Reedus Design’s acquisition by Hestiun, which was announced today, is good news for Reedus, for Hestiun, and most importantly for Reedus Design’s clients.

Having the backing  of a multinational corporation means that Reedus will be able to expand its expertise and the scope of the work it can undertake faster and further than would have been possible independently.

• By undertaking a wider range of work across more sectors, we’ll be able to call on this experience and knowledge for the benefit of all our clients.
• By building a bigger team, we’ll be able to employ even more specialists. Already the most skilled agency in its geographical area, Reedus Design will now be able to consolidate its position not only in the UK and southern Europe but globally.
• By combining our attention to detail and to our clients with better systems, scope and backing, we will be able to perform better for you, giving you what you need from us in ever-more inventive, efficient and engaging ways.

What won’t change are our method of working, our business culture, our individual consultancy model or our ability to help you build a business, not just a website. These are the cornerstones of Reedus Design’s success, and they will continue to be at the heart of what we do.

Here’s to the future!

Reedus Design and Hestiun have today issued the following press release:

MADRID – A majority stake of the Spanish-based agency has been acquired by Hestiun (http://www.hestiun.com), a Switzerland-based multinational diversified investment group. The remainder is being retained by company management, including founder Jason Reed and partner Phil Morse. Over the past half decade, Reedus Design has become one of the most respected web agencies serving the European market. Founded in 2004, the company has successfully positioned itself as a full-service, results-driven web agency, with particular emphasis on design quality, business integration and effective internet marketing.

Based in Spain, with clients in both the UK and on the European mainland, Reedus Design has particular expertise in the telecommunications, real estate, financial services and commerce sectors.

Reed, founder of Reedus Design, said: “Hestiun’s focus on international brand acquisition allied with Reedus’s ability to deliver results-driven business web products is a perfect fit. It gives us the chance to work on a broader range of accounts, and to improve our product scope and service and to address a wider marketplace. We are also confident that we can bring great value to the group, both on an operational and marketing level.”

Jeff Spence, Chairman of Hestiun’s investment committee added: “We are pleased to be able to contribute to Reedus Design’s new growth phase. An integrated web strategy is important to any company’s marketing strategy today, and Reedus Design has been a proven leader in its field. We feel their team’s expertise can also greatly benefit Hestiun and all of its associated companies moving forward.”

We’ll break this to you straight: If your competitors have an analytics package installed on their websites and you don’t, you’re at a competitive disadvantage.

Click here to find out how analytics can help your business. We usually charge for analytics installation, but until 30 November you can take advantage of our offer to get the fantastic Google Analytics installed on your website for free!

No fee, no catches
Just contact us and we’ll get back to you to get things started. There are no fees and no catches – we simply want to show you how much having a proper analytics package installed can help you to nudge ahead of your competition and be more successful.

Already got analytics?
If you’ve already paid us or someone else to add Google Analytics  to your website and are right now feeling a little left out, we have an offer of equal value especially for you.

Contact us and we’ll give you a free personalised report detailing five simple improvements you can make to your website based upon what your analytics package is telling you. Again, this product is usually chargeable so you’re getting valuable assistance that could make your website more effective – for free.

Don’t delay folks!
Remember, these offers will only run to the end of November (2009), so contact us today to get the ball rolling.

Analytics shows you who visits your website, where from, for how long, and what they do next. A good analytics program can provide you with a wealth of such information to help you grow your business and make more money from your web traffic.

How? Here are just a few ways:

1. By helping you to keep people on your website longer – By showing you where people linger the longest, a web analytics program can help you to plan further similar content. Adding content people want means they’re more likely to do what you want them to – fill in your newsletter signup form, buy your product, give you a call…
2. By giving you the tools to attract clients or customers in other geographical areas – Analytics shows you where people who view your website are. This can get you to thinking how to appeal to people in areas where you don’t do as well as you may like, or help you to further appeal to areas you seem to be doing better in than you thought you were.
3. By showing you what other sites are driving traffic to your site – Inbound links mean more traffic and better visibility in the search engines. If certain sites are linking to your site lots, you can strengthen your relationship with them, or ask other similar sites if they’d like to link to your website too. If sites you feel should be linking to you aren’t, you can go about rectifying this.
4. By showing you what search terms are driving traffic to your site – Knowing this will let you strengthen those that are doing well and work harder on those that you feel should be but aren’t, by adding new content appealing to the specific terms (for instance).
5. By letting you build on your most popular pages – If certain blog posts or how-to guides, products or services are attracting lots of traffic, analytics can help you work out why this is. You can then grow this content if it helps your business, or add similar content to grow your site overall, or if it is actually NOT helping your business to have everyone looking at these pages, you can alter the content accordingly. Knowledge is power!
6. By showing you where people exit your site – You probably don’t want anyone to leave your website until they’ve given you their credit card details/signed up for your newsletter/picked up the phone to call you* (*delete where applicable). Analytics shows you where people leave, so you can work to improve things. Maybe you don’t have enough links to other interesting content on those pages?  Are you successfully persuading people into your buying process?
7. By letting you set up goals - To improve it, you gotta measure it! Analytics lets you set up goals – number of products purchased, number of people who’ve downloaded a brochure, number of people who’ve signed up for your newsletter – whatever. By measuring these, you can instigate simple improvements and monitor their effectiveness, simply and quickly.
8. By telling you the truth about what type of setup your customers have – Got a big site with bells and whistles? What if it turns out that 40% of your clients are using a five-year-old version of Internet Explorer and have small monitors that can’t even show a whole page of your swanky new site on one screen? Wouldn’t you be better off having a site that these clients can use properly? What if 20% are using iPhones to view your site? You just don’t know the answers to any of these questions until you find out – and analytics can help you do this.

As you can see, analytics is pretty much essential for anyone who wants their website to improve, keep up with the competition, and make more money online. Isn’t that all of us? So our advice is: If you don’t have analytics on your site, get it installed today.

Noticed a drop of in the number of people filling in your “contact us” forms on your website recently?  You and half of the companies we speak to! To paraphrase Field of Dreams, web marketing is no longer a “build it and they will come” discipline. Something is happening out there, and as a savvy business, you need to be aware of it.

In days gone by (in web terms, of course, everything runs that much quicker, so we’re only talking say 3 or 4 years ago) you’d build a website, pay someone to do some search engine optimisation on it, and wait for the leads or sales to start coming in. No longer.

Time to go and find your customers
Things are changing, and changing fast. It’s time to start looking at the way you market your company online with new eyes. Because whereas before it was all about marking your territory and getting people to visit you, now you have to go and find them instead.

Your clients, potential clients and competition are all inhabiting different places on the internet to your website. They may even be talking about you there. Are you there too? If not, it is definitely starting to cost you money.

Here’s just a few ways you can spread your wings wider for little or no money. They all are disciplines in themselves, but it’s a good taster of the kind of things you ought to be doing, right now:

1. Make more use of your blog. Not got a blog yet? Get one. There is stuff going on in your industry and company, and you should be commenting on it. Post to it at least once a week. Don’t blab on about your products all the time – post useful non-commercial stuff too. (Make sure it has an RSS feed too. This allows people to read it in a digest of all their favourite websites without visiting your site.)
2. Start a company group on Facebook. Facebook has upwards of 200 million people using it. It is open of the most popular websites in the world. Tell your friends and family. Get them to join your group. Whenever you have anything to show, say or comment on, it should go on here too. People wear their Facebook Groups like badges online. Get your logo on it, and your clients, fans or colleagues will start attaching it to their own pages. Ask your staff to join up and do the same
3. Open and use a Twitter account. Don’t know what Twitter is? Get someone who does to open your company’s account and start posting to it. Set your blog software up to auto-post to Twitter whenever you add something to the blog. Now anyone searching or subscribed to you on Twitter can see when you’ve updated your content without visiting your website
4. Do the same for LinkedIn. LinkedIn is like old-school networking online. It is business-oriented, smart and popular. Join up. Take part. Join groups in your area of expertise. Answer question. Contribute
5. Join and monitor any relevant online forums to your industry or area. Monitor the posts, and reply when you can help. Again, think non-commercial, and try and be of genuine use. There’s nothing to stop you mentioning who you are, where you work and what you do while you’re doing so
6. Comment on other people’s blogs. It’s not enough to write your own blog. Find the popular blogs within your industry, town or niche and comment.  At the very least people will start to come back to your blog and subscribe
7. Send out an email newsletter to your subscribers at least once a month. You probably won’t have to write any new content on it as you’ll have four new blog posts to link to. And make sure your website´s email signup box is prominent so people leave you their details when they visit. What’s the point of someone visiting your website then going away forever? You want to start a dialogue with all potential customers. Sell them on your email newsletter, and make sure it’s good enough to deliver

Notice the link between points 2 to 7 above? They all happen AWAY from your website. People don’t come to your site every day. But they do check their email Facebook, Twitter, RSS, favourite forum or blog etc. Be there!

There’s another common denominator too. These activities take effort, not a massive marketing spend. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, email marketing, joining in forums and commenting on other people’s blogs are all free, or practically free, services and activities.

Many businesses are becoming publishers
Probably the main thing you need to do (apart from start believing this fundamental shift which is picking up pace and not going to go away) is to get someone within your organisation to start generating the copy for you. The whole strategy about will live or die on what you publish on your blog and what you say away from your website. Good companies are now publishers.

Still think you need to spend loads on a site and SEO? Well to be fair, different sectors have different need and one marketing strategy isn’t right for all, but please believe that this affects you even if you only have a small handful of predominantly business-to-business clients.

There’s one good knock on though if that web position is still your be-all and end-all: Many of the above techniques will benefit your SEO too!

If you’d like to talk more about new ways to improve your search engine marketing in Marbella, why not pop in and see us at Reedus Design? Contact us to book a free consultation.

By Phil Morse