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Each year we look at all our customers and decide who has made the most of the tools we have gave them in terms of making their business more successful. We present the winner with a trophy for all the hard work they have put in and for impressing us over the year.

We hope that by doing this it will give other businesses ideas on the kind of things they should be doing to stay competitive in today’s challenging market.

This is the first time we have done it, but for me there was a pretty clear winner. We started working with them in 2011 and right from the start they had big ideas about what they wanted to do online and with their business. So i am proud to present the Purple Cloud Solutions Business Awards 2012 to Jo and Diana at Buttercream and Bows who provide cake decorating courses teaching you how to make really beautiful looking cup cakes in Sutton Coldfield.

We have given this award to them because of the following reasons below:

They keep their website up to date

Really important for their customers and Google that the website is kept up to date with no out of date content/info on there. They are always updating/tweaking their course page descriptions and adding/removing booked classes.

Use of Social Media

On Facebook

I’ve taken a screenshot below of their timeline just to show some examples of how they use Facebook so well.

example of using facebook for business

They show high quality photos of their products relating to the timing of the post e.g. in this example valentines day which is linked to some valentines day courses they have available.

They have an offer which they posted on Facebook which gives customers a free gift.

They have posted a recent video from their YouTube channel which is a tutorial of Jo making the actual valentines cup cake that you can see in the picture.

On Twitter

Below shows them engaging with people on Twitter and using photos to showcase their products and happy customers.

example of using twitter for business

It’s all just great content and its all relevant to the time they are posting i.e Valentines. It’s an exact example of what you should be doing and they this ALL YEAR ROUND. You can see people ‘commenting’ on it and ‘liking’ the posts giving buttercream and bows massive exposure to new potential customers across Facebook and Twitter. It’s not just whacking things on Facebook for the fun of it, its carefully thought out and published with relevancy across the board and that’s key to success online.

Offline Marketing

They don’t just rely on their website to bring in leads, living within Sutton Coldfield i have noticed their adverts in the papers and heard them on the radio! some things work better than others but the point is they try different routes and then focus on the ones that work the best, they are out there doing stuff.

Video

They have used video in a number of places, on their homepage to showcase exactly what they offer and have had some videos done which sit on their YouTube Channel and feeds through to their website. This includes testimonials of their customer which is golden. If you want to find out what other people think about their courses just watch the videos and you can instantly see that people think their great and have really the enjoyed the classes.

Newsletters

They send out regular offers and info on their courses via newsletters to potential customers.

Blog

They still have some work to do on their blog but at least they are blogging! helping with the SEO of the website. We have spoke about the blogging and this will be something they will be working on in 2013. It’s so important.

What I love about working with these two is that they want to expand and come up with new ideas and ways to make their business better online and offline, they chat with us about ways to do this and listen to what we have to say and then implement the ideas we come up with. They understand that to get the most out of their business online they have to put the effort in. They have seen great success since launching their website and its because they have put the effort into maintaining their website, keeping the content fresh and interesting. They then do the same on Social Media. They have highlighted areas to improve on their website and have plans set out to do this in 2013 and that’s the great thing, they don’t want to just let it all go stale they want to keep improving everything they can on their website.

So BIG Congratulations to Jo and Diana at buttrecream and bows for being Purple Cloud Solutions 2012 Business Awards Winner!