Digital Media News

Finding a reliable company to host your website can often be quite a mission. Finding one that can manage things for you and is flexible enough to provide other services is even harder. But Rackspace manages to tick all the boxes and ExactDrive is excited to have them as an active partner to host our advertising platform software and website.

Rackspace has a great image. They offer a cloud-based hosting solution, but unless you want to know all about how they work, they try and leave all the techie terminology at the door. So this jargon-free company is a bit of a Godsend.

Rackspace offer scalable servers, so it doesn’t matter whether you have a website for a startup or a mid to large business. Importantly, they offer bespoke hosting solutions, so you can rest assured that you’ll always be getting a solution that’s tailored to meet your needs. That means that they offer different solutions depending on whether you’re focused on the retail industry, finance, online advertising, manufacturing, the public sector and much more.

According to the National Office of Statistics, in 2014, 38 million adults (76%) in Great Britain accessed the Internet every day (21 million more than in 2006, when directly comparable records began). So making a splash online and advertising in the digital arena is a business no-brainer.

Unlike traditional advertising channels, online advertising is less expensive, far faster to market and easy to measure. But without the right tools, it can be a minefield and tricky to keep a lid on your budget. So if you want the best return for your advertising budget you need to utilize some of the online tools that cangauge how effective and wide-reaching your online advertising is.

In no particular order, here’s what ExactDrive recommendstoensurethat your business, products and/or services are seen by the right people:

In today’s world, most of us have conducted some sort of business over the internet. There are millions of websites being built every year, many of which need to take payments from customers. But integrating a payment system within a website is tough to do. And with more and more financial transactions taking place, usability, safety and security are hot topics. Enter Stripe, ExactDrive's credit card processing partner.

Stripe is an innovative company that focuses on helping website developers to deliver a website that accepts payments between individuals and businesses. They’ve got a solid background. They’ve received $130 million in funding from the likes of Sequoia Capital and PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Elon Musk.

Stripe provides a fantastic alternative to the hassle of setting up a merchant account. And while Stripe’s fee per transaction is slightly higher than that of their more traditional card-based competitors, the cost to the website owner is lower because of the lack of setup fees, monthly fees, validation fees or card storage fees. And due to the fact that Stripe only earns that fee after a successful payment, there’s no charge for failed payments either. With Stripe, you even have the ability to offer coupons and vouchers to your customers. This is a payment solution that’s built with your bottom line in mind.

As the saying goes, people won’t always remember what you say, but they’ll always remember how you made them feel. In today’s business world, every industry is super-competitive and, as such, consumers expect more from brands. In particular, they’ll have extremely high expectations of your customer service abilities - and that’s where Desk.com comes in.

Desk.com offer online customer service software and a support ticket help desk app. It’s a very powerful solution for companies, such as ExactDrive, who are inundated with other demands and perhaps would be better off focusing their attentions elsewhere.

The entire desk.com experience ticks all the boxes. For starters, there’s an easy setup, so if you’re a bit of a technophobe, there’s no need to fret. The software also integrates your business to bring all the relevant support points together. This doesn’t just make it simpler for you to manage your business, but it obviously makes life easier for your customers.

You may have heard of the phrase ‘big data’. Well, Proximic are big data experts and ExactDrive is happy to be an longtime active partner. Big data is in front of our eyes every day, but are you even aware of it? And if you are, perhaps you’re not using it properly? The key to big data lies in having the skill tointerpret it and apply it correctly to your business. Put simply, Proximic will help you get to grips with your data in order to transform your ad campaigns and deliver better results.

Proximic have a company ethos that’s all about handing control back to people. That stance underpins everything they do.

When faced with the prospect of creating a digital advertising campaign, there are so many options these days. Display, mobile, video, blogging and the like. Then there are the demands of assessing a campaign and working out your ROI, not to mention strategic planning for the future. Also, let’s not forget that every business has different market requirements and digital challenges. There’s nothing quite like a million and one jobs to make you feel intimidated, eh?

ExactDrive has enjoyed working with GrapeShot for quite sometime. They offer a powerful technology suite that allows keyword targeting within the World of display advertising. Enjoyable to work with while helping us generating quality results for our clients, we are looking forward to working with Grapeshot for a long long time. Lets learn more about what Grapeshot is all about. 

The official line on Grapeshot is that they’re a software technology company that’s based in the UK and that helps other businesses with their advertising. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. The reality is that they’re a pioneering brand in the world of advertising, one that uses some truly innovative technology.

Real-time marketing can help brands engage with their consumers, but it can be tricky to do well. Here are three companies that have gotten it right.

A proven guerrilla marketing strategy, real-time marketing (RTM) links into current events that are relevant to an audience, in an attempt to engage them with a brand. The ultimate goal is to connect consumers with the products they need now, in the moment, and it's an approach to marketing that's better suited for today's on-the-go audiences.

Here we take a look at three examples of real-time marketing and the lessons that can be learned from each.

1. Warburtons

The best RTM campaigns stay relevant to their marketing strategy, audience, and products. Following the birth of Prince George last year, there were plenty of attempts to cash in on Royal Baby fever, but this advert from Warburtons stood out as one of the best to capture the mood, while staying relevant to the company’s products and sense of Britishness.

In today’s digital world, we’ve all become publishers. Content might be king, but it seems that everyone’s got something to say. The difficulty becomes separating the wheat from the chaff. In particular, there are loads of online advertising blogs. Far too many, in fact. But there are a few must-reads.

We’ve highlighted the top 5 online advertising blogs that you can’t afford to overlook.

1. Seth Godin’s blog

Prolific blogger and author Seth Godin is, quite simply, the go-to man for all things marketing and advertising. Sometimes succinct to the point of bluntness, Godin doesn’t waste words, so you won’t waste any time. Everything he publishes has value. With sharp, incisive comments, he’s probably the most famous living marketing consultant around.

Before partnering with HubSpot, a leading inbound marketing and sales software company, ExatDrive's website was constantly going down, posting a blog was a laborious task, analytics seemed to be stuck in a black box and every aspect of our social media and organic search lead generation was pathetic. 

Then comes our first HubSpot demo in Q1 2012. Our eyes opened wide, we looked at each other with wonder and excitement and whamo blamo we instantly made the decision to migrate over to HubSpot with the intent to immediately start digesting everything they have to offer, which is a significant amount of exciting features. Ranging from social media post scheduling to real-time SEO feedback on new blog posts, easy landing page creation and optimizing your call-to-action, HubSpot felt like it had everything we needed. And we were right.

ExactDrive has experienced exponential followership growth on our personal and corporate Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin social media accounts. Generating a total of nearly 90,000 combined followers. This growth has lead to a significant increase in social media based leads and website visitors. We give two thumbs up to our social media scheduler partner Buffer.com. Their services have been amazingly beneficial and useful and we are excited to continuing working with them as our social media partner.

Every business needs a solid social media strategy and Buffer is here to help. Whether you’re using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, a combination or something else entirely, creating compelling, engaging and useful content to syndicate over the various platforms is a must.

But life is busy. So for most businesses, the issue with social media is time. How do you plan your content? When’s best to post your stuff? How do you remember to consistently update your company pages day in, day out?