I’m always looking for ways to drive more traffic to a client’s website – so it’s always good to see the stats that back up key parts of online strategies that I write!

In the last 12 months UK Internet searches for discount vouchers have increased by 47.5% *

Restaurant voucher searches have increased by 226.3%*. Pizza restaurants have dominated the top 10 voucher related searches in the UK during the 4 weeks ending 01/08/09. ‘Pizza Express voucher’ was the second most searched for voucher term over the period, and the most popular branded voucher search.

If you’ve got an offer, we would recommend e-mail campaigns, posting the links onto various voucher code sites like www.myvouchercodes.co.uk, www.hotukdeals.com and www.vouchercodes.com to name a few…blog and tweet the offer - with targeted CTA vouchers and track these through redemption figures on the shop floor. It’s a great way to prove that it works with figures supporting the trends above, there’s a fine line to be had with what you offer – making it something that’s worth redeeming and at the same time profitable for the business.

It’s something that at Magnitude, we’re keen to promote and we’re currently compiling case studies to show the traffic stats to shows that it does work!

*(Source Hitwise 27^th Aug 09)

Using custom fonts on a web page back in the dark days of the internet meant one thing… images. If you wanted to fill your site with the ever popular comic sans you had to fire up your favourite editor and knock out image after image containing nothing but text. If you wanted the titles to sit on top of a patterned background you were just asking for trouble. Fonts rasterised into GIFs do not look pretty, unless you add a tiny stroke around the letters, which takes a lot of time.

Fast forward to 2009 and the idea of a custom font on a webpage is still just a glint in the W3C’s eye. Fortunately there are some options available for those who don’t mind a bit of leg work.

Up until recently I have usually favoured sIFR, flash animations inserted into the webpage using Javascript. There are a lot of reasons for and against sIFR, it’s very flexible, well established and usually gets the jobs done. However, I have found that just recently the cons are outweight the pros. Pages which require larger amounts of text replacement become very slow (sometimes even crashing the browser) and the download penalty makes the entrance page extremely slow to load.

Luckily, someone pointed me in the direction of cufon. Yes, it’s still Javascript but this time there’s no flash (and no software to buy), the whole thing takes around 100k to download and is super fast at replacing text on the page. Cufon uses individual, dynamically generated images to replace each word of a title, allowing for word wrapping and as of ver1.02 it supports a huge range of css rules.

I’m not suggesting that cufon is the answer to all our (many) prayers but I do find myself very impressed.

Go check it out!

Well despite all the doom we read about everyday it seems the result has been to accelerate the use of digital media as the most cost effective way of marketing.

Over the last 10 years we have seen two things. Firstly continuous economic growth and secondly the phenomenon of the Internet that has revolutionised the way we communicate and source what we buy. One thing therefore that will be different during this recession is that it will be the first test of how business can make their online presence reduce costs and generate more sales.

The shock-waves that will be felt in 2009 from the fall out of the credit crunch are already in on their way. Increasingly what we are witnessing is the end of commodity stores on the high street as sales fall and costs rise. Cds, books, white goods, games, cameras, electronics and holiday travel are now rapidly moving to ‘online only’ trading. More and more of us are now web savvy and buying online and the evidence is that we are now more comfortable buying even personal items as proven by the highly successful online clothes store asos.com

So for 2009 the Internet will either prove the saviour of some businesses or the opposite for those who fail to invest in their online proposition and allow web savvy competitors to take more and more business.

We at Magnitude have already been highly active with our clients making sure they have highly flexible online marketing plans in place for 2009 with emarketing, easy online shopping facilities and supporting processes to deliver excellent service online.

Looking further ahead our teams are already working on a range of projects that will deliver the online presence on any platform be-it a PC, TV or mobile phone.

Tony humphreys

Another day, another accolade and a Friday afternoon pat on the combined backs of the team.

We have found out this week that we have been short listed for the NMA Effectiveness Awards for our work with wagamama last summer. Now we have a chance of winning in the Best Consumer Products and Services Campaign category and hopefully the chance at getting another shiny award for the cabinet!

Hoo-RAH

The recent budget has yet again brought home the severity of (and I hate saying these words) ‘the current climate’ and the doom and gloom it presents to us all… a continuously shrinking economy, a whole world of debt and a future looking more and more financially-bleak. However, one industry continues to see the silver lining and, very fortunately for us, it is digital.

With budgets moving to digital/online for the obvious reasons of lowers cost, clearer ROI and better visibility on results, we are seeing that work is not only coming through as thick and fast as it was BR (Before Recession) but also that the kind of work we are being asked to do is changing. This is largely due to the fact that business are moving their day to day processes online to save costs, whether this is in the form of selling online (e-commerce), dealing with their customers (CRM) or general advertising.

Last year was all about viral marketing, fun online interactions and social media applications – really allowing us to flex our creative muscles. This year has been all about improving processes, building better systems and driving as much traffic as possible to the websites we produce.

Alistair Darling has added fuel to the digital fire by announcing broadband will be made available to all households by 2012. In his budget speech, Darling said: “It is vital to ensure the entire country and economy benefits from the digital age. So I am allocating extra funding for digital investment, to help to extend the broadband network to almost every community. This will allow us to deliver the vision set out in the Digital Britain report – making sure everyone can benefit from this communications revolution and create thousands more skilled jobs.”

Whether or not we trust the political reasons for such a move (tax on your broadband anyone?) what it will again mean for the digital industry is a mass improvement on how the normal household, across the UK, will be able to view the work we do and the speed at which they can access it. And this addresses the only stumbling block digital still faces: the issue of access. At the end of the day, if people had the ability to completely cater their leisure time to their own interests, they could get access to their choices cheaply and at the click of a button – why on earth would they choose to use any other medium? The move of on-demand television online is the first real sign to Mr and Mrs Normal that times are a-changing and soon enough we will use the internet in our private time as much as many of us do in our business time.

Checking our bank balance, watching the latest episode of Mad Men, communicating with friends who’ve moved abroad on Skype, buying an outfit for the next night out – the majority of us already do at least some of this already. How is the demand for digital services going to change when everyone is? In a time of seemingly endless bad news, digital is offering a ray of light giving us a future of continuing job prospects, opportunities for creativity and successful business stories.

If there ever was a time to go online, it is now.

Jude x