A study undertaken by the Nielsen Norman group emphasised the vital importance of first impressions, with the first ten seconds a user spends on a site deemed critical in how they proceed. It’s a stark figure for those affording big budgets on online advertising and expecting big returns.

On a more basic level, those numbers mean the design of your site has to be right. It has to be visually impressive, user-efficient and contain clear calls to action which makes the user’s task that much more easier. Although perhaps on a more complex level it also means you should concentrate on creating an impact with your advertisements, an idea which can seem more of a risk. This is where the rise of certain online tools will help.

In a previous blog post, we talked of the importance of Vine and Instagram video but it is the emergence of Snapchat as a legitimate source of advertising which has taken some by surprise. Snapchat has been around since 2011 and had taken its active daily users to over five million in two years. The tool allows users to take photos, record videos and send doodles to friends before the image is destroyed after a maximum of ten seconds. A lot has been made of its less scrupulous uses, but brands have now caught on to the craze and used it to boost awareness.

In the US, Taco Bell have been a keen embracer of the tool and have used it to post exclusive ‘sneak preview’ images of their products. While here in the UK, the Co-op have used it to send out a promotional code before it then disappears, rewarding the quick minded with £30 off laptops.

In early October of this year (2013), Snapchat also announced the launch of their ‘Stories’ feature. This allows users to piece together clips for viewing over a twenty four hour period, allowing you to create a narrative of the day. This brand new feature is sure to pique the interest of brands who’ve got a story to tell.

The use of these tools allows marketers to do what they do best, be creative. Although Snapchat, like any other form of social media, should only be used if appropriate to your brand. The tool has a huge teenage market and is best used when a brand has something impactful to say. Its bold nature can seem intimidating but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be considered if you feel you have the right content.

In an age where the average attention span of an online user is dwindling while they themselves become ever demanding, we examine the term 'fast and furious marketing' and discover what it could mean for your brand.

With the emergence of channels like Snapchat as a marketing tool, we look at how we have to evolve to keep up with ever-demanding nature of our consumers.

Get in touch with CORE and let's find the best combination of social media channels to achieve digital success for your brand.

The Search and Social team at CORE has recently been involved in the digital marketing of the Restaurant and Bar Design Awards and we've written a case study to briefly set out the processes, tasks and successes of CORE’s role in promoting the Awards using social media and other digital communications.

Core has been the Restaurant and Bar Design Awards’ digital partner since 2008 and five years in to our journey together we took on the challenge of building interest in the Awards night through a targeted digital marketing campaign. Improving engagement with fans and followers all over the world, as well as those present on the night, was a major objective.

The Restaurant and Bar Design Awards are a truly international phenomenon, which attract a significant number of entries to the competition from the four corners of the globe, and many of these shortlisted design teams travel to the UK especially for the Awards.

The opportunities and rewards of social media engagement are self-evident with a project such as this - a unique, visually exciting and internationally important event in the design calendar. Get in touch with us and we’d be delighted to show you how we did it.

Promoting an event live on social media feeds for a large brand may seem like a daunting prospect, so how do you go about planning it?

Planning and delivering a social media campaign for a leading event may sound daunting. Here’s how we approached the task and what we learnt along the way.

An important part of our work here at CORE is ensuring that the websites and web applications that we build work in all major web browsers - but what exactly does that mean?

Some companies and organisations are way behind when it comes to issuing their personnel with up-to-date versions of browsers and there’s always a few stragglers amongst the general public.

What version of what browser are you using?

Do you even know or do you think that you should even care? And if you do know that you are using Firefox or Internet Explorer, do you know which version? Is it the latest version? Well, it matters greatly to us here at CORE and especially our web development team.

But you just want stuff to work, right? So, if we can’t realistically be expected to go on supporting older browsers indefinitely, where should we as web designers/developers draw the line?

Support or ‘your browser, your problem’?

Surely some of the responsibility for browsing experience should be with the user in keeping their browsers up-to-date. Well, that’s a credible argument for the general public and we can, to a certain extent, hand-hold someone whose browser is out-of-date and encourage them to upgrade. There are, after all, good reasons for doing so. Older browsers suffer from a range of security issues leaving their users more vulnerable to viruses and phishing attacks as well as other threats. Additionally, as websites and web applications become more sophisticated there are some features that simply will not work on older versions of the most popular browsers. All good strong reasons to encourage users of older browsers to keep their IT up-to-date.

Corporate clients, or those working at other large organisations, are the proverbial elephant in the room in all of this. These are environments where users generally have little or no control over their own IT set up. Often the bigger the organisation the more likely it is that it will be running products or services that tie them to using older more restricted versions of Internet Explorer.

A recent project we have been working on here at CORE involves plotting change management processes on a timeline. At the start of the project we were told we had to support IE8 users but it wasn’t until we were ready to ship the work that we discovered that their corporate versions of IE8 had been restricted, across the majority of the IT infrastructure, to IE7 compatibility mode. That caused us considerable problems as the software we were using to build the application (modern JavaScript libraries) is not supported in IE7.

In another recent example where we were involved in public sector work, we discovered that thousands of their staff had IE6 set as the default browser. It turned out they did also have IE8 and Chrome installed but as IE6 is set as the default browser many were not aware they had alternative options and/or do not use them. Then when they opened links from their email applications or other software the default browser was launched. It was this that caused us problems as we were involved in distributing access to our work via email.

So, the question is this: how low do you go or how low do you think we should go? How far back do you think it is reasonable to test, and what support or strategies, if any, do you think it’s reasonable to provide for older, out-of-date browsers?

Tweet us @WeAre_Core and let us know what you think.

This is the first in a series of articles we are going to publish on browser testing and browser support. Bookmark our blog and follow us on Twitter to be kept up-to-date with all the latest news and articles from CORE.

Wikipedia entry on usage share of web browsers, some interesting background on measurements too

Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report on Browsers

Our favourite browser and operating system testing tool

When it comes to internet browsers, are you at the head of the pack or are you still lagging behind with out-of-date versions? 

When we build our websites we always ensure that our work is functional across all the major web browsers. But where should you draw the line?

Google Tag Manager can help you streamline and monitor your campaigns with efficiency.

So what is this Google Tag Manager thing anyway?

With different people performing various activities it is often the case that the right hand isn’t entirely sure what the left hand is doing, or how the left hand is tracking its own activities.

We may also be talking about a lot of hands (organisations) and even more fingers (human agents). To stretch the analogy even further, fingers may be in any of the following pies:

Facebook and other social network advertising

Split testing and other conversion rate optimisation

Eeek. Pie all over the place. Tag manager aims to provide a simple - or at least, simpler - solution for keeping track of all the bits and pieces. Simple pageviews, eCommerce, video viewing, attribution: the plan is to be able to track more or less everything under one harmonious system.

You’ve almost certainly got various tags active right now - Google Ads conversion tracking tags and Google Analytics tags are extremely common.

GTM tags only fire under certain circumstances. The rules can be as simple or as complex as you like.

That sounds complicated. Can’t we just concentrate on our own pies and let the IT team and the web analysts worry about pulling all the data together?

Google Tag Manager is intended to be simple enough for traditional marketers and other non-technical types to use. Code does need to be added to your HTML in the setup phase, but after that, setting up new tags is a fairly straightforward activity. The idea is that you won’t have to wait till a developer can make changes for you.

The user is walked through the tag creation process pretty gently, with integration of Google Analytics, AdWords (including remarketing), and DoubleClick Floodlight all more or less built in.

Ok, so I can manage DoubleClick, Google Ads and Google Analytics tags from one place. What if some of my pies are not Google-flavoured?

You can set up tags for Yahoo/Bing ads through Tag Manager, and while there are currently few easy-start templates available for those using some services outside the Googlesphere, it’s not unforgivably complicated. The ‘Custom HTML’ tool will let you add in conversion code generated by other platforms.

Unsurprisingly, the official documentation stresses how easy and simple everything is. Sometimes it isn’t. If you want to know more about the nuts and bolts of setting up GTM for non-Google properties, a good place to start is this guide by Snowplow. It concerns integration with their own system but is generally helpful and demonstrates the right kind of systematic approach.

Why didn’t someone think of this before?

The short answer is that they did. You might already be using something like OpenTag, Bright Tag, or Tag Commander. Should you migrate? Depends how happy you are with the current solution.

I like the scent of this new, tidy and harmonious pie. Can you set this up for me and help me get started?

Yes. Whether we built your site or not, CORE offers a range of SEO, online advertising and wider digital marketing services. We can either set you up and get you started, or manage complete campaigns for you. Talk to us. We’re very friendly and pretty darn good at what we do.

Pulling all the various strands of a digital marketing campaign together can seem daunting without the right tools.

With the number of digital marketing activities soaring, we analyse Google Tag Manager as a tool which looks to streamline your work processes.

Our digital experts share some top tips, learnings and experiences

Fast and Furious Marketing

Restaurant & Bar Design Awards

Browsers: how low do you go?

Google Tag Manager