Whittaker’s Chocolate, a New Zealand chocolatier and the Portuguese Sagres Preta, maker of chocolate stout beer, bravely decided to create their website only using chocolate, their main ingredient.

Everything from the interface design to the navigation and the social icons on their website is made of chocolate!

The idea is brilliant, and with this approach these two companies are showing that advertising should be fun and honest, not boring, false or evil.

To better promote this initiative, the companies also accompanied the campaign with videos of how the websites were done – from idea to execution. Check out one of the videos that went viral on the web:

Delicious, isn’t it!?
If you would like to reinvent your own website and find a creative way to promote your products like these two brave companies, feel free to get in touch with us.

As a final thought, I’ll just share this excellent quote from the great Jerry Della Femina, who said:

“I honestly believe that advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.”

Companies have yet to merge the online advertising potential of photo sharing into a revenue stream. It could be due to customers being somewhat discretionary about their release in public forums, even on profiles.  I have not seen many sports arenas utilize photo sharing on this scale in the States.  Perhaps anyone can share stories of venues soon?

For those who want to learn how they executed the shot, click on the FA cup.  It is quite fascinating at the level of photography acumen needed to execute this project.  The shot of Wembley Stadium took 10 gigapixels! They also had to edit the image within a 24 hour timeframe before the match.  Unbelievable.

There are a range of essential factors that influence the look and feel of e-commerce websites. The top features include quick & easy navigation, product related simple design for increased visibility of product, effective branding, specific product images, displaying related or recommended products, listing popular products, offers & discounts, simple checkout process, and complete website search option.  

The navigation of product pages should be carefully designed with more options for the users to locate the product easily.  This feature of the site requires thorough user experience testing to ensure all navigational issues are addressed properly. With the help of some simple design approaches, the site will give better visibility to the product, as selling is the key point of any e-commerce website. For better performance of the website, the design should be related to the style of products available and thus making a direct connection with the brand.

Your firm should include product specific photos, especially in different angles.  This will help the user get a feel of the product and to make an easy purchasing decision. They should also make use of the homepage and help the users to find something really interesting by adding offers, popular products, new arrivals and other discounts. Displaying a list of related products on the product details page to the user may result in increased sales of those products as well and serves as a promotional tool for similar products. Users may find it difficult to land with the particular product of their interest even with good navigation, so in order to avoid this and help them gain easy access to the product, it is advised to include search box with range of options.

In total, e-commerce websites with all the above good features provides advantages for small and medium businesses in developing countries reducing operational costs and increasing efficiency.

This form of marketing is often referred to as Content Marketing, which is defined as “words and data to create unambiguous content that support meaningful, interactive experiences”, is now evolving as a new discipline. In addition to all your traditional marketing techniques, this form of marketing uses content to achieve higher sales through profitable actions from the customer and prospect sides.

What it takes, is an effective content strategy. Content development, delivery and administration are the three major points that need to be kept in mind when you define content strategy for any marketing plan. Rachel Lovinger explains more about content marketing in her article, Content Strategy – The Philosophy of Data.

Effective content can be a combination of both verbal and visual information that will have a greater impact among your prospects. Define your content strategy in a manner that can be tracked and results are measured by easy methods which plays an important role when it comes to continuous refining and managing content for future.

There are a variety of vehicles marketers can use to deliver content to prospects which include print and online newsletters, webinars, podcasts, websites, microsites, video portals, mobile content, gaming sites, interactive online forms, email campaigns, blogs and social media. Of all, social media forms a major component of content strategy now and content marketing is replacing certain traditional marketing strategies to achieve results in a cost-effective manner.

Research and survey reports conducted by Junta42 show that now 33% of total marketing budgets are  allocated to content marketing and the main area of focus being mobile and social media. Companies of all size are now taking the help of digital marketing companies to fulfill their content marketing needs.

Blueliner Marketing offers specialized services to clients who need a partner to transform their marketing goals to profitable results. Blueliner creates and administers valuable content marketing strategies to meet client needs and deliver higher ROI.

For more photos, head over here.