Breathe Marketing Blog

If you’re good at what you do – and we’re sure you are – you’ll have a pretty clear idea of the best marketing techniques and tactics for your business and customers. But it’s also good to keep an eye on new ideas and alternative approaches. If nothing else, it shows your peers, bosses and partners that you’re up to speed with current thinking in the industry.

Our blog is all about giving you food for thought – ideas and opinions which might come in handy when you’re putting together a new campaign or proposal, or when you’re casting about for some inspiration to impress the boss or to move up a gear with a new marketing programme. We keep our posts focused and waffle-free, so it’s a quick hit of our latest, original marketing thoughts and ideas. Some of it may be old hat to you, but some topics might just get you thinking.

Choosing a new marketing agency is a great opportunity to ramp up the impact of your brand and marketing communications.

Thinking of changing agency? Or maybe you’re hiring some marketing help for the first time. Whether it’s a PR, marketing, digital, DM or any other kind of agency, we thought we’d share our 8 tips for picking a winner:

1. Decide what you need. Before you can evaluate whether an agency can help you, you need to be clear what skills and activities you want them to provide. Think about how you would like to work with them, how you want to communicate, what activities you’re hoping to set up and how much input you need from your agency in planning and coming up with ideas and suggestions for campaigns (more…)

Pick up your phone. It’s time to think seriously about mobile phone marketing…

With last month’s sell-out of Apple’s iPhone 4 on launch day, it’s clear that the mobile market is thriving, led both by the ever-present hype and some genuinely amazing technology. Do you know anyone who doesn’t have and use a mobile of some kind?

It’s marketing gold dust – a device that, for the majority of users, is at their side or in their pocket for all their waking hours. But using mobile marketing effectively isn’t easy. Many organisations, (more…)

Christmas, Easter, Bank Holidays… here we go again. Another list of the same old same old promos, mailers and frankly excruciating puns. Some calendar events are done to death, as everyone jumps on the bandwagon of big days and hopefully big spends. But don’t tear up your year planner just yet. Campaigns and communications around big dates can serve you well, if you give them a bit of creative thought and bear your audience in mind. (more…)

Everyone’s at it, every pundit and commentator’s telling us that social media is the big thing we all need to be into to succeed in 2010.

But what does that mean for your business? Maybe you’re on facebook or twitter yourself, or you’re an early adopter of Google Wave. Chances are though that it’s all about your social and personal life. It’s a good idea to keep business and pleasure separate, for both your privacy and professionalism. (more…)

Web Developers and designers don’t have an easy life they design and code a website striving for the very best job they can. They get their code working in Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera even Safari with out too much hassle, as all these browsers render code in very similar ways (having been designed to interpret and use web standards). Then the poor web designer/developer checks their shiny new design/code in Explorer and the real work and heartache begin. (more…)

The New Year is almost upon us and now is a great time to make sure your brand and marketing are in good shape for the year ahead. Here are a few pointers to help you.

Test, test, test!

If you aren’t already fanatical about testing your marketing campaigns before rolling out en masse then make testing your New Year’s resolution as it will save you money and make your campaigns more effective. (more…)

We at Breathe believe that stamps are very visible evidence that Britain is at the cutting edge of creative design and the Royal Mail’s commitment to regularly commissioning new stamp designs throughout the year should be commended. Although so far they have overlooked a very talented bunch of designers based in Henley-on-Thames!

The advent of email and mobile phones technology has changed the way we communicate with fewer and fewer letters being sent by post or ‘snail mail’ as it has become known. (more…)

Web 2.0 and particularly Social Media are hot topics at the moment and we are finding clients are asking us how they can use it to enhance their marketing. So we thought we would put together a short overview along with some useful tips for implementing in your business.

Let us first define Web 2.0 – ‘Web 2.0 refers to a second generation of web development and design which facilitates communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and applications such as social networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashup and folksonomies.’ (Definition by Wikipedia, itself part of Web 2.0) (more…)

A single word can paint a thousand pictures

• Be sure of exactly what you want to say. Clarity of thought aids clarity of writing.
• Think of who is going to read the copy. Picture a person holding the written item and reading it. Imagine where they will be sitting and how they will be holding the item.
• Consider why the person will read this copy. Remember that they know nothing about you and may know little or nothing about your product or service. What advantage will they gain from reading what you have to say?
• Think of your key message. (more…)