Alpha Design and Marketing is one of the longest established marketing agencies in Shropshire. It has served clients locally in Shrewsbury, regionally in the West Midlands and nationally across the UK since its inception in 1989. The marketing services offered by Alpha include marketing strategy, brand and logo design and development, trademark searches and registration, packaging design and production, brochure and catalogue design and printing, corporate literature including annual reports and accounts, website design and development, online marketing and newsletters. Founder Elaine Nester specialises in strategic marketing and copywriting and has worked with companies in both the public and private sector since 1989 to facilitate effective communications between clients and their respective marketplaces. Alpha prides itself on providing lateral and highly creative marketing solutions for example, printing onto unusual substrates. An example of this was a brochure for a renowned sculptor which had a stainless steel cover and was spiral bound with stainless steel wire. The inner pages were printed on metallic paper to continue with the metal theme. The sculptor worked exclusively in metal so the brochure was a tangible sample of his work. This was printed as a limited edition and sent to buyers of public art across the world and attracted a great deal of attention. Whilst budgets do not always allow for such elaborate solutions, Alpha always provides a creative solution even when working with limited budgets. An example of this was a public information campaign for the Primary Care Trust and the NHS to advise against inappropriate use of antibiotics. The campaign was very strong and used typography only to communicate a complex message in just a few words. It was executed on buses, billboards, advertisements, prescription stickers, leaflets and posters and a website.
Review – review and improve your brand
Brands create value – there is no doubt about that. Think of some of the brands you know and love. Hovis, Mini, Jaegar, dare I say Cadbury? Huge global brands with massive equity. And they all started on somebody’s drawing board. (They didn’t use computers in those days.) Of course, not all brands become huge. Many brands fall by the wayside because of lack of investment or because brand owners allow them to become weak and to lose integrity. Let’s look at your brand together – whether it’s your corporate identity or the brand of your product or service. See some examples of great, growing brands here.
Create – create on & offline brochures and catalogues
Print is still important for some companies; others promote their products and services online. Some do both, to great effect. We’ve been producing good looking, hard working printed brochures and catalogues for over 20 years. Now we apply the same skills to online publications in the form of downloadable catalogues or 3D page turning i-catalogues. Let’s talk about the best medium for your products or services. A combination of on and offline communications allows you to reach your customers in the way they like best. Give them choices and they’ll buy from you, not your competitors.
Build – build search engine friendly websites
Most businesses have a website by now. But is your website working as well as it might for your business? Chances are that if it was built more than a year ago, it won’t be built to Web 2.0 standards. What does that mean? It means you won’t be getting the benefit of the new channels of communication that are now available and your site won’t be generating as much traffic as it could. Let’s talk about your customers first – how do they make their buying decisions? Where do they search online and how? Then let’s address your site and build it so they will come.
Drive – drive traffic to your website
Let’s say straight away – we don’t just rely on search engines to generate traffic to websites. Paying for optimisation is a waste of money and shouldn’t be needed if your site was built properly in the first place. The only work that is needed on websites we build is keeping them fresh with news, or adding new products or services as you introduce them. We can show you how to do that, or we can do it for you. When we build a website, we make sure it’s search engine friendly and then we also advise you about how to market the site using off and online media. There are so many ways of driving traffic to your website, from classified ads, to banners, to billboards, to direct mail, to….. let’s talk about it.
