And so this is Christmas… and what have we done?

This year marks underscore’s third year working with Duke Of York Square on their amazing festivities including their centre piece  Santa’s Grotto, and we were very proud to see the contribution our designs have made to a place where children can go to make their wishes for the season.

It was brilliant to see underscore’s event branding at Chelsea’s premier retail & leisure destination finish the year so well. Santa’s Grotto has been a roaring success, with over 90% of time slots booked out on our online system over a month in advance, a true reflection of the importance of integrating branding seamlessly with social media for awareness and digital for booking and tracking customer flows.

This saturday we saw children enjoying stories read by Santa and plenty of eager eyed children having their photograph with Santa after which they were sent a copy by his dedicated elves.

Oh, and speaking of elves we’re pretty convinced a few of Santa’s ‘other’ helpers must have escaped last Friday as they were seen sneaking into a few West End pubs near our office. This was probably to relieve some stress from making all those toys but if anyone sees them again please contact us on twitter @underscorelive

Underscore are finishing a challenging but very rewarding year on a great note, we’ve worked with a range of top clients this year, and are already looking forward to some incredible things in 2014.

So from all of us at underscore, we hope you have a very Merry Christmas and all the best for the New Year ahead.

After achieving phenomenal growth in their first seven years, London’s leading property recruitment consultants Deverell Smith recognised the need to establish a fresh brand platform to underpin their future goals.

Following an initial consultation in May 2013, underscore was delighted to be appointed as the sole creative and digital agency to redefine the positioning and help articulate the impressive brand story behind Deverell Smith.

With our ‘thinking beneath the brand’ now complete, the brand story began to take shape. Our research showed that clients trust Deverell Smith to find the best candidates and that candidates’ value their straightforward approach. Their consultants’ drive, passion and talent does the rest…. creating great partnerships through great introductions.

After much animated discussion and healthy debate, ‘Meet the right people’ was agreed as the solution to communicate the quality of their clients’ experience whilst also capturing the quality of their candidates and staff.

With the brand positioning secured from there the creativity flowed. Along with a truly ground breaking digital suite a whole series of communications to explain that even went as far as defining the ingredients for the perfect Deverell Smith cocktail!

The biggest single deliverable was of course their website which is used hourly by consultants, clients and candidates, and includes custom made & market leading functionality including:

• THE ALL NEW VACANCY SEARCH FACILITY

With an average of one vacancy registered every hour, their new “search for a job” facility makes it quicker, easier and faster than ever to search for a role. 70% of candidates use their phones to conduct job searches, so the new website experience is fully optimised for users to access via desktop, tablet or mobile.

• FEATURED ASSIGNMENTS

Clients now have the option to feature on the home page and email campaigns. They can also now offer a dedicated, fully trackable microsite to ensure maximum exposure for client vacancies and their brand. 

• DEDICATED MARKETING AND SOCIAL MEDIA FOR EVERY VACANCY

Deverell Smith recognised the power of marketing, PR and social media for targeting high quality talent from passive candidates. Their new in-house marketing team now makes full use a database of over 90,000 active candidates, ensures press coverage of newsworthy roles and optimises advertising and social media campaigns to make sure no stone is left unturned.

Despite having only been live for a short period of time, we’re delighted with the outcome and the rebrand has already received some fantastic feedback across the market. We can’t wait to see the long-term benefits that it will bring for our clients and are looking forward to some very exciting year-on-year results in twelve months time. Stay tuned for an underscore update in six months time!

It seems simple enough to integrate a PPC campaign as part of your inbound marketing strategy to increase the amount of targeted leads following through to your website.

The ability to optimise your campaign in order to generate the most cost effective campaign requires a clear knowledge of your objectives and the ability to optimise your ad words, applying SEO knowledge to generate the most successful campaign.

With PPC advertising, the search terms must be high quality and targeted to optimise the relevance of results, reducing the quantity of irrelevant searches through vague keywords.

We recommend a twice-weekly review minimum to evaluate the words performance. This will stop the campaign racking up high costs byincreasing relevance.

An industry rule of thumb is to allow a min of 200 impressions before deciding whether to continue with that keyword; if that keyword is less than 1% CTR, it should be eliminated.

As we know your website may be accessed many times through a search engine thus one must attempt to avoid to many repetitive click throughs from potential customers clicking on your ad by clearly defining your goals.

Clearly defining your goals for the PPC campaign, whether it is sales, leads, conversions, email contacts or increased activity in certain areas of your business will provide a clear path of how you will want to segment your campaigns with different key word focuses thus refining and segmenting your PPC campaigns and the areas you will be spending your budget and achieving leads.

In order to implement a successful paid search strategy the following must be taken into consideration.

• Success must be defined
• A landing Page must be specifically designed incorporating a clear message and call to action.
• Different landing pages can be used for different ad campaigns to increase success
• A/B testing of two landing pages is great to put to market followed by optimising the most popular landing page with the least bounce backs.
• Display PPC Ads can also increase the volume of targeted traffic using cookies. If someone has already clicked on your display ad, these ads will “follow” theuser as they have already shown interest resulting in higher repeat click throughs and the amount of times the targeted customer sees your message.
• Bids should be set for the 3rd or 4th spot rather than the top spot.This way your business won’t be paying the maximum click through price for the spot every time but still ranking quite well and generating a large amount of traffic.

It’s never enough just to put in place a PPC campaign, the campaign must be monitored frequently to optimise ad words and eliminate any that are not working and eating in to your spend.

With a well managed PPC campaign, you can maximise the amount of qualified leads that reach your website and be a very efficient digital marketing strategy for your inbound marketing.