Neill Watson

The Complete and Utter Beginners Guide to #Hashtags

Hashtags are an often mis-understood area of social media. Yet, it’s surprising how many clients I talk to don’t have even a basic grasp of how they work and how to use hashtags. They seem to be every present in our world, finding their way out of the digital realm and into print and banner advertising everywhere, even casual conversation. Worst of all, people who don’t understand hashtags were very scared of sounding stupid by asking that really simple question: “How do hashtags work and how to I use them in my social media channels more effectively?” If you want advice and guidance on how to hashtags and mentions, there’s no need to feel stupid when you ask for an explanation. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. In fact, it was a casual conversation with some clients and friends that highlighted the subject. In a recent client’s marketing meeting, someone commented “Have you seen XXX’s Twitter? They use loads of amazing hashtags”. I began trying to explain how that particular strategy wasn’t going to work and then realised that the person making the comment actually had no idea how hashtags actually worked or how to use hashtags and that this was going to be a long conversation. It was that discussion we had that highlighted the need to write this article. The comment, that one of their competitors or rivals used a truly prodigious amount of hashtags in their Twitter feed and that looked really impressive was interesting to me. Over coffee, the discussion between a group of us made me realise that for many people, hashtags can be a bit of a mystery. And while they are aware of the importance of them and they are indeed eye catching, it can be difficult for many people to truly understand how they work and above all, how best to use them in their own business or personal social media feeds. This article will hopefully explain the basics of hashtag principles, what they are and how to use them most effectively in your social media marketing. Hashtag Basics – What is a Hashtag? A hashtag looks like this #hashtag and has several uses and benefits. In your social media feed, it is a clickable link and is viewable to anyone with an interest in your hashtag, crucially including those outside of your social circle. This means that, it expands your reach to…

Yorkshire Air Museum – Filming In Les Invalides, Paris

Neill Watson

Winward Media were proud to be working with long standing clients The Yorkshire Air Museum in Paris this spring, delivering social media content, images for press use and a final film documenting a unique project inside of the majestic Les Invalides, Paris. Very often, we work with clients who come to us with great ideas for projects and need help to both report on them and also create an entire eco-system of distribution to make the best use of both the event and all of the video and images we shoot. By working alongside teams such as the Yorkshire Air Museum, we are able to not only create a film for delivery, but additionally run complete social media programs. 100 Years Of Collaboration In The Air – Les Invalides, Paris, May 2018 from Yorkshire Air Museum on Vimeo. Working alongside the Museum team, the French Armee de l’Air and Britain’s Royal Air Force, we documented the transportation and display of two WW1 biplanes inside of the historic location to commemorate 100 years of collaboration in the air, part of the RAF100 celebrations. In addition to being embedded with the team travelling, Winward Media were instrumental in co-ordinating with the Museum management a travel schedule that allowed us time to integrate with the team and film the whole process. Security restrictions decreed that no announcements of the event were allowed to be broadcast until the actual ceremony, meaning that we had to have significant amounts of content queued up in readiness to respond to the significant international interest. Film clips, social media content and also film assets were shared across the Museum’s platforms and additionally made available to the international media, including BBC Paris who used footage to cut into their own feature of the event, giving more variety to the reporting. The final film was prepared for release just a few days after returning to the UK, via Normandy where we also documented a special ceremony for French veterans. Following on, we created blog content and other related assets to help the Museum to report on this remarkable achievement and form part of the Museum’s blog archive material. By working alongside the team and devising a complete strategy for distribution of the film and images across multiple platforms, the Museum did not simply have a film delivered that the then had to work out how to distribute. Instead they had…

New website for Europe’s leading ice driving experience business

Neill Watson

It is more than a decade since we first worked with Ice Driver to create a website for what was then a brand new company. In that time, they have become the premier Ice Driving Experience provider in Scandinavia. Promising to offer an ice driving experience that went beyond the ‘Winter Rally School’ genre, the timing of Ice Driver coincided nicely with the launch of the Bond movie Die Another Day. What better inspiration could there have been to travel to Scandinavia than the prospect of Pierce Brosnan impressions on ice? Ice Driver re-invented the genre of driving experiences at high speed on ice and now have a ten year record for creating high quality, bespoke ice driving events for clients from their base in Norway. Each winter, drivers and guests from across Europe and beyond converge on their meticulously prepared tracks created on frozen lakes and experience driving on ice. For Winward Media, the Ice Driver business model spans the two areas we are most active in, automotive and motorsport, plus leisure and tourism. The ice driving genre has blossomed in the ten years that Ice Driver have been in operation. Competitors offering budget activities operating more basic offerings, plus car manufacturers catching on to the excitement of the genre have latched on to the sexiness and excitement of ice driving as a platform for selling cars. Ice Driver needed a fresh website to make them stand out from the opposition. The Ice Driver product is a high value experience which clients will inevitably have questions about. The objectives we set were: To differentiate Ice Driver from the competition and car manufacturer led activities. To create a website using imagery we had shot for previous projects with the team to showcase the spectacular setting of the Norwegian wilderness To explain that travel to Ice Driver is actually both cost effective and easy. Many people assume that travel on frozen winter rail networks and roads will be arduous. In fact, the Norwegian infrastructure is, as you’d expect, geared for this each winter To show options for non-driving guests and provide an opportunity for a family holiday combined with Ice Driving at the team’s snow resort headquarters, something that no other ice driving company can offer in such close proximity. The website was to be mobile responsive, with particular emphasis on a really simple to use Call to Action at the…

Yorkshire Holiday Cottages Website

Neill Watson

A Website That Showcases The Quality of Holiday Cottages and Increases Direct Bookings The holiday cottage industry is a very competitive sector in today’s world. Gone are the days of simply being able to own a French Gite or a collection of Yorkshire Holiday lets and being confident they will be busy all year round. Families on holiday have a far greater choice, making it more important than ever to show potential visitors the quality and care you have taken with your investment and reassure them that they are making the right choice by booking with you. We had worked with Middleton Cottages previously creating photography for their stunning holiday cottages in North Yorkshire. They have a lovely collection of holiday cottages situated in the rolling countryside of North Yorkshire, each one with it’s own hot tub, private garden and contemporary decor. Their initial website had been built in house and while they’d used a good content management system as a foundation, it was now several years old and as with all websites, it’s age was showing. Over a chat to review the website, we agreed that several areas would benefit from attention and further development: The website wasn’t mobile responsive, something which is so important with modern mobile devices. It could be difficult to work out pricing and there was no mechanism for prospective visitors to quickly check availability before booking. We felt that he overall ‘look’ of the website did not really reflect the high quality of the holiday cottages and their fresh, contemporary decor. While the cottages were busy, the bookings were often through agents rather than direct. But with a busy farm business to manage as well as keeping the cottages in pristine condition for guests, they didn’t have the time or expertise to engage in an in house website project. How We Helped From previous visits to carry out photography of the cottages, we knew just how high a standard they had been built to and saw that the interior decor and quality finish wasn’t reflected in the old website. We took some time to imagine what a prospective guest to the holiday cottages would be thinking and worked out ways to link that to some of the unique elements that Middleton Cottages offered, in particular: Each cottage has its own hot tub, situated in it’s own private area of the garden so that nobody…

Mobile Specific Website Creates A Direct Method to Contact Agriculture Business

Neill Watson

Not all of our website designs are large scale projects. Sometimes, we talk to someone who needs a website to do a specific task. David Teward Agricultural Services is one such client we helped recently. They have a loyal client base and strong reputation for delivering a great service to agricultural businesses in the North of England. Much like Winward Media, a lot of their business is word of mouth and recommendation, but of course without a method of contact, it’s difficult to get in touch with even the best business. David needed a website that gave the business good visibility online in their specific agricultural niche. The website had to do two things. Firstly, to quickly reassure the visitor that they had found the right Teward (there are more than one in the agricultural sector) and give a fast way to contact them by telephone. Today, many people in farming and agriculture use mobile devices as a primary method of search and contact. David lives on his iPhone and with high speed data available in even the most obscure farmland these days, so do most of his clients. With this in mind, the website we created was primarily mobile first. To give a visual confirmation that this was the business they were looking for, we used images of the distinctive red liveried trucks that the company is well known across the region. Images of David Teward’s distinctive red trucks were prominent on the first page to load, Importantly, we added a prominent telephone number with a mechanism to create an immediate dial option right from the moment the page loaded, we made it easy for David’s customers to dial the number straight from the browser of their mobile device. By creating the home page with this specific task in mind, it helped busy farmers who needed David Teward’s services to contact him quickly, even if they only had a name and no contact number. Having the telephone number as a direct dial from any mobile device helps David’s cleints to contact him quickly with no additional steps needed. Secondly, Find New Niche Customers Of course, while it is important to make it easy for referral and existing customers to find you, a good website should also find ways of bringing in new customers too. David’s company supplies specific products and services across certain parts of the UK. Therefore we…

New Exhaust A Fix Website and Content Marketing

Neill Watson

Many clients still struggle to understand the power that creative content marketing can bring. In fact, content marketing can be a cost effective and long lasting way to highlight how your business can solve your customer’s problems. Exhaust a Fix in Darlington are one of our long standing clients. They offer unique and cost effective solutions to many modern exhaust problems. They just needed to find a way to show how their unique skills are actually very affordable. A talented team of fabricators, coupled with state of the art pipe bending technology and plasma cutting equipment give Exhaust A Fix the ability to create a complete exhaust system from scratch in a cost effective way. The same skills can be used to repair existing exhaust systems in a cost effective way, without having to replace many of the complex, one piece systems common on many modern cars. Coupled with their independent ownership, these skills give them a loyal customer following. We created a mobile responsive automotive website design to showcase their skills. To provide an insight into their custom fabrication abilities that make them unique, we created an ongoing series of blog posts showcasing real-world examples of their work and explaining how they saved customers money and created quality exhaust systems. By training their staff on some basic techniques in using camera phones, we were able to gather content on a regular basis without impeding the busy workflow of the workshop, so that shooting some images and emailing a quick note explaining the work was easy for them without taking up too much time. Content Marketing Programme We created useful articles for customers facing exhaust failure problems, paying particular attention to creating articles about particular exhaust issues, some of which could prove potentially expensive, such as Jaguar XF Diesel exhaust failures. The articles highlighted the typical problems that owners encounter, the potential expense involved, then proceeded to show how the company solves the issue in a cost effective way. This content proves very effective both for search engines and also human readers. Exhaust A Fix moved into the tyre fitting side of the car maintenance business, though the popular brand name now worked against them. Starting from very small numbers, we achieved a manifold increase in tyre sales over a period of just a few months by creating useful, informative articles that address the issues customers face when choosing new…

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