Bill Hodgson Marketing
Marketing expertise from brand strategy to websites
Is your marketing delivering results? How well is your brand enabling progress towards your goals? Where do you start to even answer these questions?
Let Bill Hodgson Marketing help you begin to make sense of all this and decide where to invest. I’ve worked with all sorts of businesses to move their marketing in the right direction, and I can deliver new ideas for your business.
Why not start with a brand review? - I look at how your brand concept, vision, visuals and messaging are working together (or at all) for your business, how they relate to your target audience, and importantly in relation to your competition. This also means listening to all stakeholders in the brand including staff, customers and suppliers to see how they perceive your brand.
From the many organisations I’ve worked with – a desire to get things right from the brand foundations is key to what makes the difference.
A next step might be to review your marketing plan(s) (if you have any). Are you investing in the right tactics to achieve your goals? Is your website performing (in a business sense) to produce the results you need? Is your advertising hitting the mark and producing conversions?
And finally - is your website up to scratch? Does the structure and flow of your website connect with your audience needs? Is the site delivering the information they need, and leading to them make contact? How modern is the site technology?
Marketing campaigns rely on clear thinking about what you offer and how you are different from everyone else. If you get that right then your visuals, messaging, website and advertising will work well.
If you need help with your marketing just send me a message for an initial free consultation to see if we are a good fit with each other.
Interim Marketing Service
Does your organisation need marketing input but not full time? I can be your marketing officer on a part-time basis and provide the guidance you need. Together we can develop or refresh your marketing strategy, and carry out your marketing projects using my network of associates or by selecting the right partners to suit your needs.
I can also advise on marketing related technology and platforms, review what you have now revealing any risks or issues, and make recommendation for the future.
Branding
What makes your firm stand out from the rest? Does your brand purpose have meaning, and cascade through your firm into goals, missions and the 'soul' of your content output?
Consider running a brand development workshop to consider the future of your brand, delivering both visuals and words that begin to shape how your firm is perceived.
Design
Great design needs great inspiration. Using your brand purpose, goals and culture, we interpret these to produce visual concepts to excite you. With iterative review and development the future visual presentation of your brand and business is transformed into a visual new suit.
Design is a great skill to have and I know two people who can design anything you need. My associates Maria and Amy have worked with me on multiple projects. My clients love their work and come back for more.
Websites
Does your website deliver commercial value and support the success of your business? Don't treat it as an after thought - regard it as your 24 hour sales person delivering new business.
The thought behind a website is a big part of success. Who does it serve? What do they want from it? How can they interact with your firm?
Work with us to discover how your site can grow your business, and when combined with a brand development workshop can transform your fortunes.
Building websites is something I enjoy, but it takes a massive amount of clicking to layout and fine tune pages. Bear in mind that most pages need to exist in both the desktop and mobile layouts which can almost double the effort to create them.
Unlike print, the layouts need to be dynamic, and use animation and effects to liven them up. I have worked with Joao on multiple projects, as he has advanced site building skills, and brings an extra pair of hands.
Traffic
Are you getting plenty of the right visitors to your website? If not we can help you choose how to build your audience. From using social media, to paid search or content creation and publishing, there are many ways to reach out to find your customers.
We can even make sense of SEO for you - how does your site rank? Why people are looking at your site? How to make the best of your blog posts to attract search traffic.
James and I have worked on projects to send traffic to websites using Google and Bing. It can be hard to find the right keywords and search phrases to grab clicks but with experimentation, and using Google Performance Max, we should be able to find traffic for your site.
For your business, there is a considered choice between buying search clicks, placing ads in social media, or 'organically' building your followers by publishing content. I will work with you to figure out an optimum approach based on your resources and inclinations.
CRM
Data Privacy and GDPR
About me
Get in touch
Thinking about Marketing
August 7, 2024
What is a brand story? How to give your team the power of exciting brand stories
June 21, 2024
What is a Brand Strategy? 7 Positive and Powerful Steps
June 12, 2024
Welcome to my website
My work
The Hardy Plant Society was founded in 1957 and is a leading specialist plant society. With members in the UK and overseas, and a huge amount of plant related content, created a new brand, website, and membership system was a big project. Launched in November 2023, around 5,000 members were migrated into the site, and the annual seed distribution scheme launched online. The HPS project has included:
- Audience research
- Content research
- A member survey
- Vision and values
- Brand identity
- Website design, build and operation
- Helpdesk and live chat support
The site contains:
- 75 unique pages
- Nearly 350 blog posts
- Over 20,000 images
- Around 1,000 individual publications
- 27 products on-sale
- 33 membership plans
All built within Wordpress using a suite of tools to manage memberships, the online shop, the integrated plant library, member-only content and the huge number of images.
Barnes Roffe are a large (150 person) accountancy practice based around London. The company makes extensive use of ShaprSpring CRM to capture and manage their incoming flow of recruitment candidates and general enquiries. I worked with them to develop a new visual toolkit and a new website via a series of brand development workshops.
- Brand definition
- Competitor research
- SEO research
- Visual development
- Website wireframe development
- Website build and deployment
- CRM integration
- LinkedIn campaign
BG Law are a legal services agency and platform, providing a working environment for independant solicitors. BG Law provides each solicitor with their case management platform, billing and commercial services, promoting them via the central website. I work with the senior team via brand workshops to develop a new visual toolkit, referencing their competition and jumping into a vibrant and exciting new look.
- Brand workshops
- Visual toolkit
- Website wireframe
- Website build and migration
- Google campaigns for recruitment and lead generation
Cassini Systems are a leading provider of risk management tools to the wholesale capital markets. Their suite of tools has been integrated into front end trading platforms, banks, fund administrators and other firm and has received multi-million dollar rounds of investment to develop the business. I worked with Cassini from an early stage to create their new visual presentation. Beginning with the brand concept we developed and delivered a complete rebrand including the website, business cards, document templates, marketing materials and social media branding. The website provides content for the diverse audience of users from the front to the back office, linking their roles to specific use-cases. Over time we worked together on content, events, webinars, CRM, SEO, a large search campaign, a podcast and every component of a marketing engagement.
- Brand development and visuals
- Website build and deployment
- CRM
- SEO
- Events and webinars, with video
- Podcast episodes
- Document templates
- Marketing flyers
- Google search campaigns
HairCo sell everything you might need to support your beauty needs. Part of their strategy is to be the price winner on at least one leading product, ensuring they feature first in the Google Shopping results. Their product inventory is managed via the website and an automated feed to Google using GoDataFeed ensures that their products are always on view for shopping searches. In addition significant budget is spent to capture search traffic using the Google Pro Max approach across as many Google platforms as possible.
- Website development
- Google integration & data quality improvement
- Google multi-platform traffic generation
- Cart abandonment workflow
Engage provide a means for furniture and household goods to be donated and re-sold. Buyers with qualifying benefits are given a beneficial price compared to the regular charity price. In these times of economic challenges, demand for their service has been strong with quick turnover of stock.
- Brand workshop
- Visual toolkit
- Website build and deployment
Rooftech are commercial roofing contractors - if your warehouse or factory roof needs repairs or replacement, give Rooftech a call. We remade their website and brand visuals to a fresh modern design, and cleaned up an existing website both for design, content and regulatory matters. Extensive use of hidden landing pages and a corresponding Google search campaign drove traffic and leads.
- Visual design
- Website build
- Google search campaign
Razor Risk Technologies provide an enterprise level risk and capital management platform to major banks around the world. Having undergone an ownership change we worked with Razor to re-invent their visual styling and produce content for the site. Razor is part of the Parabellum Investments group.
- Brand toolkit and visual styling
- Website design, build and deployment
- Document templates
- Marketing materials
- Business cards
- Printed booklet and event stand
New-Link are a boutique consultancy for the capital markets. Having established the basics of a visual toolkit, we expanded on this to design and build their website. The firm has many business lines represented using various visual animations. Occasionally the firm produced PDF content with dynamic visual design which we then translated into corresponding pages on the site.
- Visual design
- Website build and operations
- Online promotion for an in-person event
Porlock Parish Council have a legal obligation to provide access to the documents underpinning the operations of the council. Every meeting has an agenda, minutes and supporting documents. Many policies and other documents need to be made public. We took over an existing site which contained nearly 400 documents dating back a few years. All the documents were organised with metadata, and loaded into a back-end database ready for publication. Using parameterised UI components the documents are published into the relevant pages of the site. By using a back-end database, there is no need to touch the web pages themselves when new documents are added. The Clerk of the council can add documents in an almost non-technical way without needing us to intervene. We are also working on a parallel home page which is designed entirely with accessibility in mind, for people using screen readers.
- Visual design
- Back-end database design and population
- Website content migration
- Website revisions and testing, then deployment
- Accessibility testing and parallel home page (in progress)
Prodktr is a hybrid consultancy with a SaaS platform to enable fund managers to move providers. The firm is lead by people with extensive experience in the buy-side crossing over all asset classes. They have won business by being focussed on their topic of Treasury Operating Model reviews and revisions. Currently in Beta their platform Segue aims to speed up the painful process of extracting data from a fund admin provider and delivering to a new provider, in a controlled way. We worked with Prodktr to remake their website, create new content with some SEO behind it, film videos, run an email campaign and support their social media.
- Website re-build
- Filming
- SEO
- Content creation and publication
- Social media operations
- Podcast episodes