free Haribo’s here!

Thursday 27^th from 9-6 at the Hilton Treetops marks this year’s Granite Expo http://www.granitepr.co.uk/, exhibiting and celebrating SMEs across the North East, including our fantastic selves, ;)! We are all excited for the event and have been busy organising freebies, case studies, products, and a FREE prize draw for our stand to show off & give to all you lucky attendees!

We have lots to show and giveaway including four banner stands boasting our services from branded products to our bespoke marketing services. As for the freebies, you will just have to come pay us a visit at Stand 67 to get your hands on them, but we can tell you that there are some of our famous Haribo giveaways on the uptake if you come and chat to us, we’re a friendly bunch, honest!

This year we are co-promoting with Simpsons http://www.simpsonshotel.co.uk/ and showcasing our first X-media Case Study on the popular West End hotel! Calum and Jason will be on hand to discuss the Case Study after working closely on the project as well as talking you through our customised golf products, who wouldn’t want their own branded balls? Moreover, we will have our own in-house Social Media ‘Butterfly’ Cheryl on hand to discuss all things Twitter and Facebook, there were rumours of hiring the Blue Twitter bird outfit for the exhibition but they were swiftly thwarted, much to Cheryl’s relief!

But, the focus isn’t just on us, Granite Expo is showcasing over 100 exhibitors, 12 must see seminars and plenty of crucial local SME networking, you really can’t afford to miss this. So please come down and pay us a visit, partake in some conversation and of course indulge in our giveaways, they are pretty great if we do say so ourselves!

We love Blogging, and here is why you should too!

There aren't enough words to describe how much we love Blogging and writing content that we are passionate about. It is an extremely cleansing and powerful way to convey your knowledge and even better, your opinions, we all have them! Our passion is sparked by articles all the time that are relevant and topical to XIC and it is also a chance for us to praise and raise awareness of other people/companies whose content we love also… interactivity is the aim of the game!

In order to promote our Blog, we try to keep our content fresh by updating it once/twice a week with topics from print to social media, marketing to cakes! Then we link it up to blogs/articles/influencers who have spurred our creativity and @mention them on Twitter and tag them on Facebook…it’s a reciprocal thing folks!

We can almost guarantee that if you haven’t started Blogging yet you will fall head over heels for it when you do, and for those avid Bloggers already out there, you will know exactly what we are talking about J

Since we are waxing lyrical about Blogging, here are some of the benefits and some tips that we personally have found particularly valuable:

· Brand Building: Blogging is an excellent way to build your brand with real communication and knowledge, proving what’s important and great about your brand. We have received cross-Atlantic recognition with some of our content through networking we wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise, nothing like a bit of self-promotion!

· Social Media: An excellent tool for marketing your Blog, enabling you to tag and mention all sorts of relevant influencers and businesses local or global and if you’re really lucky you might even get your Blog re-tweeted or shared as we have managed through specific networking.

· Search Engine Optimisation: This is one of the benefits that we have only become aware of recently, but it is in fact possible for you to blog your way to the top of Google. You can do this by regularly updating your content, keeping your blog fresh, including relevant links and using key words specific to your company.

We also would recommend this here site: http://www.thelinkmedic.com/ for useful tips on Blogging, tools and promotion, you can also follow them @TheLinkMedic on Twitter for up to the minute information!

So whether a Blogging virgin, a new start or a keen bean, please feel free to leave your comments, questions and feedback about Blogging, we would love to hear from you!

Integrating traditional and digital, print is not dead!

So having watched a fantastic webinar this week that went into detail about the power of combining both traditional print with digital tools we coincidently then found a few interesting blogs from Ussery Print: http://bit.ly/4hvMsN and Golden Parachute: http://bit.ly/oqpkhh who were all communicating the same ideas. As a print, reprographics and marketing service provider we are always looking for new, changing and innovative ways to combine our well established print services with our creative marketing endeavours.

The webinar focused on understanding the need to co-ordinate all efforts including email marketing, print, web, SMS and QR codes to name a few. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly important to measure our own metrics and analytics in order to prove return on investment as well as offering it as a service. A good marketing provider will analyse and utilise these metrics thoroughly in order to gain the most out of said ROI.

As a result, combining traditional print with digital tools, we can now tailor campaigns to suit our clients and prospects through direct interaction using print with QR codes leading to landing pages, for example, which means we collect data from customers who are genuinely interested. We are moving towards a much more interactive world due to consumers being better informed than ever before! It has never been more important to be reactive to these changes and that is something we at XIC pride ourselves on.

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing

After being inspired by an article expressing the on-going and topical debate about the differences between outbound and inbound marketing (http://bit.ly/bRRtOC ), we thought we would get creative and write an entry for the XIC blog.

Traditionally, marketers would push a company message through various channels such as cold calling, advertising, outsourced telemarketing, and promotion for example, to try and communicate with that one in a million prospect, and these are still very prominent activities for companies across industries. This kind of outbound marketing is still heavy practised but the debate points out that much outbound marketing should be replaced by inbound marketing. We are now living in an age where consumers are much more sophisticated at ‘dodging’ and filtering out information that they don’t perceive as valuable, in fact we would go as far as to say that techniques such as cold calling marks you as human spam, and in your face advertising can make you a pest or worse, be muted!

As a result of this shift in consumer awareness, inbound marketing presents much more effective opportunities to be found by consumers who actually want to be a part of your community and expertise. Be it through your website, social media presence or relationship marketing, it is now possible for you to interact directly with your existing and prospect client base. We at XIC are inclined to agree with the article that a sustainable ratio of inbound versus outbound marketing is much heavier on the former and only backed up by the latter. However, it is also important to do what’s right for your company and tailoring to what suits your products and services. No one size fits all!

It seems that we are all playing catch up with developments regarding the web and how we harness it to build our brands, but either way it is essential to become a part it. There are many positive outcomes in adopting inbound marketing techniques, whether it’s to increase customer loyalty, generate leads, educate your fans on company specific issues or just simple communication, inbound marketing should now, if it isn’t already, play a much heftier role in your marketing strategy.

Macmillan coffee morning, cakes aplenty!

XIC’s Jill and Claire are hosting a coffee morning for Macmillan Cancer Support this Friday 30^th in the ‘tea room’ at XIC, find us here: http://bit.ly/niKUJl.

We cordially invite you to scoff down some homemade treats and indulge in some gossip & banter with us at 10am, though we will accept early birds if you don’t mind help setting out the cakes!

Minimum donation is £3 but we know you are a generous bunch so feel free to exceed the limit :)

For more info on Macmillan Cancer Support check out their website here: http://bit.ly/o39ZFy or Facebook them here: facebook.com/macmillancancer

Look forward to seeing you there…

Social media week, excited much?

Beirut, Berlin, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Glasgow, Los Angeles, Milan, Moscow, Rio De Janeiro and Sao Paulo, sounds like the travellers holiday of a lifetime…hold the phone, “what’s that” we hear you say? Yes, it is in fact a list of all the cities that are involved in and playing host to Social Media Week! Pretty Amazing, right?

As you have probably noticed from our tweeting and Facebooking we are pretty excited about Social Media Week and are inclined to agree with The Urquhart Partnership in their blog (http://bit.ly/rbX3Cy) and fess up to being ‘a bit geeky about social media’, well said UP! The event takes place September 19^th-23^rd 2011. So, we at XIC thought we would dedicate this week’s blog entry to the festivities.

For those of you who don’t know, Social Media Week started in 2009 and brings hundreds of thousands of people together every year by offering the opportunity to share experiences and educate what and how social media has affected them and their business. Consequently, as part of Social Media week Glasgow, Creative Space are hosting a day in Aberdeen, this Friday 23^rd, so check out the link and get involved, you know you want to: (http://bit.ly/oaNGwN)

In light of the event we thought we would share some of our experiences and encourage you to do also! We want all our social media to be a hub of interactivity between us and our fans, clients, customers, followers and anyone who is interested in our business and content. However, we recognise that this is a long term strategy and takes time and effort to cultivate. Building brand awareness and harnessing customer loyalty are all aspects of our goals and we think that things are really starting to happen.

We have noticed marked improvements on our likes and interactions on Facebook, even more followers and mentions, re-tweets on Twitter and plenty of networking on LinkedIn! Moreover, new advancements have taken place such as building a company profile on LinkedIn, building a Facebook landing page, including a ‘Like’ box in our blog amongst many others.

This is excellent progress for us thus far as we can now start to measure and track our responses to further target and improve our content. We feel we are starting to understand our fans and followers more and more and recognise that this will continue to be an on-going process.

So, how much are you a social media (for business) geek, have you caught the bug? Leave a comment on the blog, post us an update on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/nzJPB7, give us a shout on Twitter: http://bit.ly/pLhIT1 or visit us on LinkedIn http://linkd.in/mU7ngc.

Finally, our very own Facebook landing page…

Well chaps, we got so excited about developing our Facebook landing page that we thought we would write a small entry for the XIC Blog.

After attending the First Lady of Social Media (Nicky Fraser’s) training day for Facebook Wizard, we were inspired to mark the first of many new developments in the XIC Social Media Strategy. Facebook represents just one arm of the strategy and a business page is one of the most up-to-the-minute and cost-effective means of promoting and marketing your business! Take note… Nevertheless, for those of you who aren’t aware, the Facebook landing page is a fun and expressive way to convert visitors into fans, yes that’s right, real, actual, informed fans who are genuinely there because of you…

Digging a little deeper, here are some of the actual benefits:

It is a chance to communicate your company message and improve how informed your visitors are about your brand.

Including a specific call to action will allow you to entice visitors and encourage them to find out more about you, even connecting with your Twitter or Blog (like in our landing page we have incorporated clickable Twitter and LinkedIn buttons. Noice!)

It sets you apart from the rest! A landing page increases your professional appearance and is something many other SME’s have not done.

So, for those of you who aren’t already a fan get yourselves across and ‘Like’ our page here: http://on.fb.me/qbxuIW and to all of our existing, loyal xic.com fans just click the ‘welcome’ tab under our profile pic and let us know what you think.