It’s the first Monday in August, so naturally it’s time to start talking about the Christmas period. Our Christmas Marketing website is due for a refurb and wheels are turning in the background to launch a new look site later this month. The range of Christmas products that have been chosen for inclusion has been trimmed from the current selection, paying greater attention to products that are specific to Christmas time.

Corporate Christmas card ideas, company Christmas party invitations and ideas on how to present business gifts at Christmas are all give a strong focus on the new site along with calendars and other ideas for Christmas and New Year promotions.

Amongst the improvements that you will see are increased product information and immediate viewing for product videos. Page access times will also be improved so that visitors are not wasting too much valuable search time waiting for pages to load. Navigational aids have been improved and the whole look of the site has been brightened to enhance the visitor experience.

The whole site is being re-written so this is not a re-hash of existing pages. Research into what visitors want has taken quite a long time and the re-write has been based on our findings so, hopefully, we will not only see an increase in visitors but those visitors should find the site visit much more fruitful. We will keep you posted on the progress so that you can come to visit on opening day.

Websites are subject to fashion changes that are almost as regular as the seasons which is certainly good news for independent website designers and website developers. Website owners also realise the value of a redesign. Return visitors get fed up of seeing the same old thing and if a favourite site shows improvements in content and navigation then it improves the visit to the website.

We try to make improvements on a regular basis in order to maintain the interest of our visitors and also the improve the visitors experience. We try to make improvements to navigation and to make the site easier or the eye as well as making the site more interactive.

Our latest revamp is to the Whitney Woods UK site. Not only has it been given a total re-design, we have also incorporated new features. A new Marketing Bulletin has been incorporated to add extra interest to the front page. Customer testimonials have been incorporated into the design to help to reassure our visitors that Whitney Woods is the place to look for pop-ups and interactive mailers. Extra links have been incorporated to make navigation easier and to improve access to samples and prices.

The site is going live today and is well worth a visit even if only out of curiosity.

Here’s something for marketing professionals looking for ideas for a new promotion. You already know all about marketing so you know that a search for marketing ideas is likely to throw up loads of results that are really for marketing beginners. In order to find what you are looking for, more and more people are using more words in the search box and the same applies to marketing professionals. If your plan is to run with a street team promotion and you want some ideas for the giveaway try entering Street Team Marketing Giveaway Products or maybe Guerrilla Marketing Mini Media Products. A search for Guerrilla Marketing is just too vague.

The same applies to every type of marketing problem. Let’s say that you are looking for ideas to help with a new product launch. You obviously know all about the new product, you just want to get ideas for the best way to pass on information at the launch event. Try a search for Product Launch Ideas and Promotional Products. Alternatively, you might be looking for new ideas to run with a brand of wine, for example. You know that you want a bottle collar but you don’t want to wade through loads of info for wine storage. Try searching for Bottle Collar Promotions for Wine Marketing.

If your promotion isn’t quite that easy to define but you still need inspiration for, say, a mail shot, the same applies - be specific. A search for Direct Mail Ideas and B2B Marketing Products is far more likely to find the information that you need rather than searching for B2B marketing.

However, you could save yourself some time. Diversified as these searches might be, there is a common thread. Try Interactive Marketing Products and Ideas or Ambient Media Advertising Products and Ideas. The search result offers the same destination - Popup Mailers - but to a page that is quite specific to your requirements. I recommend this one for listing in your “favourites”.

One of the great things about marketing is that once you are in it you never stop learning. I thought that we were fairly good at developing customer relationships. We are a friendly, plain-speaking company with a reputation in our own marketplace for supplying a good product, a good service and for meeting deadlines. We have testimonials from our customers in a list as long as both arms. We supply a terrific pack of free samples. We don’t pester customers with spam. We have repeat customers in the UK, in Europe and in the USA. We must be good at CRM; or so I thought.

I had seen one or two interesting snippets on the web and decided to read up on the subject so I bought a couple of books on Relationship Marketing and I began to realise that there are a lot of areas in which we could improve on our CRM efforts. We have begun to address those issues and improvements will become evident to our customers in the coming months as we develop our in-house software.

What I also realised, however, is that we have a range of products which are perfect for CRM professionals, particularly those who are involved in loyalty schemes and the production of vouchers, coupons and plastic cards. Our products can help to strengthen a brand’s image and to enhance the customer experience of receiving a loyalty card our reward vouchers.

To point towards a couple of obvious examples, plastic cards would have far greater kudos if presented in one of our Gift Card Carriers and a Rewards Campaign could have greater initial impact AND longevity if presented via our Foldilocks card. Perhaps less obvious but equally pertinent is our range of pop-up desk top products which would be ideal as a B2B “thank-you” to customers at year-end. A pen-holder-cum-calendar works perfectly as a direct mail product. Check out our website to read more details.

Oh, and just for fun… our colleague, Sharon, will be 40 on April 21st. Perhaps you might drop her an email. She’s on our contacts page.

According to Jay Conrad Levinson, Guerrilla Marketing is the marketing domain of SMEs. The success of a Guerrilla Marketing campaign is all about the amount of energy, thought and time that a person is prepared to devote to the promotion and waht’s more; it’s an ongoing process. This applies to Whitney Woods as much as it applies to other SMEs and the gradual development and expansion of our website to include Guerrilla Marketing products is, somewhat ironically, an example of how online Guerrilla Marketing might work for us. A search on Google UK UK for “Guerrilla Marketing Products”, with the inverted commas, revealed only 3 entries this morning so maybe we’re onto something!

So, what do we mean by Guerrilla Marketing products? Well, I have been reading Mr. Levinson’s books to learn more about the genre and to see if we can jump onto the bandwagon in some way. I have recognised that certain products in our range are perfect for Guerrilla Marketing campaigns involving street teams and so we have featured a handful online along with suggestions of how the products might bring improved results in order to give you some guerrilla marketing ideas.

When I have seen street teams in action it usually involves a young person indiscriminately handing out A5 flyers in a busy shopping street followed by busy shoppers throwing away the leaflet as they pass the nearest bin (Note for street teams - don’t hand out leaflets near a waste bin!). Our research shows that pocket sized handouts and handouts with a difference are far more likely to be retained by the shopper, simply because the put them in a pocket rather than into a bin!

Products like our Foldilocks card and the Little Big Card are perfect for street team marketing and by adding a little imagination you can create something really memorable. An example of what I mean would be the Open Mouth card which has a really amusing action created by a simple cut and fold. Guerrilla Marketers could do worse than take a look.